8:04 A.M., April 23, 1992, Ramada Renaissance Hotel- Techworld, Washington, D.C.: George Smoot, a tall, neatly bearded astrophysicist from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, California, wearing a suit on this exceptional day, stands ready to present the long-awaited results of an experiment aboard the Cosmic Background Explorer, a satellite known to everyone by the acronym COBE. Tomorrow his research team’s discovery will be a feature story in hundreds of newscasts and newspapers, and George Smoot will temporarily become the most famous scientist in the world.
Right now Smoot isn’t worried about the press--he’s worried about the reception he’ll get from his fellow researchers. Several groups have arrived at the meeting to discuss their own COBE experiments, and Smoot isn’t sure their results will support the announcement he is about to make. Why then is he rushing to announce a major discovery that might not pan out? Cold fusion, after all, is still a recent memory. But Smoot is confident his team’s results can stand on their own. He said as much to a group of researchers from MIT only a week and a half before going to Washington. The MIT guys said, ‘We disagree,’ Smoot recalls now. And I still said I’m ready to go. I really am betting my career on this.
Nearly a thousand people--technicians, programmers, engineers, and scientists--have helped make COBE work; some two dozen of them make up Smoot’s team, and each is all too aware that the whole scientific community eagerly awaits their results. Theories that touch on everything from particle physics to cosmology hang on these observations. Smoot’s boss sent him off to Washington with the advice You’d better be right.
The team Smoot heads is responsible for analyzing the data from one of COBE’s three instruments, the DMR (differential microwave radiometers). The DMR has been observing the heavens since November 1989, when COBE was launched into a near-polar orbit, 560 miles above Earth’s surface, to study the cosmic background radiation, the faint microwave glow that’s everywhere in the sky. It is radiation that no star nor any other known object could have produced. This radiation came directly from the act of creation itself--the Big Bang.
According to Big Bang theory, 15 billion years ago all matter in the universe--and all space, too--was crowded together in a state of near- infinite density. The explosion of that inconceivably dense point released a titanic amount of heat into the early universe and lit the cosmos with high-energy radiation. For hundreds of millennia the radiation was so intense that no particles could stay joined together in a single atom. But as the universe expanded, this brilliant glow became a pale shadow of its original self. Expansion diluted its energy, cooling the universe in much the same way that vapor from a spray can cools when released. The original radiation still fills the universe, but it fills a much larger universe than before: each cubic light-year now contains far less energy in the form of this cosmic glow than did a cubic centimeter long ago.
