> In 1964 the Horn Antenna in Holmdel, N.J., picked up a mysterious buzzing noise that turned out to be cosmic microwave background radiation. It helped confirm the big bang theory. NASA
An interesting story if you are not aware of it, otherwise nothing new.
One of my favorite science stories. Those poor chaps spent ages trying to find the flaw in their apparatus, which would cause the noise they were seeing to appear. Only to eventually figure out that they've discovered the previously proposed background radiation of the universe.
I feel like the nobel prize might have been a bit too much here. The fact that the effect was cosmic background radiation was of course huge, no question. But the discovery was accidental, and used an exclusive expensive equipment not available elsewhere. They didn’t design the equipment or an experimental methodology. It seems they simply observed what the antenna captured. They had all those great physicists at Bell Labs and Princeton to talk to.
I believe cosmologists generally refer to the Big Bang theory as the progression from the hot dense state to the modern shape. This Hot Big Bang part is very well understood in theory and very well supported in observation, with the Cosmic Microwave Background being a pre-eminent discovery supporting that.
What preceded the hot dense soup involves conditions that are a problem for both theory and experiment. For theory, those conditions involve both quantum gravity and general relativity and we don't have any accepted way to resolve those yet. And, for experiment, the hot dense soup is opaque to our observations. There are educated guesses as to what might have come before, and one guess is that it leads back to a singularity, and the popular view of the Big Bang theory is often that singularity as the kickoff, but we don't have anything resembling evidence. And whether anything came "before" even that is super speculation, even the concept of "before" may not apply.
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
-- Douglas Adams
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 31.8 ms ] threadFrom the Nobel Prize press release linked in the article:
> it is thus tempting to assume that the universe was created by a cosmic explosion, or ‘big bang’, although other explanations are possible.
An interesting story if you are not aware of it, otherwise nothing new.
What preceded the hot dense soup involves conditions that are a problem for both theory and experiment. For theory, those conditions involve both quantum gravity and general relativity and we don't have any accepted way to resolve those yet. And, for experiment, the hot dense soup is opaque to our observations. There are educated guesses as to what might have come before, and one guess is that it leads back to a singularity, and the popular view of the Big Bang theory is often that singularity as the kickoff, but we don't have anything resembling evidence. And whether anything came "before" even that is super speculation, even the concept of "before" may not apply.
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” -- Douglas Adams