The secrets of the universe are hidden in a vast number of places, from the furthest reaches of outer space to the inside of an atom.
Sometimes they’re under a pile of bird shit.
Today’s Moment of Science… the big bang, and not just the shotgun blasted pigeons.
The nature of the origins of the universe are still somewhat shrouded in mystery. We know up until a few bajillionths of a seconds after the beginning of it all how the universal fuckery went down. We’re still not sure how the cosmic egg that befell our little cosmic omelet got here, but for a long time, we weren’t so sure about the existence of said egg at all.
Was the universe eternal or did it have a beginning? Revelations only come as fast as our technology’s ability to provoke them, and the twentieth century was a time for rapid expansion of our capability to prod the universe. Edwin Hubble- yes, that Hubble- already observed that the universe was expanding, suggesting that it likely expanded outward from an origin point. But “shit’s moving” wasn’t evidence for us to shift our model of the origins of everything.
In New Jersey in 1964, two separate teams of scientists were poking the sky with big fancy sticks, looking for answers. At Princeton, the team of Robert Dicke, Jim Peebles and David Wilkinson searched for the radio waves that could hopefully provide evidence of the big bang. The hypothesis suggested that the initial powerful blast of radiation diminished over the last thirteen billion years or so and would now be detectable as radio waves.
Though I’m sure the grant application was more specific, the second lab was just kinda checking for what the fuck was out there.
Let’s hone in on that second lab though because knowing what you’re looking for is boring.
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson from Bell Labs aimed the Holmdel Horn antenna at the night sky to prod for radio waves from other galaxies, but it didn’t seem like the cosmos were answering them. It seemed more like a hum of interference coming from… somewhere?
They couldn’t get rid of it. They tried pointing it towards and away from the relatively nearby New York City to no effect. They sifted through all other possible causes of radio chatter, the instrument’s endogenous noises, even interference from our own sun, and yet the hum remained.
Then there were the damned pigeons.
They found pigeons- and a mess of pigeon shit- nesting in the antenna and hoped they’d found the cause. The two experts in astronomy and physics applied themselves to pest control. They excavated the guano themselves and removed the birds. They tried to dissuade the shit doves from returning. But the flying fucks gave nary a fuck about the mysteries of the universe.
If you’ve ever had a pigeon roosting issue at your home, take solace in knowing that literal astrophysicists couldn’t think of a better end to the birds than a shotgun.
That damn hum was still there. And they were still all “idk, aliens?” when searching for explanations.
Penzias and Wilson got together with the research group from Princeton, and wouldn’t you know it? That damn hum was exactly what they’d been looking for.
As it turned out, when they prodded, the cosmos had answered. If the universe is the child of the big bang, this is the faintest whiff of fuck fumes coming off the big bang’s sex sheets two days later. This was cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR), the radio waves that the team from Princeton predicted, scattered across existence. It would all but confirm the big bang theory.
Penzias and Wilson were rewarded for the pigeon shit clean up efforts with the Nobel Prize in 1978.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, inquiring for my front porch if we have advanced anti-pigeon technology yet.
Sigh It’s never aliens
” If the universe is the child of the big bang, this is the faintest whiff of fuck fumes coming off the big bang’s sex sheets two days later. ” Amazing. All the cosmology I will ever need or want !
Some secrets of the universe may be under bird shite but the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42.