Gresham provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2, videos available on the Gresham website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come. Is there an 'echo' of the big bang? The story of the prediction, serendipitous discovery and interpretation of the microwave radiation left over from the hot early beginnings of the universe. This radiation contains a wealth of information about the history and structure of the universe.
It tells us its shape. It reveals the nature of the small lumps that eventually turned into galaxies. It tells us how fast we are moving. It events tells us about irregularities which no longer exist. In recent years there have been spectacular space missions to map this radiation with unprecedented accuracy and in the next year a new European PLANCK mission will be launched.
Professor John Barrow. Of course, the titles of these lectures were planned many, many months ago, but it was a reasonable guess that the Nobel Prize in Physics might go to the area of cosmology this year.
The area of cosmology in question is the radiation which is left over, apparently, from the hot early beginnings of the universe; the radiation that is usually called the microwave background radiation or the cosmic microwave background radiation. I want today to tell you a number of the features of this radiation, why we believe it is coming from the beginnings of the universe rather than being made somewhere in the solar system or nearby in our galaxy, and how we can use that radiation to tell us all sorts of unusual things about the universe.
First of all, radiation more generally… If you look at different pictures of the Milky Way, that long, thin, milky strip in the sky, in different wave bands, you can see gamma ray observations, and what you are really seeing are very high energy events in the distant galaxy, so you get one view of what is going on.
