Originally shared by Ethan Siegel
“1960s — After some 20 years of debate, the key observation that would decide the history of the Universe was uncovered: the discovery of the predicted leftover glow from the Big Bang, or the Cosmic Microwave Background. This uniform, 2.725 K radiation was discovered in 1965 by Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson, neither of whom realized what they had discovered at first. Yet over time, the full, blackbody spectrum of this radiation and even its fluctuations were measured, showing us that the Universe started with a “bang” after all.”
Considering what we know about our Universe today, it’s hard to believe that just a century ago, Einstein’s General Relativity was very much untested and uncertain, and we hadn’t even realized that anything at all lie outside our own Milky Way. But over the past ten decades, ten great discoveries have taken place to give us the Universe we understand today.
Complete with the Big Bang, dark matter, dark energy, cosmic inflation and so much more, one can’t help but wonder what the current decade — or even the coming decades — might hold to open up our understanding of the Universe even further.