Critical Tests of Theory of the Early Universe using the Cosmic Microwave Background

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the fossil light of the Big Bang, is the oldest light that one can ever hope to observe in our Universe. The CMB provides us with a direct image of the Universe when it was still an "infant" - 380,000 years old - and has enabled us to obtain a wealth of cosmological information, such as the composition, age, geometry, and history of the Universe. Yet, can we go further and learn about the primordial universe, when it was much younger than 380,000 years old, perhaps as young as a tiny fraction of a second? If so, this gives us a hope to test competing theories about the origin of the Universe at ultra high energies. In this talk I present the results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite that I contributed, and then discuss the recent results from the Planck satellite (in which I am not involved). Finally, I discuss future prospects on our quest to probe the physical condition of the very early Universe.