devonknowsall asked:
What's your favourite story about how something scientific got discovered?
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quantanaut answered:
It would probably have to be how the Cosmic Microwave Background was discovered. For those who don’t know, the CMB is the “afterglow” of the big bang. In 1964, Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias were experimenting with a radio antenna, and they kept getting a strange background noise from all parts of the sky. Naturally, they thought the problem was with their own antenna, and at first blamed it on pigeon droppings. But after thoroughly cleaning it out, the noise remained. They later found they had accidentally stumbled upon the CMB, the oldest light in the universe.
I love this story, because it means that the ancient light left over from the big bang, the earliest picture of our universe, and indeed one of the most important discoveries ever made in cosmology, was initially mistaken for bird poo.
