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Robert Dicke: Reading the Cosmic Record
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15428 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1996 |
2,964 Words |
| Author
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Kym Kuenning
Kym Kuenning is a science/health writer based in Cincinnati.
The author wishes to thank Ed Schneider for his help in
researching this article. |
When two radio astronomers from Bell Laboratories discovered an unexplainable static in their radio antenna in 1965, they went to Princeton University physicist Robert Dicke for some insight as to what the static signified. At that time a team led by Dicke was adapting one of his inventions, the microwave radiometer, to look for the very static that the Bell astronomers had discovered.
It was Dicke who explained to the astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, that they had discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation that was predicted by an important cosmological model, the big bang model. Both groups submitted papers on the subject to The Astrophysical Journal. Dicke's group presented the theoretical explanation of the radiation; Wilson and Penzias described its observation.
Thirteen years later, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Penzias and Wilson for their discovery. The discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation provided decisive support for the big bang model of cosmic origins, which has become the dominant paradigm in cosmology today.
In 1978 a postdoctoral physicist who heard Dicke's Einstein memorial lecture at Cornell University accepted Dicke's challenge to try to devise a theory that would show how the Universe could have developed from a big bang to its present average density. That young physicist, Alan Guth, developed the "inflationary" model of cosmic expansion that has gained wide acceptance as a key concept for understanding the development of the early Universe.
An adept experimentalist, Dicke honed his
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