Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - How was the cosmic microwave background discovered?

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

Daniel and Jorge go through the crazy story of missed opportunties, accidental observations that led to one of the greatest science discoveries of all time. Learn more about your ad-choices at https:...//www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System
Starting point is 00:00:33 On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.
Starting point is 00:01:06 Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow.
Starting point is 00:01:30 That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dresses Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA.
Starting point is 00:01:53 Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Daniel, do you know what I don't understand about winning a physics Nobel Prize? Oh, yeah, what's that?
Starting point is 00:02:34 Well, you know, to be honest, some of them seem kind of easy in hindsight. Easy to win a Nobel Prize? Yeah, I mean, like for Einstein, all he had to do was analyze someone else's experiment. It was just one idea that he had one day, and boom, Nobel Prize. I guess that's easy if you're Einstein. Well, I mean, also like the discovery of X-rays, It was totally by accident, and it took about one day of work for them. That's true, if you happen to have x-rays around.
Starting point is 00:03:00 Or like the Higgs boson, you know, like college physics major can do that kind of math. All right, you win, I admit it. Getting a physics Nobel Prize is easy. So then why don't we have one? Because we haven't tried. Let's win one today, Daniel. All right, great idea, Einstein. Let's do it.
Starting point is 00:03:24 Hi, I'm Horammy cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I have not yet won a Nobel Prize, but maybe any day, someday will be the day. Do you wake up every day thinking maybe today's the day I'll have my great idea? I don't expect it to ever happen, but I do love those stories when somebody has a moment of insight or stumbles across something weird. And that morning when they woke up and had their oatmeal or whatever, they had no idea that it would be that fateful day. Maybe that's the key. It's the oatmeal. And maybe it's a special kind of oatmeal, Daniel, like a radioactive oatmeal. Bitten by his radioactive oatmeal, he gained its proportional intelligence. Yeah, there you go. Maybe that was Einstein's secret.
Starting point is 00:04:12 I think when people say you're as smart as a bowl of oatmeal, they don't mean it as a compliment. Well, I think that's very disparaging of oatmeal. Because you never know. There could be sentient, genius oatmeal out there. base. They could be our next alien overlords. Yet another sci-fi pitch for Netflix. Put it on the list. All right. Well, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeartRadio. In which we try not to turn your brain into oatmeal as we talk about all the amazing things that are out there in our universe, all the things that we have painstakingly uncovered in our search to reveal the fundamental nature of matter and radiation and everything in the universe. and all the things that science is still picking at. All the big questions that are out there, all the discoveries that might be far into the future
Starting point is 00:04:59 or just around the corner. That's right. The universe is full of mysteries, full of big questions, and wonderful discoveries just waiting for us to find them and possibly get a Nobel Prize for finding them. In a congratulatory bowl of oatmeal. And sometimes the answer to those questions
Starting point is 00:05:16 is already out there. It's beaming down at us from the cosmos or it's in somebody's data, they just don't even recognize it. And sometimes those Nobel Prizes come just from putting one thing next to the other, from finding that the answer to a question is already out there. Yeah, because technically all of the secrets of the universe, all of the great big truth about it, are out there for us to discover. I mean, it's not like they don't exist, they're there.
Starting point is 00:05:43 We just haven't seen them or having discovered them or haven't known where to look. Yeah, you know, that's a really fun question. Like, is it actually possible? to unravel the nature of the universe without ever leaving the earth, just by watching the skies. It's sort of incredible what we have been able to figure out about like far-flung corners of the universe and the way galaxies expand and collide and do all sorts of crazy stuff without ever having left the earth. But I wonder if it's possible to actually figure out like all of it, to get all the way down to string theory and quantum gravity without ever going anywhere else.
Starting point is 00:06:17 It would be pretty cool if all that information was beaming down on us right. right now. Are you saying like are we maybe in the wrong place? Like if we were somewhere else, we could see the secrets of the universe, you know, or maybe they're all in one box, but in another part of the galaxy. Yeah, or it might be that you need to do some kind of experiment, like smash black holes together at very high speeds in order to get the answer to some question. Or it might be that you need to be able to look inside a black hole, which we can do from here. Maybe you need to be nearby it in order to decrypt the quantum information in the hawking radiation. It might not be possible.
Starting point is 00:06:50 to gather all that information from Earth. Or maybe it is. Maybe if somebody was smart enough, they could figure out all the secrets of the universe just from the data we are getting today. Yeah, hopefully not by getting us near a black hole or by smashing a couple of black holes together here on Earth.
Starting point is 00:07:06 That sounds kind of dangerous. Anything in the name of science. Not worth a Nobel Prize. Well, you know, everybody makes their own judgment call on that. Please physicists check with the rest of us before you make those kinds of judgment calls. I know this is important for you, all of you, but, you know, we might have other
Starting point is 00:07:20 priorities. Yeah, your priorities to get to name the black hole machine, right? I want to be alive to name it and to call it that, you know. But yeah, the history of physics and science here on Earth has a long and interesting history full of amazing discoveries. And some of them happened kind of by accident, right? Oh, lots of them happened by accident. People stumble across stuff they didn't even know to look for, see things they don't understand, and only later realize that they contain secrets of the universe. So today we'll be covering one such story. of an amazing discovery that really kind of illuminated in a very real way the beginning of the universe. Absolutely. It's some of the oldest light in the universe. And it tells us a lot about how the
Starting point is 00:08:02 universe began and how hot and dense and crazy it was billions and billions of years ago. And it was almost overlooked and mistaken for pigeon poop. Wow. That is a big oops there for the physicists. So today on the program we'll be talking about. How was the cosmic microwave background discovered? Now, Daniel, this is the famous CMB, right? This is the famous CMB that has taught us so much about the nature of the universe. It's not the CMBR, as they call it in the Marvel universe.
Starting point is 00:08:38 You have a problem with that? Well, the scientists in the Marvel universe can call their CMB whatever they like. But out here in the real universe, we tend to call it the CMB. Just the cosmic microwave background, meaning like, it's, the background basically of the universe. It's everywhere. It's all around us. Photons from the early universe plasma are zooming all over the universe in every direction no matter where you look.
Starting point is 00:09:01 That's what we mean by background. It's sort of just like always there is everywhere. Yeah. And it has a long and interesting history of people thinking it was there but not seeing it or seeing it and not thinking it was there. It's kind of an interesting and dramatic plot line, right? Absolutely. And it's the kind of thing that could have been discovered very easily decades before.
Starting point is 00:09:20 it was. And in fact, it was discovered several times without even being understood. And so it's sort of like a story of missed opportunities. And the folks who ended up winning the Nobel Prize for finding it could very easily not have. So it sounds like a pretty intriguing story. So we'll dig into that and go over every detail. But first, we were curious about how many people know how this amazing discovery was found. So as usual, Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet and ask people if they knew how the cosmic microwave background was discovered. And so if you would like to be interrogated about physics by a physicist without the opportunity to consult any reference materials, if that sounds fun to you, then please email me to Questions at Danielanhorpe.com.
Starting point is 00:10:05 Here's what people had to say. I think it was around the 70s or whenever it was. They built a very powerful telescope, maybe radio telescope, to look at something else. and then they heard or saw some like what they thought was noise from a local source. They even thought it was the pigeons that were nesting in the telescope and actually had a big job clearing that out, trying to get rid of it. But no matter what they did, couldn't get rid of it. But obviously, eventually they realized it wasn't local at all,
Starting point is 00:10:31 but from almost 14 billion light years away, the CMBR. Two words, Hubble, telescope. Okay, that's a tool, not an answer. Aliens told us about it, and they also told us where to look. So we pointed the Hubble telescope at the cosmic microwave background radiation, and that's how we discovered it. I haven't really heard about it, but just as an assumption, maybe when we were trying to discover some kind of radiations.
Starting point is 00:11:00 I think the background radiation was discovered by accident. It had nothing to do with someone using their microwave oven to make eggs. But I think it was World War II. Weren't they doing radar experiments, and they discovered this noise, but I think it was by accident. The cosmic microwave background was discovered by two scientists working at Bell Labs in New Jersey who were investigating a strange buzz
Starting point is 00:11:25 that they picked up when actually working on something else. I think it was discovered around 1960s as one of the first discoveries of radio astronomy. After making sure it wasn't the error in data or in measurements, there was a lot of theorizing what it meant and why the signal was actually quite possibly with a radio telescope, maybe astronomers or scientists were looking at like certain stars or something. They're like, hey, these guys are given off a lot of radiation
Starting point is 00:11:53 and then they looked at the stars and they're like, oh, it's not the stars, put something around it, but there's nothing around it. So they're like, oh, what if we just focused on the space around it and then they focused on the space? All right. A lot of versions of the story here from the public. Yeah, a lot of people seem to know something about how it was discovered by accident. Yeah, including apparently aliens told us about it. I like how this person just said, two words, Hubble, telescope, bam, drops the mic, and aliens. Oh, by the way, also aliens. Well, how else do you know where to point your Hubble telescope, right? The aliens have to tell you. It makes perfect sense. It's pretty surprising how many people had heard about this and also knew a
Starting point is 00:12:33 little bit about it. Generally, people seem to know that it wasn't like this intentional thing, like there was some element of accident to it. That's exactly right. And it took a long time. for people to even know that it should be there and know that we might be able to see it. So there's sort of like progress and back steps and forward steps on the theoretical side as well as on the actual like observational side. All right. Well, let's get into the story then. And maybe take us back, Daniel, because I imagine this story starts in the early 1900s.
Starting point is 00:13:03 And, you know, we were sort of just starting to discover how big the universe was and that it maybe came from a big bang. you know, what were we thinking at the time and what did we know because, you know, I imagine that the idea that there's some background noise in the universe is not that surprising to think about, but it having
Starting point is 00:13:22 some special meaning maybe is. Yeah, so we have to go back to basically Hubble. Hubble's the one who figured out that the universe was expanding. Before that people thought that everything was just sort of like hanging out in space things hadn't changed in hundreds or thousands or billions of years.
Starting point is 00:13:37 But Hubble discovered that there were other galaxies out there and that they were moving away from us faster and faster. And suddenly that made the universe dynamic instead of static. Like, things were definitely changing. And people had two totally different concepts of ways to explain what Hubble saw that the universe was expanding. One is the idea that's very familiar to us that if the universe is expanding, then you run the clock backwards in time, then it must have been more dense, must have been more compact,
Starting point is 00:14:06 must have been more squeezed together in the beginning. and you can sort of track it back to a very early moment when you reach like infinite density, the singularity. So this is the Big Bang idea that the universe came from some like huge early expansion and what we're seeing now is the remnants of that, the continued expansion of the universe. So that was one idea, this Big Bang idea. Right, because we saw the stars and the galaxies.
Starting point is 00:14:29 Right now they're all moving away from us. So, you know, the idea is that if you rewind, then at some point everything was crunched together. Yeah, but some people didn't like that idea. They thought that's ridiculous for the universe to have a beginning and for it to begin in some sort of big bang. And in fact, the name Big Bang came about as a sort of like an insult and they were like trying to, you know, make that idea sound silly by calling it a big bang. And instead, they preferred a steady state theory of the universe. Now, it was sort of hard to have a steady state idea of the universe that the universe like isn't changing on the largest scale when you see that it's expanding. You know, how could that possibly be?
Starting point is 00:15:06 If things are expanding, don't they get less? and less dense. Well, their idea was that there was some, like, source of new stuff in the universe, that stuff was constantly being created, and that was, like, refilling the universe. So the universe was expanding, but at a constant density because there was some, like, thing that was, like, topping it off all the time. That is sort of what we think of now, but back then, it seemed sort of counter to the evidence. Well, that's interesting that you say that.
Starting point is 00:15:32 You're right, that we know that the universe is expanding and that there is more space being created, but the universe is getting more and more dilute. The steady state theory involved like the creation of more stars and galaxies and more stuff in the universe to keep like the density constant. So the steady state theory was like, well, let's figure out how to make the universe so it's not getting more and more dilute. It's always been this way and lived forever. They were thinking like the density of the universe doesn't change.
Starting point is 00:15:59 It's somehow expanding, but the density is not changing. Yeah, because somebody's like pouring more syrup onto these pancakes all the time. and so even though it's dribbling off the edges, you're keeping the same amount of syrup on top of your pancakes. That's my big pancake theory of the universe. I think you messed up that analogy. I think it's more like the pancakes getting bigger and so somebody must be pouring more syrup.
Starting point is 00:16:21 There you go. All right, there you go. Yeah, that's a more delicious analogy. It's a very breakfast-themed physics analogy today. Yeah, oatmeal, pancakes. It's the most important physics meal today. Wait till you hear about my waffle-based observation ideas. That might have to be another episode, Dan.
Starting point is 00:16:35 You know, I'm stuffed already. And so these were sort of the ideas people were bouncing around, like, what does the expansion of the universe mean? Did it come from some early hot, dense point? Or is there some place where the universe is creating new stuff so the things don't get less and less dense as time goes on? I guess why were they finding this idea of a more, you know, kind of empty universe? Like, why couldn't the universe beginning more and more dilute?
Starting point is 00:16:59 I think they didn't like the idea of a beginning. It seems sort of counterintuitive. They prefer the concept. It seemed more natural to them to imagine the universe had always been here because if there's a beginning, then as you know, there are big questions about that beginning. What came before it? What caused it? Why do we have a beginning? You can avoid some of those things if you imagine the universe had just always been this way. Like if you don't accept that the universe could have a beginning, then you have to make something up. Like, where's all this syrup coming from?
Starting point is 00:17:27 Yeah, there are always more questions. But, you know, it was sort of an aesthetic preference. And so you had physicists on both sides of the issue, some arguing that the universe must have started with a big bang. and others suggesting that, you know, stuff was constantly being made in this steady state. And so that's what people were thinking about. They were like, where does the stuff in the universe come from? And they were trying to understand, for example, where heavy stuff in the universe came from? Like, where does all the iron and where does all the nickel and all that stuff in the universe come from?
Starting point is 00:17:55 Was it made during the Big Bang? Or is it somehow made somewhere else and being like poured into the universe somehow? I see. Because it could have been made in the Big Bang, right? Like the heavier elements could have been for. in that hot dense initial moments. That's what people thought in the early part of the century, that maybe in that incredible heat from the Big Bang,
Starting point is 00:18:14 you could have made iron and you could have made silicon and oxygen. And maybe all the elements were fused in that initial time period. So people spent a lot of time doing theoretical calculations of how hot it was back then in the very early universe. What was the temperature? What was the density? Were there the conditions needed to make all of the heavy elements? So that was the reason they started doing these calculations.
Starting point is 00:18:35 and they realized, wow, in the very early universe, there must have been this very, very hot plasma and that plasma must have glowed the way plasma from the sun, for example, glows. And then the universe cooled and at some point that plasma becomes transparent because all the ions in it capture electrons as they cool and they become neutral and then it's transparent. So what they were wondering about was all that energy, all that light that was now flying around the universe, was there enough light there to like make the heavy elements? And they did a bunch of calculations, and they decided, no, it wasn't possible. And now, of course, we know that those heavy elements were not made during the Big Bang.
Starting point is 00:19:11 The Big Bang mostly made hydrogen and helium and very tiny amounts of heavier things. The heavier elements were made later in stars. But they didn't know that at the time until they did these calculations. Wait, how do they know that you couldn't have made the heavier elements? Because there just aren't the conditions. Like, you can't make iron, for example, under the conditions just after the Big Bang. Like, it needs to be hotter and denser. You need the conditions inside stars.
Starting point is 00:19:35 But wasn't the Big Bang infinitely dense and super duper hot? It was, but not for very long. You know, and so it took time for the basic particles to form. You needed, like, quarks to shake out of it. And then those quarks to get bound into protons. And then those protons to find electrons. That's basically all that happened. And then things cooled down.
Starting point is 00:19:53 It was very, very quick early expansion. Remember, the Big Bang itself is an expansion that lasts like 10 to the minus 30 seconds. I see. There wasn't enough time to make the heavier element. is what you're saying, but just enough time to only make hydrogen and helium. Just enough time to make hydrogen and helium, exactly, and little trace elements of what comes next. And so the other elements were later made in stars. And this is where cosmologists kind of lost interest. They were like, all right, so there must have been this hot plasma and it must
Starting point is 00:20:21 have generated a bunch of light, but we're not interested anymore because that couldn't have made the heavy elements. That was the question they were asking. So they had the idea that there might be this light from the early universe flying around, but they didn't care because it didn't answer the question they were asking at the time. They were more interested in like how the planets come about and had it stars and galaxies, like the stuff that you can actually kind of, that is interesting to them at least at the time in the universe. Yeah. So it's very much motivated by like what question scientists are asking. Sometimes you stumble across an idea and you don't realize, oh, this could actually be really interesting and important for a totally different question. They were
Starting point is 00:20:59 focused on, you know, how do you make these heavy elements? And on top of that, nobody imagined that you could even see this light. Even if they thought, well, that light is cool. And if you could see it, it would prove that there was this hot, dense state in the early universe. They didn't imagine it be possible to see it today. And so they just sort of like rode it off and cosmologists sort of like moved on. This is calculations done in the 40s by some guys named Alfer and Herman and George Gamow. And they did it and people thought, well, I guess you can't make heavy elements in the Big Bang, and then they just sort of turned to other stuff. They thought that Big Bang was too boring.
Starting point is 00:21:33 They were like, you know, like, all right, yeah, that's where the universe came from. It was a big flash, but nothing interesting happened. Nothing interesting that we could see today. These photons, they started out really hot, you know, like thousands of degrees Kelvin, but then they got cooled down as the universe expanded. They got stretched out as the universe expands down to very, very cold temperatures, which means long wavelengths, which means radio waves. And so at the time, radio astronomy was like really a brand new field that had just begun a few years earlier.
Starting point is 00:22:04 So nobody imagined you could actually detect these faint signals. Nobody even, like, bothered to propose that somebody do that. All right. Well, let's get into a little bit more detail about what they were expecting to see and then how it was accidentally discovered. But first, let's take a quick break. 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed.
Starting point is 00:22:43 There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop.
Starting point is 00:23:17 Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone.
Starting point is 00:23:50 Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor. and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him?
Starting point is 00:24:04 Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Starting point is 00:24:19 I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe, Foundation and I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit
Starting point is 00:24:41 fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know.
Starting point is 00:25:03 I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, it's Honey German. And my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and
Starting point is 00:25:31 celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talked all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of Chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vibras you've come to expect. And, of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me.
Starting point is 00:26:13 But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're talking about the cosmic microwave background and how it was discovered. Now, Daniel, some of our listeners might not know exactly what the cosmic microwave background is or where it comes from. Do you want to give us a quick recap of what it is and what exactly it is that we're seeing when we look at it? So the cosmic microwave background are photons from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Right. Big bang happens. Things are really hot and dense and stuck together. And the universe expands, which means everything is getting more dilute and more cool. And by about almost 400,000 years, the universe had cooled to the point where atoms could form. Like electrons were slow enough that they could now be captured by protons and turned into hydrogen, for example. And that means that the universe became transparent. So there's this moment when the universe goes from like really hot and glowy but opaque to slightly less hot, slightly less glow. and transparent, right? It becomes like glass all of a sudden. So what happens to those photons that
Starting point is 00:27:31 were made just before the universe became transparent? Well, they were flying around and they're still flying around. And 14 billion years later, most of them are still flying around. And so they're everywhere because the Big Bang was everywhere and this plasma filled the entire universe and filled it with these photons. So that means that everywhere all around us are these photons not from the Big Bang itself, but from this hot plasma that existed about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. Yeah, I'm thinking like, it's like you're in the middle of a giant fire, and then suddenly the fire, the air all around you becomes transparent. And so you sort of get that one last, you know, flash of light from that fire right before the universe became kind of solid. And because it
Starting point is 00:28:18 happened everywhere all at once, then there are always photons wherever you look. Right. We look out and we see this just in the night sky, right? If you point to a radio telescope to the night sky in any direction, you see this because there's always a place where 14 billion years ago, almost, a photon was created and it has been flying towards us ever since. And as time goes on, we're seeing these photons from further and further slices of that early plasma. So we're always seeing it. We always will see it. And so you were saying that in the beginning of the 1900s and through the middle of it. We sort of knew this story. We knew that's what had happened or possibly happened at the Big Bang and what happened to all that light. But you're saying nobody really cared
Starting point is 00:29:01 about seeing this light. Nobody imagined that you could, right? Nobody thought, wow, you could actually go and detect this stuff. It seemed like it would be a really faint signal and you'd need really impressive technology. And so people just sort of like, well, I guess that existed. Just like lots of other things probably existed in early states of the universe, doesn't mean we think we can see clues of them now. It's sort of like incredible to imagine that you could see today remnants of something that happened 14 billion years ago, right? That's sort of incredible.
Starting point is 00:29:30 Most of the stuff that happened a long time ago is gone, right? Like you can't see most of the dinosaurs that were on Earth, just a very few that happened to get fossilized. I think part of it is that, you know, we were at that time stuck on like visible light astronomy, right? We were trying to look at the entire universe only through like the visible light spectrum. Yeah. At the same time, people were.
Starting point is 00:29:49 were just starting to figure out that there were other ways to look at the universe. It was in the 30s that radio astronomy was accidentally invented because somebody built a big antenna to try to communicate across the Atlantic and realized, oh my gosh, there are crazy radio signals coming from space. What? Why is space making radio signals? And that was the discovery, for example, the big radio source at the center of our galaxy, which turns out to be from a black hole's accretion disk. And so we had just begun to understand that radio astronomy was a possible thing you could do, another way to look at the universe. Right.
Starting point is 00:30:24 Everything in the universe is glowing. Everything that interacts electromagnetically gives off some kind of light. And it just depends on the temperature. So you're not very hot. So you don't glow in the visible light the way like a white hot piece of metal does or the sun does. You and the earth do, however, glow in the infrared. And so if you're cold enough, then you glow at longer and longer temperatures, which are
Starting point is 00:30:46 not visible. So if you look at the night sky or any sky, really, and look at it in the frequency of radio waves, then you can see colder stuff, stuff that doesn't glow in the visible things like gas and dust and planets and other kinds of things. So it's a different way of looking at the universe, a different filter shows you different stuff. Right. And it also travels differently through space, right? Which is why it's sort of like clearer to see things in the radio spectrum. Longer wavelengths are less obstructed by like small particles and stuff. So radio can travel more easily through like big clouds of gas and dust and this kind of stuff.
Starting point is 00:31:19 So let's you see through different things because every object is transparent or opaque at different frequencies, right? For example, your walls are transparent in x-ray, right, but opaque in visible light. You can see through them with some kinds of light, x-ray light with very high frequency, but you can't see through them in other kinds of light like visible light. So that's kind of the picture that sets up the discovery. So we knew there was this light out there where we didn't think. we could see it. And also, we were just discovering, you know, the radio spectrum of signals out there in space. So then how did they finally put the two together?
Starting point is 00:31:53 So people put the two together sort of accidentally at first. And it wasn't even realized until decades and decades later because it was World War II that really improved our radio technology. Obviously, that was important for signaling during the war. And so it gave a great boost to like a lot of our electronics and radar and radio technology. And so after World War II, people started playing our. around with radio a little bit more. And there were folks that were like looking at the sky and surveying it at various
Starting point is 00:32:21 wavelengths. And for example, a Frenchman named Emil Leroux in 1955 made a measurement of radiation from the sky. And he found this source of radiation at just the right frequency, which we now understand was the CMB. He just didn't understand what it was and nobody recognized it. I see. He just hooked it up and he heard like a shh or something through his earphones or something.
Starting point is 00:32:44 Yeah, and people are looking for sources, right? They're like pointing this telescope at various things, trying to find things that generated radio waves. So like the center of the galaxy generated radio waves. The sun generates radio waves. Jupiter, you're looking for like objects. You're trying to understand what's out there. But what they were seeing was in addition,
Starting point is 00:33:02 this noise that you hear from every direction, right? It doesn't matter where you point at the center of the galaxy, the center of the solar system. It doesn't matter where it's coming from every direction. And so that's sort of weird. and people had sort of forgotten this prediction by the theorists that there would be this like radio noise from the early universe out there. And then they started to hear it and they didn't understand what it was.
Starting point is 00:33:25 I see. But I guess how did they know it wasn't just noise, like just general, you know, noisy equipment, you know, thermal fluctuations, you know, noise in the air? How did they know it was something special and not just like, hey, I have bad equipment? Yeah, that's a great question. that took a more detailed comparison between what was expected and what was predicted and what was actually seen. But we'll get there at a moment. To me, it's super fun to look back into history and see evidence of future discoveries in people's data to see people who could have claimed
Starting point is 00:33:56 the discovery of something which later won the Nobel Prize. They just didn't understand what they had. And so this actually happened twice for the CMB. In 1955, it was Emil Leroux. And two years later, a Russian guy named Shemanov observed a signal at the same temperature in every direction and didn't understand it. And they just sort of like went, hmm, and then moved on and never really figured it out. Now, of course, we know that was all the data they needed to claim discovery of the CMB. They just didn't really have the context for it. Yeah, I mean, like, is it directional this noise or is it only coming from space? If I pointed back towards the Earth, I don't hear it. You know, I guess paint us a picture. Like, if I'm in the 60s and I have a centenna, what would
Starting point is 00:34:37 I be experiencing? Yeah, so it comes from space, right? Earth actually is a big source of radio noise. So not just electronics, but like everything around us is constantly emitting light, just like we said earlier. It's glowing. And so you've got to get rid of that by only pointing your antenna up at the sky. So you're listening to radio from the sky only. The interesting thing about this is that there doesn't seem to be any particular source of it. It doesn't seem like it's coming from the center of the galaxy, doesn't seem like it's coming from Jupiter or from the sun or any particular source. Once you point your radio telescope up at the sky and listen, you see it equally from every direction, which is really weird. And it's a clue that it's not coming from any particular object out
Starting point is 00:35:21 there. It's just sort of like the cosmos are filled with this bath. And of course, you have to make sure it's not instrumental, that it's not just like noise in your, you know, electronics or something like that and so you can spend a lot of time trying to like find that noise and remove it and make sure you know that's not from your electronics but you can tell that it's not from any particular object because it's coming from every direction in the sky it was definitely coming from somewhere is what you're saying it was coming from space right it was definitely not coming from earth all right so then what was the big breakthrough how did they piece it all together it was in the 60s when one group at Princeton realized hold on a second we might be able to see this radiation they sort of like
Starting point is 00:36:02 dug back into these old calculations from the 40s to think about this light from the early universe and realize that with the advance in radio technology, it might actually be possible. And so this is like, go back and read old papers, people, because there are great ideas out there that people wrote down that they didn't follow up on because the technology wasn't there. And so there was a guy at Princeton named Dickie who realized, you know what, we could probably see this light. We think it's out there. It would be evidence that the universe was what's hot and densest.
Starting point is 00:36:32 enough to generate this light. And now we think we might be able to see it. So let's go build a radio telescope so we can go and look for it. So this was Dickie at Princeton. I see it was somebody who said like, hey, radio astronomy is a thing. You could find interesting signals out there in the radio spectrum. And oh, by the way, you should be able to see this early light, this dim light from the universe beginning.
Starting point is 00:36:54 Yeah. And it was a great idea. You know, the technology had come around. The question was interesting. I realized, wow, I have the hammer to bang. in this nail. And actually, as a weird aside, Dickey didn't believe in the Big Bang as the beginning of the universe. He didn't think the universe had a beginning. But he did think that the universe had an early, really hot, dense state. He had this other idea. He thought of the universe
Starting point is 00:37:19 as a sort of a cycle. He thought the universe expanded and then slowed down and crunched back together again. And he was trying to understand if that crunch was sort of like intense enough to break apart all of the matter. He wanted to find this early radiation as like evidence of how matter was destroyed rather than created. He thought this fireball destroyed the previous universe and then ours was birthed out of that.
Starting point is 00:37:42 What? Like a crunch from the Big Bang or before the Big Bang? From before the Big Bang. He thought that our universe was just like the latest and infinite series of universes and that before our Big Bang there was a big crunch and that this sort of like cleansed the universe
Starting point is 00:37:58 from all the stuff from the previous universe, you know, sort of like wipe the table and sets it for a new meal. He was thinking maybe you can hear the crunch or see like this crunching in the current universe. Yeah, and he thought that maybe this cosmic microwave background radiation if you could spot it would be evidence for this like cleansing radiation
Starting point is 00:38:15 that basically destroyed the previous universe and helped create ours. I see. And what made them think that radio would be a better way to see it than other wavelengths? So they did this calculation. They thought how hot was it back then? and it was about 3,000 degrees Kelvin.
Starting point is 00:38:30 And if that light was still around, what would be its wavelength now? So it's a little confusing. We talk about the temperature of light. What we really mean when we say the temperature of light is we mean the temperature of a thing which would generate light at a certain frequency. So for example, when we say the light was 3,000 degrees Kelvin,
Starting point is 00:38:49 we really mean a plasma that was 3,000 degrees Kelvin would glow a certain frequency. Something that's colder, something that's 3 degrees Kelvin, for example, would glow at a much longer frequency. But if you have a plasma from a long, long time ago, the glowing at 3,000 degrees Kelvin, it made very high frequency light,
Starting point is 00:39:07 light that like zigz and zags really quickly. As the universe expands, remember space stretches, that light gets to longer and longer frequencies. That light gets stretched. It doesn't get slowed down. Light always moves at the same speed, but the wavelengths get stretched. So now that light is much longer frequency,
Starting point is 00:39:24 whereas we say colder temperature. And so they did that calculation. They figured what the frequency of the light should be. And they figured it should be something corresponding to radiation from an object around 3 or 5 or 10 degrees Kelvin. So they sort of knew that this light from the early universe glowed at a certain frequency or a frequency range. It's not like you can measure that glow in the x-rays or in the visible light. Like it only glows in that certain frequency. Yes, it would be characteristic at that temperature.
Starting point is 00:39:53 All right. And so they were poised then to go look for it, basically. basically, and then realize what an amazing discovery it was. So let's get into how they found it and when they realized what they were sitting on. But first, let's take another quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. at 6.33 p.m., everything changed.
Starting point is 00:40:31 There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop.
Starting point is 00:41:04 Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on. on the okay story time podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her.
Starting point is 00:41:34 Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet.
Starting point is 00:41:55 So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call, said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, season two, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community.
Starting point is 00:42:30 September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I wouldn't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg
Starting point is 00:42:56 and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, it's HoneyGerman and my podcast, Grasias Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition?
Starting point is 00:43:21 No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start.
Starting point is 00:43:39 We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing Vibras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network
Starting point is 00:44:08 on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right. We're talking about the cosmic microwave background and how it was discovered. And it feels like people knew it was there. And this new technology, this radio astronomy was just coming into fashion. And so people were ready to see it. People were ready to see it, you know, but just like to recap the crazy history, it was like predicted in the 40s and then ignored, accidentally discovered twice in the 50s and then ignored. And then in the early 60s, Dickie at Princeton is like, hold on a second. I bet we could see this. Let's build a telescope to look for it. So he's the first one to like really bring this idea together
Starting point is 00:44:57 and decide to look for this thing on purpose. But he's not the one who actually found it. Oh, really? But did he build a telescope for it to look for it? No, he got started and they were like getting going and starting to build this thing. Meanwhile, at the same time, totally coincidentally, 60 kilometers away from Princeton at Bell Labs,
Starting point is 00:45:16 there was another couple of guys working on a totally different project looking for something totally different. They built a radio telescope because they were working from Bell Labs and they were trying to communicate with balloon satellites. Bell Labs was experimenting with like building a telecommunications networks using floating balloons in the upper atmosphere. So they built this thing to talk to balloons.
Starting point is 00:45:38 Oh, wow. So they had already built one but not to do astronomy, to do like communications. Yeah, to do communications. And so they had built this thing and they were like trying to talk to balloons. And then Bell Labs decided, you know what? we're not interested in this. Let's cancel the whole project.
Starting point is 00:45:52 We're not interested in like balloon satellites as a way to build a telecommunications network. But these guys, Penzius and Wilson, the ones working for Bell Labs, they had done radio astronomy for their PhDs. They knew how to do that. And they were like, all right, well, we have this awesome telescope. Why don't we point at the sky and see what we see? We got some questions about, you know, they wanted to follow up from basically from their theses and do some more research.
Starting point is 00:46:16 So they just sort of like took advantage of this existing thing and started. trying to do some research. I see. So they were originally scientists and they probably hoped they could use it for science, but they had this pesky engineering problem they had to work on. But then when that got canceled, they could do science on it. Yeah. And so they had this instrument. Now, Dickie was building one for himself over Princeton because he knew what to look for. Pensy S. and Wilson, they already had it. But they didn't know what to look for. They weren't looking for the cosmic microwave background. They didn't know what existed. It wasn't on their radar, so to speak, at all. They were just trying to build a sensitive instrument.
Starting point is 00:46:49 so they could listen to the sky. And, you know, they're great engineers and they built this really awesome telescope. If you look at pictures of it, it looks kind of funny. It doesn't look like a telescope you see often because it's only part of a parabola. It looks sort of like a big shovel, like a big scoop, because it's only a little sliver of a parabola because they wanted to be really careful and only pointed towards the sky. So it's like really well shielded from the ground and just gathers a bit of the radio waves from the sky. Now, did they set out to look for this cosmic microwave background?
Starting point is 00:47:19 or were they, you know, hoping to look at stars and black holes and things like that? They were not looking for this at all. They had no idea this thing existed as a concept. They had no idea that it was possible to see it. One of them was interested in, like, finding big clouds of hydrogen that were glowing. So they wanted to look for other stuff. But they were really good engineers and builders. And so they built this thing and they cooled it really, really cold.
Starting point is 00:47:43 Because what you want to do for your radio telescope is not absorb signals from, like, the telescope itself. Remember everything. glows, including your telescope, so they had to cool the whole telescope down to 4.2 degrees Kelvin so they didn't like swamp itself with its own radio signals. And then finally in July of 1965, while Dickie is over there building his own telescope, they turn it on and what they saw was a lot more noise than they expected. Because they had done such a good job of like cooling everything that they expected to hear this clean signal, but really they saw this like giant hiss in the radio wave spectrum. Yeah, they saw this giant hiss. And they pointed their telescope in different
Starting point is 00:48:22 directions. It's on a big wheel so you could like turn it this way and that way and the other way. And they just couldn't get rid of this hiss. And they like took apart all their electronics and replaced them. They like put another layer of shielding on everything. They cooled everything down a little bit. All this made like a very small amount of difference reducing the noise, a very small amount. But they couldn't get rid of this hiss. I see they were trying to get rid of the sign signal. But they did because they didn't know it was a sign signal. Yeah, exactly. They thought it was just noise that was going to interfere with their science.
Starting point is 00:48:52 And at one point, they found a bunch of pigeons that were nesting in their telescope. And they had covered part of the electronics with pigeon poop, or as they called it in their paper, white poultry dialectic material. And they cleaned all that off, but it didn't help anything. And so they were very disappointed. You know, at the time, Wilson says, this was a huge disappointment for us scientifically. And they spent like a year plunking away at this thing, trying to get rid of this noise. They had no idea what they were looking at. Well, in a way, they were right, you know, like if they were trying to get, you know, radio waves signals from a cloud of hydrogen somewhere, this is sort of noise that gets in the way, right?
Starting point is 00:49:29 Like, the universe just has this noise. They just didn't know it was a feature of the universe. Absolutely. You know, one man's noise is another woman's signal. It's another woman's Nobel Prize. And we have that in particle physics all the time. We were looking for the top quark. And now the top quark is an obstacle in finding other particles.
Starting point is 00:49:46 We wish we could like turn it off and get it out of the way so we could see other stuff. And so yeah, it's very subjective. All right. So then they thought they had some sort of error or some sort of equipment failure for over a year. And then how did they realize that this was something of interest? So Penzias, one of the guys who built this telescope, happened to run into one of his friends, Bernard Berkey, on an airplane, who told him that Dickie over Princeton was looking for this exact thing. So Penzias is like complaining about how we have this hiss in our telescope.
Starting point is 00:50:15 but my gosh, we don't understand it. And he says, you should talk to these guys at Princeton because I think they know what you found. Oh, wow. No kidding. On an airplane. On an airplane, just like by chance. And I'm guessing this is, you know, the 60s. So they were, you know, wearing ties, drinking cocktails.
Starting point is 00:50:31 Smoking. Yeah. Smoking in the plane, right? Over the loud propeller noises. Yeah. So Pensias calls up Dickie at Princeton and says, I heard about this thing you're predicting. Dickie sends them a paper written by his student, John Peebles, predicting this noise and explaining exactly what it should look like. And Penzias is like, wow, this is exactly what we are seeing in our telescope right now.
Starting point is 00:50:55 They had no idea. You know, what does it mean what it looks like? Should it have a specific like signature when you look at the signal in the frequency spectrum or should it have this particular shape to it? Or what is that like, how would you recognize it? Yeah, it looks like what we call black body radiation. So as we said earlier, everything in the universe that has a temperature glows. And it glows at a specific frequency, but not at only one frequency. It tends to peak at a frequency and then have a particular shape.
Starting point is 00:51:22 So at one frequency, you'll have the highest intensity of radiation. And then at the nearby frequencies, it'll sort of fall off in a very characteristic pattern that we call a black body spectrum. And so what they saw was the frequency of something at 2.7 degrees Kelvin glowing with black body radiation. And so it wasn't just like, oh, we saw a bunch of photons of this one number. Like, they saw the whole shape. You know, it's like if you saw a mountain of a very specific shape and somebody predicted seeing a mountain of exactly that shape, you'd be like, okay, you've understood how that mountain came to be. Because black body radiation, I think it doesn't just look like a bell curve, like a random noise curve. It actually has kind of a shape to it, right?
Starting point is 00:52:02 Yeah, it has a shape. It's asymmetric around the peak. So it's very characteristic. All right. So then Dickie's like, uh-oh. Like, I'm building this telescope, but these guys. guys already have it and we've been scooped. Yeah, exactly.
Starting point is 00:52:13 This is a famous story where Dickie gets off the phone from talking with Penzius and says, boys, we've been scooped. And that's really kind of a bummer for Dickie because he's the one who had this idea to look for it and started building his telescope. Like, that was really the ingenuity. And Penzias and Wilson just sort of like stumbled across it, had no idea what they had found until Dickie told them. That's what you get for answering the phone, Daniel.
Starting point is 00:52:35 That's why I never answer my phone. It could be somebody trying to scoop. So then they worked together. Everyone was a very good science citizen at that point. And Dickie explained to them what they were looking for and they all agreed to publish together. So Dickie and his crew published a paper saying, We predict that if you looked in the sky at this frequency,
Starting point is 00:52:57 you could see the afterglow of remnants from the Big Bang and it would look just like this. And you can do it and it'll be very interesting. And then in the same journal, the next paper is Penzius and Wilson saying, by the way, we've looked in the sky and we see this weird glow. We think it might be explained by the previous paper you just read by Dickie and his group. Interesting.
Starting point is 00:53:16 It was a two-part series. It was a two-part series. And this is nice, you know, when scientists who are working on something and realize they're sort of in competition or in working in parallel, they decide to publish together rather than like have some crazy race to who gets their paper in one minute before. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So then, because I guess Dickie didn't have his telescope ready. It's not like he could have just like jumped in.
Starting point is 00:53:37 and found the signal, he was just still ways away from having a functioning telescope. Yeah, he had been scooped, right? And just by chance, if Penzius and Wilson had waited another year or something, then Dickie could have had the idea and the data. But he didn't. And Penzias and Wilson went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1978 for this observation. Wow. And also Peoples got it too, right?
Starting point is 00:53:59 Peoples who originally had this idea and wrote the paper. He won the Nobel Prize in 2019 for like other contributions to cosmic microwave background theory, but Dickie in the end never won a Nobel Prize. I see. So back then, it went to the people who discovered it, not the people who predicted that it would be there. Yeah, because if you look back in history, it turns out that other people had already predicted it, right? People in the 40s had the idea that this would be there. And there was this other Russian group, which in the early 60s had also published a paper saying, by the way, we might be able to see this, people should go look for it. So that was
Starting point is 00:54:33 an idea which was sort of old and bubbling up around the world at the same time. And maybe by 1978, a lot of those people had died or something, right? You couldn't give them the Nobel Prize for it. That's true. You can't give the Nobel Prize to somebody if they've already died. All right. So that's how we humans discovered the cosmic microwave background. And it's something that's pretty significant, right?
Starting point is 00:54:53 It tells us a lot about the conditions for the early universe, about the composition of the universe. It confirms things like dark matter, dark energy. I mean, there's a lot in that signal. Yeah. Hawking says it's the greatest discovery of the center. if not of all time. And the reason is that it is really very, very rich, like how the cosmic microwave background looks
Starting point is 00:55:16 and specifically how it's not exactly smooth but has these little ripples in it tells us a lot about how that early universe plasma was operating, what it was doing. And like ripples in that plasma are sensitive to things like is the dark matter fraction of the universe 20% or 5% because it changes how that matter sort of sloshes back and forth if the dark matter is interacting or not.
Starting point is 00:55:38 So as you say, we can fit a lot of the parameters of the universe, a lot of the questions about what the universe is made out of and how it came to be come from understanding that in great detail. And years later, people launched a satellite to measure the cosmic microwave background radiation very precisely that was called the Kobe satellite. And then that won a Nobel Prize. So it's like a very rich area of research.
Starting point is 00:56:00 Right. There's not just a lot of information in it, but it also kind of basically confirms our, theories about the early universe, right? Like it's like perfect evidence for all these theories about the Big Bang and inflation and, you know, what was happening in those early few seconds. Yeah, it definitely confirms the Big Bang, right? It tells us that the steady state theory just doesn't work because the universe was once
Starting point is 00:56:23 much more dense and hot and crazy. So it rules out the steady state theory and confirms the Big Bang. It doesn't exactly confirm inflation precisely. There are some predictions for like weird little wiggles in the CMB we might be able to see that would confirm inflation. And several years ago, there was an experiment called Bicep 2 that thought they had seen that, but it turned out they were wrong. But in the future, there's a lot more we can learn about the universe, whether inflation was right.
Starting point is 00:56:47 Is it the right theory of what caused the Big Bang in the very, very early universe? We still don't know. But we hope that there's more layers of information in the CMB that will one day reveal even more about the early universe and how it all came to be. Yeah, there might still be more noble prices in there. Yeah, there might be information in that data right now, which you could download onto your laptop and if you knew how to interpret
Starting point is 00:57:08 could win you a Nobel Prize. Sometimes everything you need is right in front of you. Or I guess the danger is you could download it, have it on your computer and then not discover something. And then in the future, some physicists in a podcast saying,
Starting point is 00:57:22 see that person had that data in his or her laptop and didn't see it. So better to just not download it. Better to just ignore it and go about your day. Or just don't answer the phone. I'll never hear about how you were scooped. You'll have an easier life. All right. Well, that is how we discover, one of the greatest discoveries of human history, apparently.
Starting point is 00:57:40 Although I would argue that, you know, that bowl of oatmeal I had this morning was a pretty good discovery as well. I think brown sugar on oatmeal, that was a pretty big discovery. Oh, no thanks. Who came up with that? No thanks. No thanks. Oh, you're a purest, huh? That's a level too far. Oh, right. That's for the future. All right. Well, we hope you enjoy that story. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.
Starting point is 00:58:05 Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the Irish.
Starting point is 00:59:05 Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy?
Starting point is 00:59:35 That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazacios, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition?
Starting point is 00:59:57 No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending With a little bit of chisement and a whole lot of laughs And of course, the great bevras you've come to expect
Starting point is 01:00:12 Listen to the new season of Dacus Come Again On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast This is an IHeart podcast This is an IHeart podcast

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