- [Narrator] Listen.
This sound is the first
evidence of the Big Bang.
And, this is the story
of two radio astronomers
who discovered proof of the
beginning of everything.
This is the horn reflector
antenna at Bell Laboratories.
Robert, can you tell us
what this thing does?
- [Robert] It receives
radio waves coming from
the direction it's pointed to
and funnels them into a receiver.
- [Narrator] That's Robert
Wilson, radio astronomer.
In the early '60s, he and
his colleague Arno Penzias
were tasked with measuring
the brightness of the sky
using the horn reflector antenna.
But, no matter where they
pointed it, the antenna read
a much larger signal
than the pair expected.
- [Robert] Our immediate
reaction was that there must be
something wrong with our system.
- [Narrator] They thought
it might be interference
from the horn itself, or New York City,
or even some pigeons living in the horn.
- [Robert] You know, we
thought about a collection of
ordinary sources that
are in the very distance.
That just didn't seem to be possible.
- [Narrator] So, they reached
out to a group of researchers
at Princeton University led by
astrophysicist Robert Dicke,
who had been scouring the sky
unsuccessfully for
evidence of the Big Bang.
Arno called, and . . .
(phone ringing)
- [Robert] Dicke picked up the phone,
and they started hearing things like
atmospheric radiation, sky brightness,
all the things that they were working on.
Dicke put the phone down and said,
"Boys, we've been scooped."
- [Narrator] Robert and Arno had measured
what Dicke and his team were
searching for, the elusive
cosmic microwave background radiation.
- [Robert] He thought
about a Big Bang source
of the universe, realized
that it would be very hot,
and, therefore, full of radiation, and,
as the universe expanded, that
radiation would simply cool.
And, whereas it was
extremely hot to start with,
by now it would simply be microwaves.
Now, it's so cold that it
would just be radio waves.
- [Narrator] And this, not
pigeons or the noisy city,
was exactly what had
been causing headaches
for Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias.
The two groups of researchers
from Bell Labs and Princeton
each wrote complimentary research papers
with their findings.
- [Robert] They wrote
one about the theory,
we wrote one about our
measurement, and we published them.
I think unlike many changes
that occur in science,
there really was a paradigm shift
with very little pushback.
- [Narrator] It was huge.
There was now evidence of a new theory
for the beginning of the entire universe.
Over a decade later, Robert
Wilson and Arno Penzias
were awarded the 1978
Nobel Prize in Physics.
How'd that feel, Robert?
- [Robert] Felt pretty strange
to win the Nobel Prize.
I didn't feel comfortable being
on the same list with Einstein.
- [Narrator] But, despite
Robert's humility,
there's no doubt of the
significance of the discovery.
- [Robert] It gives us
our earliest picture
of the universe from which we can
extrapolate back to very early times.
It's one of the centerpieces of cosmology.
(soft music)
