To catch even a whiff of the universe’s earliest epochs — an age of darkness, and one of new light — Cynthia Chiang builds her own equipment. Then she deploys it at the ends of the Earth. The post The Experimental Cosmologist Hunting for the First Sunrise first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Cynthia Chiang always wanted to work with her hands. Although it may sound counterintuitive, it’s what led her to the fairly abstract field of observational cosmology: studying the cosmos’s origin and development by gathering data on the universe’s early years. Her trip into this work began when she was applying to graduate school and she checked out a lab in a basement at the California Institute…