The final lecture in the series returned to the theme of how insight is derived from observations, considering the cosmic microwave background.
This oldest light in the Universe, emitted just 400,000 years after the Big Bang, contains the seeds of the structures we see around us, and tells us about conditions at the Universe’s beginning.
The lecture considered how measurements of the Universe’s expansion, made using the CMB, are leading to unexpected results, creating tension in modern cosmology.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/sites/default/files/transcript/2024-05-29-1800_Lintott-T.pdf
Further reading
The original discovery of the CMB is reported in A. Penzias and R. Wilson, “A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Mc/s,” ApJ 142, no. 419 (1965), https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1965ApJ…142..419P
The explanation by Dicke’s group, published in the same issue as the discovery paper, is given in R. Dicke et al., “Cosmic Black-Body Radiation,” ApJ 142, no. 414 (1965)
https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1965ApJ…142..419P
The description of the cosmology of the early Universe given here is now out of date in some aspects, but still unparalleled in reach and clarity: S. Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, 2nd ed. (Basic Books, 1993).
Professor Lintott would also recommend: P. Coles, Cosmology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2001), and the venerable online tutorial by Ned Wright, here: https://astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm
For those looking for something more technical, there’s a good review here: R. Durrer, “The Cosmic Microwave Background: The History of Its Experimental Investigation and Its Significance for Cosmology,” Classical and Quantum Gravity, 32, no. 12 (2015), id. 124007, available at arxiv.org/abs/1506.01907.
Professor Chris Lintott
Professor of Astronomy (2023-)
Professor Chris Lintott is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at New College.
Having been educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and University College London, his research now ranges from understanding how galaxies form and evolve, to using machine learning to find the most unusual things in the Universe, to predicting the properties of visiting interstellar asteroids. He is Principal Investigator of the Zooniverse citizen science platform, which provides opportunities for more than two million online volunteers to contribute to scientific research, and which was the topic of his first book, ‘The Crowd and the Cosmos’.
Professor Lintott is best known for presenting the BBC’s long-running Sky at Night program, and as an accomplished lecturer. Away from work, he cooks, suffers through being a fan of Torquay United and Somerset cricket, and spends time with a rescued lurcher, Mr Max, with whom he presents the Dog Stars podcast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lintott
https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/lintott
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/4jgzzH6CBH7b5K0qblb73nZ/professor-chris-lintott
helen the hare 