From the book 'A Short History Of Nearly Everything´ by Bill Bryson. Edited slightly by Adam Smiley.
The universe is a bloody amazing thing.If you wanted to create one you would have to collect everything, every atom, particle and just everything, from here to the edge of creation. Then squeeze it into a spot so compact that it has no dimensions at all, it´s known as a singularity.Either way get ready for a big bang, naturally you´ll want to retreat to a safe distance to witness the spectacle.But, unfortunately there is no where to retreat to, because outside the singularity there is nowhere.When the universe begins to expand it won´t be expanding to fill a larger emptiness.The only space that exists, is space that exists is the space it creates as it goes.When you visualize a singularity, you imagine a dot hanging in a vast darknes.But, you´d be wrong.The Singularity has no around it, no space for it to occupy, no where for it to be, we can´t even ask how long it has been there. Whether it just popped into existence or whether it had been there forever.Time dosen´t exist.There is no past for it to emerge from, so, from nothing, our universe begins.
In a single blinding pulse, to swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions. Space beyond conception. The first lively second that creates gravity amd all the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is ten billion miles across and growing fast. Theres about ten billion degrees of heat, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements - principally, hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium. In three minutes ninety eight percent of all the matter there is and ever will be is created. We have a universe. It´s a place of the most wonderous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too, and it was all done in the time it takes to make a sandwich.
When this moment is a matter of some debate. Cosmologists have long argued over whether it was ten billion years ago, double that or somewhere inbetween. The consensus seems to be heading for a figure of about 13.7 billion years. But, these things, as you can imagine, are ludicrously difficult to calculate. All that can be really said is that at some undeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t=0. We were on our way. There is of course a great deal, and much of what we think we know we haven´t known, or thought we´ve known, for long. Even the notioin of the Big Bang is quite a recent one. The idea had been kicking around since the 1920´s when georges lemaitare, a Belgian Priest-scholar, first tentavely proposed it, but, it didn´t really become an active notion cosmology until the mid 1960´s when two young radio astronomers made an extroadinary discovery. Their names were Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. In 1965, they were trying to make use of a large communications antenna at Holmdel, New Jersey, but they were troubled by a consistent background noise - a steamy hiss that made experimental work impossible. The noise was unrelenting and unfocused. It came from every position in the sky, day and night, through every season. For a year the young astronomers did everything they could think of to get rid of the noise . They tested every electrical system, rebuilt instruments, checked circuits, wrigglrd wires, dusted plugs, climbed into the dish and covered every seam and rivet with duct tape. Climbed back into the dish with scrubbing brushes and brooms and carefully cleaned of ,what they called in a later paper, ´a white dialectric substance,´or what is more commonly known as bird shit. Nothing they tried worked.
Unknown to them just 50km, just over 32 miles away, at princeton university a team of scientists, led by Robert Dicke, were working on how to find what they were trying so desprately to get rid off. The princeton team were pursuing an idea that had been suggested in the 1940´s by Russian-born astrophycisist George Gamow: that if you looked deep enough into space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Gamow calculated that by the time the light had crossed the vastness of the cosmos it would reach earth in the form of micro waves. In a more recent paper he had even suggested an instrument that could do the job: The Bell antenna at Holdmel, New Jersey. Unfortunately neither Penzias and wilson or any of the princeton scientists had read Gamow´s paper.
The noise Penzias and Wilson was hearing, was of course, the noise that Gamow had pestulated.
