NOVA - Official Website . How did the universe, our planet, how did we ourselves come to. How did the first sparks of life take hold here? Are we alone in the. Where did all the stars and galaxies come from? These questions are as. This search takes unexpected twists. Imagine meteors delivering Earth's oceans from outer space. Descend. into a toxic underworld where bizarre creatures hold clues to how life got its. And picture the view when the newborn moon, 2. Earth than today, loomed large in the night sky. This cosmic quest takes us. Big Bang itself and retraces the events. Coming up tonight: how did all begin? The. accidental discovery of the Big Bang leaves scientists with nagging questions. DAVID SPERGEL (Princeton University): .. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: So a furious race is on to solve the ultimate. ANTHONY READHEAD (California Institute of Technology): The spirit. Let's hope and pray. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: And as our new vision of the universe emerges. It seems that we are stardust. STAN WOOSLEY (University of California, Santa Cruz): Stars are. ROBERT KIRSHNER (Harvard University): You get carbon and nitrogen. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: Those elements are the building blocks of life. There are billions and billions of galaxies. The habitat for life. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: A scientific detective story takes you back to the. Microsoft is proud to sponsor NOVA. Sprint is proud to support NOVA. Additional funding is provided. NASA Office of Space Science, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to enhance. George D. Thank you. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: The grand dance of our universe is a breathtaking. Stars parade across the sky in lockstep, night after night. The. galaxies spin, vast cities of stars bound together to create stunningly elegant. Has the universe always been here? Did. it have a beginning? We came on a. field trip here, to the Hayden Planetarium. Looked a lot different then, but. More or less on the spot, I decided to become. Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American businessman, television producer, author, politician, and the Republican Party nominee for president in 2016. He is the chairman and president of The Trump Organization, which is the principal holding. I could barely pronounce the word. And over. that time, our understanding of the universe has been transformed again and. In its last version, the idea even had a name, the steady state. But that was really just an assumption, and like so much received. In 1. 96. 2, astronauts. America went space crazy. Telstar. was the first link in a truly global communications network. But there were a. AT& T engineers wondered if the problem might lie in. Telstar communicated with earth, using a form of energy called. They all work in pretty much the. No, I'm kind of busy now. Can, can you call back later? Let's talk later, but thanks for. Most familiar is visible light with. What makes one color different from the next is simply. And I can use this knob to tune one wavelength to the next. It has the shortest of all wavelengths. Moving to. longer and longer wavelengths, we pass from one color to the next, right on up. There ends visible light. Can't see infrared, but we feel it, we sense it as heat. Beyond. infrared, we find microwaves and then, the longest of them all, radio waves. Here is the Milky Way photographed in visible. And now it would lead to a phenomenal discovery. To test the instrument they pointed it at an. Aiming at nothing, they expected to find nothing. Instead. to their surprise, they picked up a faint microwave signal, apparently coming. They even climbed into the horn to clean up after a pair of. ROBERT WILSON (Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics): When. ARNO PENZIAS (New Enterprise Associates): Thirty- eight years ago. The Last Day of Her Life When Sandy Bem found out she had Alzheimer’s, she resolved that before the disease stole her mind, she would kill herself. The question was, when?
There had been a pair of pigeons living there. And that was clearly a possible. As a graduate student I did worse things. You probably. did too. There is one story about Bush's particular brand of certainty I am able to piece together and tell for the record. In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. This short quiz will show you. LGBT adoption is the adoption of children by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) persons. This may be in the form of a joint adoption by a same-sex couple, adoption by one partner of a same-sex couple of the other's. ARNO PENZIAS: Oh, yeah. Yeah, you just do what you have to do. You do. what you have to do every day. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: Nothing worked. The hiss was still there, and. ROBERT WILSON: We could, by then, rule out that it came from the horn. We were unaware of anything in the sky that should do it, and we. It was just. was sort of surreal. It didn't fit our idea of physics. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: But the microwave hiss, so perplexing to Penzias. Wilson, did fit a radical idea being explored by a group of physicists just. Princeton, New Jersey. Team. leader Bob Dicke believed that some of that energy should still be detectable. To test that hunch, Dicke asked a young. David Wilkinson to set up this miniature antenna in his spare. DAVID WILKINSON (Princeton University (d. We weren't in. any particular hurry because Bob Dicke's idea was so original. We weren't too. worried about somebody else getting there before we did. We went down to Arch. Street in Philadelphia and dug around in the World War II surplus shops to find. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: But before their instrument was up and running. Penzias and Wilson, who gave Dicke a call. DAVID WILKINSON: He hung up the phone, and I'll never forget exactly. These are his exact words. In the Big Bang our entire universe, all the matter. A. flash of light filled the cosmos. And as the universe expanded, that light. Until, now, that flash of light remains as a faint glow of. Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias. DAVID SPERGEL: Penzias and Wilson's discovery of the microwave. ANTHONY READHEAD: It suddenly made you realize that history was being. Here you were, and suddenly the universe, as understood by man, was. DAVID SPERGEL: All of a sudden you had data and you really tested a. You had a theory that said the universe started with this hot Big Bang. Penzias and Wilson saw was this leftover heat from the Big Bang. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: Their serendipitous discovery was so important it. Penzias and Wilson the Nobel Prize. ARNO PENZIAS: The actual ceremony in Stockholm was kind of a blur. I. never have quite gotten over the feeling of not being a grownup, that other. I don't think that ever. ROBERT WILSON: When the Nobel Prize was announced I think probably one. I thought about was, . Over the years I guess I've come to understand that the Nobel. Prize is given for discovering something, not for being the smartest person. So while there are much smarter people around, we did something. I feel comfortable with it now. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: Now that we know what to look for, it's not all. Big Bang. All you need to. Most of that. static comes from stray local radio waves hitting these rabbit ear antennas. Big Bang itself. According to the theory, the Big Bang made everything, all. In the modern universe, matter is. But the microwave glow Penzias and Wilson had seen showed no. And that's the problem, a big one. But if that were true, then the universe that evolved. Big Bang should be just as smooth, like this formless fog. So then. how did our universe come to be filled with clumps of stuff, galaxies, suns. Maybe it. contained some tiny seeds, little dense spots that gravity could shape into the. Cosmologists figured that those slightly denser. Big Bang, so they set out to find them. And we went down to a part in a. We went down to a part in ten thousand, it was. It was at this point that my colleagues at Cal Tech started. I was proving we weren't here. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: No lumps, no galaxies, no us; that's what every. Big Bang's microwave glow seemed to show. Either we just. didn't understand the Big Bang, or secrets remained hidden within the microwave. Finally astronomers wanted to settle the question. BENNETT (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center): As a. COBE team, we wondered all the time, would we detect this. We thought that, theoretically, it should be. For 3. 0 years people had thought that, too, and went out and made. So we didn't know for a fact whether we'd see. It was a, it was a crap shoot. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: NASA launched COBE in 1. It would spend two. Earth orbit, observing the microwave hiss, the energy of the Big. Bang, at hundreds of thousands of points in the sky. When it accumulated enough. COBE revealed this: a blotchy pattern that doesn't look very dramatic to. But to astronomers it was a revelation. CHARLES BENNETT: Well, we didn't, as some people said, see the face of. God in the COBE picture. What we did see was a spectacular face of the early. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: This was what they had been waiting for. The blue. colors reveal places where there's slightly more matter in the early universe. In one brilliant stroke, COBE. Big Bang. You see, COBE had a. A COBE picture of me would look something. It was much the same with COBE. Its. picture was too fuzzy to reveal much of what was really happening in the early. LYMAN PAGE (Princeton University): It was as though we had seen. Earth, and we knew there were oceans and we knew there were continents, but. DAVID SPERGEL: The microwave background has encoded in it a tremendous. And. with the COBE data, we couldn't answer any of those questions. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: In other words, COBE was teasing us. Its fuzzy. picture concealed clues to fundamental mysteries, everything from the age of. Big Bang. itself. To uncover these clues we needed a much sharper image of the Big Bang's. Its twenty horns were designed to. And its. state- of- the- art electronics could then assemble an ultra sharp image from the. Murphy's. Law says that if anything can go wrong it will go wrong. And believe me it's. CO- WORKER: . It would take. NASA's rivals a. window of opportunity. And then the idea that the, the. NASA was going to go out there, and they were really going to do. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: Beginning work in 1. Tony knows he cannot. He decides to make remarkably detailed observations of. Big Bang's microwave glow. To. make this discovery, Tony and his team build an instrument called the Cosmic. Background Imager. What looks like an array of giant tin cans is 1. This kind of array is the perfect design to. Tony seeks. ANTHONY READHEAD: In order to do observations of the microwave. South Pole, or come to a place like this, which is up at a. Andes. In other words, you have to get halfway to. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: But to work up this high, almost 1. ANTHONY READHEAD: When you tried to drive it, it just didn't move. NEIL de. GRASSE TYSON: The instrument can't track the sky with the.
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