Telescopes are time-machines. They allow us to see into the distant past. Our deepest images show the Universe not as it is today, but as it was just 400,000 years after the Big Bang.  At that time there were no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no people, no familiar elements other than hydrogen and helium. The cosmos contained nothing but weak sound waves in a near-uniform fog. Supercomputers can compress thirteen billion years of cosmic evolution into a few months of calculation to show how these sound waves developed into the rich structure we see around us today. A study of their harmonic content gives clues to their origin. They appear to be an echo of quantum zero-point fluctuations occurring a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Thus our entire world may be a consequence of the nature of this early vacuum.  In a very real sense, everything may have come from nothing.

Bio: Simon White is a British astrophysicist interested in what the Universe is made of and how galaxies and galaxy clusters formed within it. He has contributed to many aspects of our current understanding of these topics by using computers to simulate cosmic evolution. White is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich, a member of the national academies of the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States of America, and holds awards including the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Gruber Cosmology Prize,the Max Born Medal of the Institute of Physics, an honorary PhD from Durham University and honorary citizenship of the city of Padova.