

Robert Wilson jpg.JPG

Former Bell Labs physicist Robert Wilson stands in front of the 20-foot horn antenna in Holmdel from which he and Arno Penzias first recorded the cosmic microwave background, although they didn't realize it at the time.

(John Munson/The Star-Ledger)

For thousands of years humans have contemplated the heavens — and heard music. Cosmologists have claimed the planets pluck notes on celestial strings, the Earth spins in the key of G and the universe spans three octaves. Pythagoras, Plato and Pliny all believed the universe sang to them.

And in a way, so does Robert Wilson. In fact, he is happy to play the tune for you — all four minutes and 17 seconds of it. Call it the Beginning of Time.

Smiling, Wilson fishes in his pocket for his cellphone, fiddles with the keys, presses play and the recording begins: "SHSHSHSHSHSHSH …"

A hiss, like the static on a car radio between stations, fills the room. There are no dulcet tones, no euphonious chords. This clearly is not music. But you’d have a hard time convincing Wilson otherwise. The hiss is the soulful song of the first hot breath of creation when the universe was born 13.8 billion years ago. It is the echo of the Big Bang now cooled to a raspy whisper. And it is this "noise" that won Robert Woodrow Wilson and his Bell Labs colleague Arno Penzias the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978.

Fifty years ago, on May 20, 1964, Wilson and Penzias made the first written record of the Cosmic Microwave Background. That discovery, which many scientists consider the most important of the 20th century, eventually confirmed the universe is finite — that it had a beginning.

"It’s impossible to overstate the importance of (their) discovery," said Mark Kamionkowski, professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. "The CMB has turned out to be a Rosetta Stone on which all the information we have about the origin of our universe is transcribed. Cosmology would still be in the Stone Age if it weren’t for the CMB."

Wilson and Penzias, the two scientists who worked for decades to discover the "fossil" photons from which the stars, planets and all other celestial objects were born, will reunite on Tuesday at Alcatel-Lucent (formerly Bell Labs) in Holmdel, where they made history.

"I consider myself so lucky," said the 78-year-old Wilson, who still lives just two miles from his old office.

Penzias, 81, could not be reached for an interview.

In 1964, they were simply confused by the hiss coming from their radio antenna. The sound was indeed monumental, but it would take a long time for them to realize why.

The two young Ph.D.s, who had been hired by Bell Labs within a couple of years of each other, expressed interest in working together in the nascent field of radio astronomy. As luck would have it, just a few hundred feet from their offices sat an unused 20-foot horn reflector antenna.

Right place, right time

Planted atop a hill behind the former Bell Labs research facility, the horn antenna was built in 1959 to help carry out communications tests with Echo, a giant plastic balloon launched into low earth orbit by NASA in August 1960. Project Echo was an experiment in triangulation and the balloon was meant to act as a reflector for sending radio signals between two distant points on the globe. In 1961, with the dispatch of the far more sophisticated Telstar satellite, the reflector antenna was no longer needed, which meant it was free for Wilson and Penzias to use in their radio astronomy experiments.

"Our first project was to measure the brightness of the brightest star in (the constellation) Cassiopeia, Cas A," said Wilson, referring to the supernova remnant.

Radio astronomers use temperature to measure signals, and by hooking an antenna to an audio amplifier they could turn those thermal signals into audio ones. Wilson and Penzias estimated that if they pointed the horn antenna in the general direction of the constellation and used a calibrating instrument called a "cold load" to subtract extraneous noise the signal received would be weaker. However, the receiver picked up a loud, persistent hiss that was stronger.

"We knew we had a problem right away," Wilson said. "We saw that the antenna had almost twice as much ‘noise’ as it was supposed to have."

Neither man was steeped in astronomy. Wilson took exactly one astronomy course as a graduate student in physics at Cal Tech and that was from Fred Hoyle, the Steady State theorist who mockingly coined the term "Big Bang."

If the two scientists’ focus went only so far as the Milky Way, it was understandable that they thought the hiss must originate from something closer to home. Perhaps it was coming from New York City, 45 miles to the north?

Wilson and Penzias pointed the horn toward Manhattan.

Not there.

Maybe it had to do with structural imperfections in the seams of the antenna? Wilson and Penzias covered the likely culprits with aluminum tape.

It wasn’t the seams.

What about that high altitude nuclear bomb test over the Pacific a few years back? Penzias remembered it as the northern lights on steroids. Was the hiss from those radiation signals?

Couldn’t be. The radiation signals would have decayed and decreased over time. The hiss did not.

In a last-ditch effort, the two men booted a pair of pigeons that had taken up residence in the small end of the horn, then propped a ladder against the antenna and climbed in, scrubbing it to remove all traces of pigeon droppings.

The hiss continued.

Confounded, the two scientists now believed that the source of the excess radio noise must be coming from outside the Milky Way. But where?

Unbeknownst to either man, 40 miles away at Princeton University several physicists were halfway through building their own horn antenna to search for the cosmic microwave background, the energy released by the Big Bang. Modern cosmology was in its infancy in the mid-1960s and the nature of the universe — whether it had a beginning (the Big Bang) or always existed (the Steady State) — was still in doubt.

Through a game of scientific "telephone," Penzias, who now lives in California, heard about the Princeton team’s project. In what has now become the most famous telephonic conversation in the history of physics, Penzias called the Princeton group’s leader, Robert Dicke, who at that moment was having his weekly brown bag lunch in his office with his radio astronomy team.


The young team members continued to talk in the background while Dicke spoke with Penzias. According to historical accounts by several of those present, the group grew quiet when they heard Dicke repeating certain phrases, such as "horn antenna" and "cold load." At the end of the conversation, Dicke hung up and turned to his team and said, "Boys, we’ve been scooped."

Wilson and Penzias freely admit they didn’t realize the significance of their discovery, even after it was confirmed by the Princeton team, for quite some time. The article they wrote about their experiment, "A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Mc/s" published in the Astrophysical Journal a year later, is less than 800 words and never mentions the words "universe," "cosmic," or "Big Bang." Only in the last line of an addendum to their article do they even hint at the significance, when referring to their elimination of "the possibility that the radiation we observe is due to radio sources of types known to exist …"

The sense of importance about discovering the CMB didn’t hit Wilson, in fact, until he saw a headline on the front page of the New York Times on May 21, 1965, a year and a day after Wilson and Penzias made their first measurement: "Signals Imply a ‘Big Bang’ Universe."

Times science writer Walter Sullivan had a mole at the Astrophysical Journal and if Wilson and Penzias didn’t quite get the significance of their discovery, the astrophysicists at the journal apparently did.

"Even at the announcement of the detection of the CMB 50 years ago, it was clear to all but the opponents of the Big Bang, who had yet to die off, that the discovery sounded the death-knell to rival theories," said Harvard physics professor Tony Rothman.


It still took another 14 years before the two Bell Labs scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. They were in the right place at the right time in 1964, thanks to a 20-foot horn reflector that started as an earthly communications experiment.

"While investigating a real-world challenge with satellite communications," said Marcus Weldon, president of Bell Labs and CTO of Alcatel-Lucent. "(They) happened upon a discovery that would change our understanding of the universe."

Although he still does consulting work with the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Wilson’s scientific mind, today, is inclined more toward projects closer to home. He and his wife, Betsy, are ardent about sustainability and carbon off-sets. He drives a Prius and installed solar panels on the roof of their house.

During Hurricane Sandy the power to their house was out for 11 days. Wilson ingeniously used his Prius as an electric generator. Even better than the $275 electrical bill for all of last year was the fact that he only needed 8 gallons of gas to keep the lights on and the refrigerator running after Sandy.

Though the discovery of the CMB assured Wilson a place in the pantheon of scientific pioneers, he says he was a bit sorry to see the Steady State theory go.

"I kind of liked the idea of a universe that always was and always will be," he said.

The universe, instead, will likely end, say physicists, but for now at least the light of the Big Bang continues to hum around us. All you need to do is listen.