Jim Al-Khalili

What led you there?

Well, you started your PhD at Princeton in 1998.

NASA already had plans in place to launch a satellite mission called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

Now, the idea was to take detailed measurements of the faint radiation that permeates the entire universe.

which would help us understand something about the universe's origin and its evolution.

So your supervisor asked you to lead on the analysis.

Maybe you can first briefly say something about this radiation, the cosmic microwave background, and what it tells us about the early universe.

Because it's taken a long time to get to us.

And the probe was picking up the faint patterns of this ancient light.

You were part of the team that analysed the data.

What did that involve?

So these theoretical fingerprints are basically stories of how the universe came to be and how it evolved.

And you want to see which story is the correct one, which one matches the data.

Okay, so let's talk about what you discovered.

Maybe we can start with the age of the universe and then maybe how far back in its existence we can measure.

So the 380,000 years, that's how many years after the Big Bang itself?

Now back to what you found then.

Your observations confirmed a simple model for the origin and evolution of the universe.

And yet they make up 95%.

One of the ideas that you've been working on is what happened to the universe very, very soon after the Big Bang itself, long before even this cosmic microwave background was set free.