The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

by Richard Panek

A subsequent search of the literature turned up other predictions and at least one previous detection. In 1948, the physicist George Gamow had written a Nature paper that predicted the existence of “the most ancient archeological document pertaining to the history of the universe.” He was wrong on the details but right on the general principle: The early universe had to be extremely hot to avoid combining all the hydrogen into heavier elements. That same year, the physicists (and sometime collaborators of Gamow’s) Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman published their calculation that “the temperature in the universe” should now be around 5 K, but astronomers at the time assured them that such a detection would be impossible with current technology. (In retrospect Wilson felt that they probably could have performed it with World War II-era technology, as long as they had properly connected the antenna to the cold load.) In a 1961 article in the Bell System Technical Journal, a Crawford Hill engineer wrote that the Echo antenna was picking up an excess of 3 K; but that reading fell within the margin of error, and the discrepancy wasn’t going to make a difference for his purposes anyway, so he ignored it. In 1964, Steady State champion Hoyle, working with fellow British astronomer Roger J. Tayler, investigated the oscillating-universe scenario and performed calculations similar to those of Alpher and Herman. Also in 1964, even as Penzias and Wilson were directing their antenna to ev...