Sunday, March 26, 2006

Cosmology and Microwave Glow

From BACK TO THE BEGINNING one hour program on SBS:
Hosted by astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, this program outlines the major discoveries in the science of cosmology, beginning with the most important of them all - the discovery of the microwave glow and the Big Bang in the mid 1960s. Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias were looking for the source of the annoying hiss that interfered with early satellite communications on behalf of the phone company AT&T (who built Telstar, the first satellite to transmit transatlantic phone calls). They picked up a faint microwave signal, apparently coming from empty space. This gave substance to a radical theory explored by a team of Princeton University scientists led by Bob Dickie that the entire universe had actually been born in a tremendous burst of energy billions of years ago - the Big Bang. The microwave glow was the left-over heat from the Big Bang. Further studies showed that there were concentrations of matter in the microwave glow, which confirmed that the universe did indeed evolve from the cataclysm of the Big Bang and today, with advances in technology, scientists can map out the cosmos as it was in its infancy 380,000 years ago.