The two groups each published papers in the Astrophysical Journal in 1965. Simultaneously, a Princeton University team led by Robert Dicke was trying to find evidence of the CMB and realized that Penzias and Wilson had stumbled upon it with their strange observations. At first, they thought the anomaly was due to pigeons trying to roost inside the antenna and their waste, but they cleaned up the mess and killed the pigeons and the anomaly persisted. This accidental discovery happened when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, both of Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, were building a radio receiver in 1965 and picked up higher-than-expected temperatures, according to a NASA article. (Image credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration, CC BY-SA) This information helps astronomers determine the age of the universe. Related: Peering back to the Big Bang & early universeĪ map of the background radiation left over from the Big Bang, taken by the ESA's Planck spacecraft, captured the oldest light in the universe. It was first predicted by Ralph Alpher and other scientists in 1948 but was found only by accident almost 20 years later. Sometimes called the "afterglow" of the Big Bang, this light is more properly known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This allowed light to finally shine through, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Over time, however, these free electrons met up with nuclei and created neutral atoms or atoms with equal positive and negative electric charges. "The free electrons would have caused light (photons) to scatter the way sunlight scatters from the water droplets in clouds," NASA stated. This early "soup" would have been impossible to actually see because it couldn't hold visible light. The cosmos now contained a vast array of fundamental particles such as neutrons, electrons and protons - the raw materials that would become the building blocks for everything that exists today. This all happened within just the first second after the universe began, when the temperature of everything was still insanely hot, at about 10 billion degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 billion Celsius), according to NASA. In short: the uncertainty principle describes a trade-off between two complementary properties, such as speed and position.Hubble images show the far-distant galaxy GN-z11 as it appeared shortly after the Big Bang. Conversely, if we wanted to know the exact position of one peak of a wave, we would have to monitor just one small section of the wave and would lose information about its speed. The location is spread out among the peaks and troughs. The more peaks and troughs that pass by, the more accurately we would know the speed of a wave-but the less we would be able to say about its position. To measure its speed, we would monitor the passage of multiple peaks and troughs. To understand the general idea behind the uncertainty principle, think of a ripple in a pond. Quantum objects are special because they all exhibit wave-like properties by the very nature of quantum theory. Though the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is famously known in quantum physics, a similar uncertainty principle also applies to problems in pure math and classical physics-basically, any object with wave-like properties will be affected by this principle. In other words, if we could shrink a tortoise down to the size of an electron, we would only be able to precisely calculate its speed or its location, not both at the same time. Formulated by the German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg in 1927, the uncertainty principle states that we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy the more we nail down the particle's position, the less we know about its speed and vice versa.
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