How It All Started: The Best-Ever Observations of the Origins of the Universe Hint at the Way It Will End

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To understand the latest discovery about how the universe began, it helps to go back to the saga of the pigeon poop. In 1964, two radio astronomers at Bell Labs were working on an antenna for the new Telstar communications-satellite system. But no matter where Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson pointed the horn-shaped antenna, it picked up a hiss. Some kibitzers suspected that bird droppings in the antenna might be responsible, so the astronomers shoveled out the guano and shooed away the birds. Still the hiss. Scientists at Princeton University eventually traced the sound to a somewhat more distant source: the hiss was radiation left over from the cosmic fireball in which the universe was created. This "cosmic microwave background radiation" has cooled off in the 13 billion to 16 billion years since the big bang, but it still fills the heavens like a faint whisper of creation. It provides such a good …