Space & the universe
The accidental discovery of the Big Bang's afterglow
11 min
How two engineers troubleshooting a noisy antenna stumbled onto the cosmic microwave background — the faint radiation left over from the birth of the universe — and won a Nobel Prize for it.
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Show notes
Bell Labs researchers discovered a persistent microwave hiss while attempting to map radio waves in the Milky Way.
The signal remained constant across all seasons despite cleaning pigeon droppings and sealing the horn antenna hardware.
Princeton physicists identified the noise as light from the Big Bang stretched into the microwave spectrum by redshift.
The discovery provided the first physical evidence that the universe began three hundred eighty thousand years after the explosion.
This uniform heat signature effectively ended the debate between the Big Bang and Steady State cosmological theories.
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson won the nineteen seventy-eight Nobel Prize for detecting the oldest light in existence.
In this episode
- 1Intro1 min
- 2The Holmdel Horn and the Persistent Hiss2 min
- 3The Pigeon Problem and Technical Exorcism2 min
- 4The Princeton Connection3 min
- 5Winning the Nobel and Changing the Cosmos3 min
- 6Outro1 min
Sources
- A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries: Penzias and Wilson discover cosmic microwave radiation
- The Nobel Prize in Physics 1978 - Speed read: Tuning in to Big Bang's echo - NobelPrize.org
- Big Bang's Ripples: Two Scientists Recall Their Big Discovery : NPR
- Smart Luck: How the Big Bang Was Found by Accident [Slide Show] | Scientific American
- June 1963: Discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background | American Physical Society
- Bell Labs Scientists Proved the Big Bang Theory - IEEE Spectrum
- Discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation - Wikipedia
- Cosmic Times
- How Scientists Accidentally Discovered Proof of the Big Bang
- The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation - Smoot Group
- How Two Pigeons Helped Scientists Confirm the Big Bang Theory
- Discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation
- A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries: Penzias and Wilson discover cosmic microwave radiation
- The Big Bang's Echo : NPR
- Arno Penzias – Interview - NobelPrize.org
- Pigeon poop and strange static: How we proved the Big Bang | Astronomy.com
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