Unknown to them, just 50 kilometres away at Princeton University a team of scientists led by Robert Dicke was working on how to find the very thing they were trying so diligently to get rid of. The Princeton researchers were pursuing an idea that had been suggested in the 1940s by the Russian-born astrophysicist George Gamow: that if you looked deep enough into space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Gamow calculated that by the time it had crossed the vastness of the cosmos the radiation would reach Earth in the form of microwaves. In a more recent
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