The intense energy unleashed during the big bang eventually cooled and transformed into microwaves. So going back to Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson and their hiss, what exactly was it that they had discovered?
98% percent of all matter, along with the fundamental forces that govern the universe, were created in the time it takes you to make a sandwich.
In just three minutes, the universe grew from the tiniest of specks to over 100 billion light-years in diameter. It may be hard to grasp just how fast that is, so let’s put it another way. Scientists believe that immediately after the big bang, the universe doubled in size every 10 -34 seconds. The sheer scale and speed of this explosion are hard to fathom. In a single moment, all the future contents of the universe were flung across the void.
Suddenly – and no one quite knows why – this singularity exploded. Confined in this single, infinitely dense point were all the building blocks of the universe. This point was so compact that it had no dimensions. The big bang theory states that the universe began as a single point of nothingness called a singularity. So what exactly happened when the universe was formed? Here’s the key message: The big bang theory states that the universe developed from an incredibly dense point, and at terrific speed. By complete accident, Penzias and Wilson have found the first concrete evidence of the big bang – the moment when our universe was born. When Dicke hears their story, he instantly knows what they’re on to – it’s cosmic background radiation left over from the birth of the universe. In exasperation, they call Robert Dicke, an astrophysicist at Princeton. They climb onto the antenna and clean off the bird poo. Penzias and Wilson try everything to get rid of the hiss. Wherever they point the antenna, there’s persistent interference – a weird, unfocused hiss that just won’t go away. They’re trying to find a bit of radio silence so that they can perform experiments. Two radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, are working with a large communication antenna in New Jersey.
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