John Carlstrom | What Do We Know About The Big Bang?

John Carlstrom gives the plenary lecture at the New Horizons in Inflationary Cosmology Templeton Conference organized by the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Our understanding of the origin, evolution and make-up of the Universe has undergone dramatic and surprising advances over the last decades. Much of the progress has been driven by measurements of the fossil light from the big bang, called the cosmic microwave background radiation, which provides us with a glimpse of the Universe as it was 14 billion years ago. This talk will discuss what we know about the Big Bang and how we learned it. We will also talk about the new questions we are asking about the origin of the Universe and the experiments being pursued to answer them, peering back to the beginning of time.