Re: [BVARC] An antenna to celebrate

[s.c.flowers via BVARC]

Hey Rick, Yes it was quite a story.  The researchers at Bell labs tried everything to get rid of the noise even aiming the antenna to different parts of the sky but couldn’t loose the noise.  They thought it was the pigeons & their droppings but after cleaning the horn thoroughly and still seeing the noise signal they concluded it wasn’t. Finally they phoned Dr Phillip (?) Dicke at Princeton physics, I believe, asking for suggestions and the story says that after he hung up the phone, he said to his grad students: “well boys, we’ve been scooped”.  Dr Dicke was looking for that exact signal from the Big Bang echo or the “cosmic microwave background radiation”.  They got the Nobel prize, he didn’t. The echo from the Big Bang now attenuated to the point of 3 degrees Kelvin or microwave frequencies was the signal they’d stumbled upon. Thanks for the physics story! Regards, Stephen (W2WF) On Sep 4, 2023, at 09:36, Rick Hiller via BVARC <bvarc@bvarc.org> wrote: Courtesy of Bill, K2TNO….. link at the end. Today's New York Times has an article about a microwave horn antenna built by Bell Labs in the early 1960's. After they finished the original purpose, their scientists observed a curious, persistent receiver noise regardless of where they pointed the antenna.  That noise turned out NOT to be instrument error, but instead was the first detection of the "Cosmic Background Radiation," the leftover energy arising from the "Big Bang"-- 13.8 billion years ! The antenna site was visited by the reporter, guided by Dr. Robert Wilson, age 87, who still lives nearby. He and his collaborator received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their finding. This link is to the article entitled "Back to New Jersey, Where the Universe Began." ________________________________________________ Brazos Valley Amateur Radio Club BVARC mailing list BVARC@bvarc.org http://mail.bvarc.org/mailman/listinfo/bvarc_bvarc.org Publicly available archives are available here: https://www.mail-archive.com/bvarc@bvarc.org/

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