FINGERPRINTING THE UNIVERSE - FUTURE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND EXPERIMENTS

The very existence of the cosmic microwave background led to the wides pread acceptance of the Big Bang Cosmology. Now, it has become possibl e to study irregularities in the temperature of the radiation coming f rom different parts of the sky. These irregularities can reveal detail s about the Universe, to a precision that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. High accuracy ground and balloon-based experimen ts are already in operation, and in a few years new satellite observat ions should revolutionize our understanding. I describe why the microw ave background is such a fine source of information, and the experimen ts which aim to get at it.