Pigeons and the origin of the universe
From inside the horn-shaped antenna located at Bell Labs in Crawford Hill, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson solved a puzzling and persistent mystery.
After many painstaking hours of suppressing stray radio waves, cooling the apparatus down and eliminating all possible sources of noise they decided to look inside the antenna. Finally, there, it seemed, was the solution.
Birds.
Pigeons.
Well, pigeons and their poop.
The two astronomers had found the source of the mysterious humming that seemed to permeate all their measurements of the sky. A few humble pigeons nestled inside their antenna.
With a bit of work, the pigeons were evicted and the droppings were cleaned out. At last, the astronomers could get back to work experimenting with their supersensitive receiver.
Yet, still, there was a steady, yet surprisingly intense rumble. One that seemed to spread across the sky, and that persisted throughout the day, despite the newly cleaned interior.
If it wasn’t the birds, then what was it?
In the middle of the 1900s, there were two competing theories about the origin of the universe. One put the universe as an unchanging, eternal object that had existed and would continue to exist…
