wilson
esiegel | March 27, 2013"The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to -271.3°C, not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it." -Stephen Hawking
One of the most powerful predictions of the Big Bang -- the fact that our cold, star-and-galaxy-rich, slowly-expanding Universe came from a hot, dense, much more homogeneous state -- was the existence of a bath of leftover radiation that should be detectable, even today.
Image credit: Pearson / Addison Wesley, retrieved from Jill Bechtold.
Back when the…
esiegel | April 15, 2008I was doing a little research into the history of telescopes, and it was about a century ago that they finally realized how much more potential light-gathering power reflecting telescopes had as compared to the older refracting telescopes. On Mt. Wilson in California, astronomer George Ellery Hale and optician George Willis Ritchey (back then everybody was named George -- look it up!) were embarking on a program to build large reflecting telescopes as the wave-of-the-future of Astronomy.
But even before this telescope was operational, Hale and Ritchey were thinking of bigger and bigger…