Seeing the Beginning of the Universe Benjamin D. Wandelt, Associate Professor of Physics, Departments of Physics and Astronomy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, currently on sabbatical at Caltech and JPL

One week before Planck will be launched, after a century of advances in physical theory and in astronomical observations, cosmologists now find themselves in the position of being able to probe the physics of the Beginning at the earliest moments of time and at energies far beyond those that can be reached in particle accelerators. Using novel ways of extracting robust and precise inferences from the cosmic microwave background and other astronomical data we start seeing how the Universe emerged out of the regime of quantum gravity and even test certain aspects of string theory. I will look ahead to other astronomical probes of fundamental physics and explore the ultimate limits of what we can learn about the Beginning from astronomical data.