A few miles away, physicist Robert Dicke and his students at Princeton University are beginning to examine the conditions under which the universe began, if it really did begin. They concluded that such a Big Bang must be hot enough to sustain thermonuclear reactions of millions of degrees to synthesize heavy elements from primordial hydrogen.
They realized that the energy must still be there. But as the universe expanded, they calculated, the primordial fireball would cool to several Kelvins above absolute zero, so that cosmic radiation would enter the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. (The research group did not know, or had forgotten, that the same calculations had been done 20 years earlier by physicist George Gamow and his collaborators at George Washington University.)
Dr. Dicke tasked two graduate students, the talented instrumentalist David Wilkinson and theorist James Peebles, with trying to detect these microwaves. As the group was meeting to decide on a plan of action, the phone rang. It was Dr. Penzias. Dr. Dicke hung up and turned to his team. “Guys, we just got scooped,” he said.
The two teams met and wrote two papers, which were published consecutively in the journal Physical Review Letters. A group at Bell Labs described radio noise, and a group at Princeton suggested it could be residual heat from the Big Bang. Wilson said.
“I think both Arnold and I wanted to keep open the idea that there were other sources of this noise,” he added. “But of course it didn’t work out.”