Cynthia Chiang always wanted to work with her hands. Although it may sound counterintuitive, it’s what led her to the fairly abstract field of observational cosmology: studying the cosmos’s origin and development by gathering data on the universe’s early years.

Her trip into this work began when she was applying to graduate school and she checked out a lab in a basement at the California Institute of Technology. “I walked in and saw all this vacuum equipment and all these fun cryostats, and in a split second, I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s what I want to do when I grow up,’” she said. “I think I have a track record of making possibly impulsive, poorly informed decisions. But this was a great decision.”

After completing her doctorate, she received a Dicke fellowship at Princeton University, where she got her start studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — relic radiation from the Big Bang — as part of the Planck telescope’s science team. But the CMB experiments (and teams) were getting larger, and Chiang wanted to study something that would allow her to build an instrument on her own.

While figuring out what to do with her life again, Chiang spent a year at the South Pole as one of the “winterover” scientists for the South Pole Telescope. While she was there, a position opened up in South Africa, where the Square Kilometer Array radio telescope would soon be built. She pivoted from cosmic microwaves to cosmic radio waves. “It’s one wavelength over,” she said. “How hard could it possibly be?”

Today, as an associate professor of physics at McGill University, she builds, deploys and runs instruments that can detect radio signals from pivotal eras in the early universe — the dark ages and cosmic dawn. The former is a long-ago time when the universe was just a sea of neutral hydrogen gas; the latter a slightly later time when the first stars turned on. Catching the light from that first cosmic sunrise, and the dark even before that dawn, is so tricky that Chiang and her colleagues must go to the ends of the Earth to have even a hope of disentangling their signals from the rest of the cluttered cosmos. (The James Webb Space Telescope and its many-faceted mirror are also gazing back toward these early times, trying to see that oldest starlight.)

So far, scientists have seen little of the dark ages, and just one team — called EDGES — has (maybe) seen hints of cosmic dawn. Their results, though, require confirmation or refutation from a different instrument.

An instrument like the ones Chiang works on.

True to her roots, Chiang is using her team’s hand-built instruments to catch sight of these ancient cosmic eras. “The science goals overall are these big questions about how the universe works and what its fate is,” she said. But the experiments can be — if not exactly simple — at least small-scale.

Quanta spoke with Chiang about the universe’s distant past, scientists’ difficulty time-traveling there, her team’s work in remote places, and why mysteries are the best part of science. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.