The Discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation and the Big Bang

Several miles away, Robert Dick, a physicist at Princeton University, and his students began to investigate the conditions under which the universe might have begun, if it had indeed had a beginning. 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 realize that the energy must still be there. But as the universe expanded, the primordial fireball had cooled to a few degrees Kelvin above absolute zero, which, they calculated, would 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.)

Dick assigns two graduate students—David Wilkinson, a talented musician, and James Peebles, a theorist—to try to detect these microwaves. While 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. “Guys, we have just been targeted,” he said.

The two teams met and wrote two papers, which were published sequentially in the journal Physical Review Letters. The Bell Labs group described the radio noise, and the Princeton group suggested it might be residual heat from the Big Bang – “Maybe each side thinks, what we’re doing is right, but the other side may not be right,” said the doctor. . said Wilson.

He added: “I think Arnold and I want to embrace the idea that there are other sources of this noise.” “But of course it didn’t work.”

“Evil thinker. Bachelor of music. Hipster-friendly communicator. Bacon freak. Amateur internet enthusiast. introverts.”

2023-09-04 19:13:56
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