Several miles away, Princeton University physicist Robert Dick and his students began investigating the conditions under which the universe might have formed, if it did. They concluded that an explosion of that size would have to be hot enough to sustain thermonuclear reactions, at temperatures of millions of degrees, to synthesize heavy elements from primordial hydrogen.
They realized that the energy must still be there. But as the universe expands, the primordial fireball will cool to a few degrees Kelvin above absolute zero, which, they calculate, will place cosmic radiation in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. (This group did not know, or forgot, that the same calculation had been made twenty years earlier by the physicist George Gamow and his collaborators at George Washington University.)
Dr Dick has recruited two graduate students – David Wilkinson, a talented instrumentalist, and James Peebles, a theorist – to try to detect these microwaves. Just as the group is meeting to decide on a plan of action, the phone rings. It was Dr. Penzias. When dr. Dick hung up, he turned to his team. He said, “Guys, we’ve just been targeted.”
The two teams met and wrote two papers, which were published successively in Physical Review Letters. The Bell Labs group described radio noise, and the Princeton group suggested it may be residual heat from the Big Bang – “perhaps each side thinks, what we’re doing is right, but the other side may not be right,” said Dr. said Wilson.
He added, “I think Arnold and I wanted to leave open the idea that there is another source of the hype.” “But of course it didn’t work.”
2023-09-05 14:18:05
#Jersey #universe #began
