Breakthrough Prize winner Alan Guth developed the theory of inflation to answer to our cosmic origins. It’s one of the most studied and debated theories in cosmology, with research propelling Guth’s work to the forefront of scientific conversation.

In this Master Class, Professor Guth addresses what experiments could potentially rule out the BICEP2 results. Since recording this in 2017, the Planck spacecraft collected the data that Professor Guth anticipated, which shows that the initial observations were likely an artifact of interstellar dust, not primordial gravitational waves.

This lecture was recorded on xyz at the World Science Festival in New York City.

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Professor Stephen Hawking’s final theory on the origin of the universe, which he worked on in collaboration with Professor Thomas Hertog from KU Leuven, was published in 2018 in the Journal of High Energy Physics.

A team of astrophysicists has created a simulated image that shows how the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could conduct a mega-exposure similar to but far larger than Hubble’s celebrated Ultra Deep Field Image. This Hubble observation transformed our view of the early universe, revealing galaxies that formed just a few hundred million years after the big bang.

“Roman has the unique ability to image very large areas of the sky, which allows us to see the environments around galaxies in the early universe,” said Nicole Drakos, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Santa Cruz, who led the study. “Our study helps demonstrate what a Roman ultra-deep field could tell us about the universe, while providing a tool for the scientific community to extract the most value from such a program.”