After cleaning out the dielectric substance, the interference dropped a little bit, but a leftover signal remained. The paper they published in 1965 was all about this unaccountable “excess antenna temperature.”†† Meanwhile, a team of physicists at Princeton, led by Robert Dicke, was building a detector specifically to find the CMB. But they didn’t have the resources of Bell Labs, so their work went a little slower. And the moment Dicke and his colleagues heard about Penzias and Wilson’s work, the Princeton team knew exactly what the observed excess antenna temperature was. Everything fit:
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