Fifty years ago, the universe's genesis story was confirmed – by accident. Cosmologist Jim Peebles recalls the struggle to convince doubters
FIFTY years ago, on 20 May 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, recorded their first astronomical measurements of microwave radiation from the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. They were using a horn antenna system first assembled in 1959 to study microwave communication – an early step in the development of today's cellphone technology.
The antenna had been carefully engineered to reject radiation from the ground. But once all known sources in the sky had been painstakingly accounted for, Penzias and Wilson were left with the same problem that had been bothering Bell's engineers. The microwave sky seemed to be about ...
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