THE AFTERGLOW OF CREATION
by Marcus L6th

15 billion years ago (give or take a millennium) something happened. The universe was born. One might say it was an important event; some might say it was an act of god; if so then we have solved one of the greatest riddles ever set; we have discovered the oldest fossil and this is known as

The Cosmic Microwave Background

Why did it take so long to find? After all we could detect microwaves in the Second World War. There was a slight problem however; everything around us glows with microwaves and so finding the radiation that resulted directly from the Big Bang was hard; also the cosmic microwave background was ever so smooth which did not make sense because the Universe today is anything but smooth. So therefore the material in space after the Big Bang must have clumped together and so therefore the aim was completed:

To find some variation in the brightness of the microwave background

If there was some variation then we would be looking at the seeds of our own existence; the very pieces of matter that clumped together to form the galaxies we see today. In April 1992 COBE found hotspots and coldspots in the cosmic background; it had found the areas of higher density that would expand and get bigger and eventually form clusters of galaxies; Stephen Hawking summed it up:

There is always a beginning........
Bob Dicke is a name that normally pops up when you talk about cosmic radiation and so it seems appropriate that we start with him. He believed in an oscillating universe that had periods of swelling and periods of contracting. This meant the Universe had no beginning but kept on " bouncing " for all of eternity. By starting to concentrate on cosmology his interest in the Big Bang radiation increased. It became more than a curiosity when he, along with David Wilkinson and Peter Roll, began to construct an instrument with which they could detect what had now been known as the " primeval fireball ".

And then we had eyes.........
The telescope built by Wilkinson and Roll was to be erected (stop laughing) on the flat roof above the geology building at Princeton University. The heart of the apparatus was the antenna— this was a metal funnel made out of copper which led microwaves to the receiver which actually detects the waves.

Measuring how much colder the background radiation was going to be difficult. However the use of an artificial source of radio waves would help in the following way; firstly one could point the antenna at the sky and measure the strength of the radiation and then point it at an artificial source and the difference between the two strengths would show how much hotter the sky was than the artificial source. Roll and Wilkinson used liquid helium as their cold load (the artificial source) which had to be 4.2 º above absolute zero

(liquid helium boils at this temperature). They used a Dicke switch to move the antenna from looking at the sky and then the cold load very quickly and so now they believed that they, and they alone, were ready to enter the history books as the first men to measure the temperature of this fireball and gaze into the past.

A parallel universe ?.........
As Roll and Wilkinson were fiddling around with their knobs in Princeton, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were working on a telescope very similar in shape to Dicke’s only much larger; the telescope was being used by Bells Labs for their satellite Telstar and that was the main use of the telescope until Penzias and Wilson arrived; and just guess what they wanted to do with it? Pick up background radiation. Guess what they set about doing first? Making a cold load. And just guess what they used? Yes, liquid helium.

Taking the measurements should now be a piece of cake. Well it would have been but for an anomalous result of 3.5º above absolute zero; the measurement should have been zero as they had diligently accounted for every piece of unwanted static; so why was it 3.5? And so began the most frustrating year of their lives; Penzias and Wilson accounted for every other source of radiation they could find including New York, rivets in the aluminium in the antenna and even pigeon droppings; They were at their wits end when Penzias made a phone call.

Fate or Luck ?.........
Penzias phoned Bernie Burke, a radio astronomer, and by chance they moved onto the topic of the unwanted signal. Burke suddenly remembered what he had heard from Jim Peebles about this background radiation and straight away Penzias was on the phone to Dicke. Penzias told him of this result and Dicke turned to his co-workers and said:

" Well boys. We’ve been scooped. "
Wilkinson and Roll checked out this result and concluded that they had been well and truly scooped. Penzias and Wilson had measured the radiation from the Big Bang that had been cooled by the expansion of the Universe and now were eager to share their discovery with the world.

You just can’t please everybody........
When the scientific paper was published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, the whole world became engrossed, or should I say almost everybody. George Gamow, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman were none too pleased that their names had not been mentioned in the papers as they had all made groundbreaking advances in this area of cosmology. None of these astronomers forgave Dicke and his team nor Penzias or Wilson; but as history remembers them the scars are slowly healing.

And what now ?........