Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

by Charles Seife

This cosmic background radiation was the afterglow of the big bang. It would give physicists the first direct evidence that the big bang was correct and that steady state was wrong. The Princeton scientists did not have long to wait before their prediction was confirmed. At Bell Labs in nearby Murray Hill, New Jersey, two engineers had been testing out sensitive microwave-detecting equipment. For all their tinkering, they could not get the equipment to work just right. There was a background hiss of microwave noise—like static on a radio program—that they could not get rid of. At first they thought that pigeons defecating in their antenna were to blame, but after chasing away the birds and cleaning out the droppings, the hiss remained. They tried everything they could think of to get rid of the noise, but nothing worked. Then when the engineers heard of the Princeton group’s work, they realized that they had found the cosmic background radiation. The noise wasn’t pigeon droppings. It was the scream of light from the big bang, stretched and distorted into a whisper’s hiss. (For their discovery the engineers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, got the Nobel Prize.