As I finished my PhD in 1992, the universe was full of mystery – we didn’t even know exactly what it is made of. One could argue that cosmologists had made little progress in our understanding of these basic facts since the discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the afterglow of the Big Bang, in the 1960s.
I left the UK after my doctoral studies to begin a research career in the US, where I was lucky to be recruited to work on a new experiment called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This new survey embraced advances in digital technologies with the ambition of measuring the “redshifts” (how light becomes more red if a source appears to move away from you) of a million galaxies.
