Bear's Journey

The Cosmic Microwave Background

In the year 1965 two scientists named Penzias and Wilson were working with a large radio antenna. They kept hearing a faint noise that came from every direction in the sky. At first they thought it might be caused by pigeons sitting on the equipment. They cleaned the antenna yet the noise did not go away. The signal was real. It was everywhere, no matter where they pointed their antenna.

This faint signal is now called the Cosmic Microwave Background. The name sounds mysterious, but what it really means is that the universe is filled with a steady form of radiated energy. This energy is too weak for our senses to detect directly, but the antenna could pick it up. It arrived equally from every direction, like a quiet hum that seemed to fill the whole sky. This is the fact that was discovered.

The experts decided that this energy was the leftover glow of an ancient explosion called the Big Bang. They claimed it was the echo of the first light in the universe, still wandering through space after billions of years. This story has been repeated so often that many people forget the simple truth of the discovery. The truth is only that a faint signal was measured. The rest is a story told around the signal.

The existence of this background energy does not prove the Big Bang. It only proves that some energy is present. The true cause of this signal is still unknown. It could be related to universal fields such as gravity. It could be related to interactions of energy that we do not yet understand. The simplest possbility suggests that the signal could be a measurement of the instrument's own feedback or interference with itself. What is certain is that the discovery proves only that a signal was measured. The claim that it is the voice of an ancient explosion is the fantasy of calculating minds who never learned how to think.