Hiranya Peiris
speaker
454 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 25 May
Hiranya Peiris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So the oldest light we can see in the universe is the cosmic microwave background.
So the analysis involved comparing the patterns of the very early light that we can see in the cosmic microwave background with theoretical models.
And different cosmological models make different predictions for the pattern.
It's like a fingerprint.
It identifies the theory.
And my job was to build a sort of statistical bridge
between the data that we had measured from the sky and the theoretical fingerprints that we needed to compare them to.
The age of the universe, we were able to put a number to that, 13.8 billion years old.
And we could also measure when this early light came from.
It comes from a time when the universe was about 380,000 years old.
So this is like a baby picture of the universe.
That's correct.
We can therefore tell a story about the evolution of the universe, at least from that early age till now.
Yeah, it's a simple model, but it's a really bizarre one.
It is described by just six numbers.
So we need two numbers to describe the origin of cosmic structure.
Where did everything come from?
Then we have three numbers to describe how it's evolving.
So that's the amount of ordinary matter in the universe.
Everything our world is made of, what we are made of, that's ordinary matter.
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