Just for the record I want to point out that I have the chimp on ignore as a general principle and only respond to those parts of its comments that get quoted by others; even then I respond not to the chimp itself but for the benefit of others who may be interested. In that vein I submit the following history lesson:
The CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) is a prediction of the Big Bang Theory. Putting it extremely simply, the 'flash' of the Big Bang suffused the embryonic Universe with trapped photons, unable to move freely because of the insanely high temperatures. Later the temperature dropped sufficiently for the photons to escape their atomic prison and the Universe became transparent. Ralph Alpher, George Gamow and Robert Herman predicted that this early glow would still be detectable today, although the expansion of the Universe would mean that the light would be Doppler shifted far into the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum - in fact, into the microwave range. The prediction came first, then astronomers looked for it but their equipment wasn't sensitive enough to do the job.
Meanwhile two Bell Lab technicians, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, picked up what they thought was microwave interference wiith their expensive corporate-funded microwave detector (they knew nothing of the Big Bang Theory and its predictions at this point). They went to exhaustive lengths to eliminate every possible source of local interference - they removed a bird's nest from the detector horn, cleaned up birdshit, tried pointing the equipment in different directions; no matter what they tried they got the same results. In fact, they detected this microwave radiation even when they pointed their detector straight up at the sky, meaning that whatever the source was, it was emanating from beyond the Earth. To cut a long and fascinating story short, they eventually realised they had found the CMB which had been predicted earlier, published their work and were awarded the Nobel Prize.
The CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) is a prediction of the Big Bang Theory. Putting it extremely simply, the 'flash' of the Big Bang suffused the embryonic Universe with trapped photons, unable to move freely because of the insanely high temperatures. Later the temperature dropped sufficiently for the photons to escape their atomic prison and the Universe became transparent. Ralph Alpher, George Gamow and Robert Herman predicted that this early glow would still be detectable today, although the expansion of the Universe would mean that the light would be Doppler shifted far into the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum - in fact, into the microwave range. The prediction came first, then astronomers looked for it but their equipment wasn't sensitive enough to do the job.
Meanwhile two Bell Lab technicians, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, picked up what they thought was microwave interference wiith their expensive corporate-funded microwave detector (they knew nothing of the Big Bang Theory and its predictions at this point). They went to exhaustive lengths to eliminate every possible source of local interference - they removed a bird's nest from the detector horn, cleaned up birdshit, tried pointing the equipment in different directions; no matter what they tried they got the same results. In fact, they detected this microwave radiation even when they pointed their detector straight up at the sky, meaning that whatever the source was, it was emanating from beyond the Earth. To cut a long and fascinating story short, they eventually realised they had found the CMB which had been predicted earlier, published their work and were awarded the Nobel Prize.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
