Cosmic Microwave Background: Past, Future, and Present

Abstract

I explain the origin and evolution of anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and argue that upcoming experiments will measure cosmological and fundamental parameters very accurately. Most of the paper focuses on present data, which strongly suggest that the universe is flat. Several arguments are given to prove that present data sets are not contaminated by systematics. New techniques to compare different experiments visually are introduced. These are illustrated for two years of the MSAM and Python experiments.