Short Wave: Big Bang Revisited

0:00This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Download the latest episode of the latest. universe in a multi-million, even billion-year time frame. I've been thinking about it because on Friday, as you'll hear, I spend the hour with world-renowned paleontologist Ken Lacovara at a really unusual place in southern New Jersey that is teeming with fossils. The site is about to open to the public, but Ken gave us a sneak peek, taking us back 66 million years ago to the end of the dinosaurs and what happened in the days, even hours after an asteroid hit the planet.

0:56That's coming on Friday. But meanwhile, to get you in the mood, we have something very special from our friends over at the podcast Shortwave. They've been thinking about even deeper time. This episode is about the Big Bang, how scientists originally discovered it, and why ideas about it are actually evolving. It is part of Shortwave's awesome summer-long series called Space Camp. Take a listen and enjoy. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers, it's Regina Barber. Can I admit something to you? I learned about the beginning of the universe the way I learn about a lot of things.

1:37On TV. For thousands of years, people have wondered about the universe. That it all started with a singularity, a brief moment in time called the Big Bang. One view of the universe prevailed. But here's the thing. Even though that definition is fairly common, it's not how many scientists talk about the Big Bang now. Today, when you hear people use the phrase Big Bang, they often mean the time period that we might otherwise call the early universe. So they're often talking about, I don't know, roughly like the first few hundred thousand years of space-time's existence, the Big Bang era, instead of just the Big Bang.

2:18That's Chanda Prescott-Weinstein, a theoretical physicist and an expert in cosmology, which is the study of how the universe began. But how do we observe that beginning, that Big Bang era? And why do we talk about it differently now? To understand that, we have to go back 60 years. To a lab with a giant horn-shaped antenna in New Jersey. And to two radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. To see photos of them, they're standing next to this giant antenna, arms wide open looking at the sky. And one of the things that they noticed is it didn't matter where they pointed this detector in the sky, they had a residual noise, kind of a background.

2:59Renee Hlajic is an observational cosmologist. She's also a spokesperson for the Dark Energy Science Collaboration, which studies the acceleration of the cosmos. They spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it could be, including the bird poop that had been collected in their detectors. They tried to calibrate all their instruments. They thought it was New York, maybe? Yeah, they were just like, where is this coming from? But it wasn't directionally dependent, and that's super important. So if you look anywhere in the sky, you'd see this. So they put out a paper with their findings, basically saying, we found this background noise and we don't know what it is.

3:30And at the same time, people were saying, oh, if we understand how the nuclei formed in the early universe, we understand that the universe must have been hot and there must be a background. So in a sense, they were looking, trying to design experiments to look for this. But Pentance and Wilson serendipitously discovered it first. And so as soon as they put out their paper saying, oh, we see this background, the theorists who are working on this were like, oh, shoot, this is exactly what we thought we should get. So it was that discovery of the cosmic microwave background, which we call it now, that to me catapulted this era into the modern age.

4:04So today on the show, the background noise of the universe. We get into what the Big Bang is, why scientists talk about it differently than they used to, and how the cosmic microwave background and its fluctuations help us understand the early universe. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. This message comes from the Michael J. Fox Foundation. Did you know that every six minutes someone in the U.S. is diagnosed with Parkinson's? It's the fastest growing brain disease in the world. Chances are you or someone you know is impacted by Parkinson's. The Michael J.

4:43Fox Foundation is on a mission to find a cure. Now is a critical time for Parkinson's research, and your support will help drive progress toward a cure. Get involved today. Visit michaeljfox.org slash get involved. This message comes from Amazon Business. How can you grow your business from idea to industry leader? Bring your vision to life with smart business buying tools and technology from Amazon Business. From fast, free shipping to in-depth buying insights and automated purchase approvals, they deliver everything you need to achieve your goals. It's not easy to stand out from the crowd. Simplify how you stock up to get ahead.

5:21Go to AmazonBusiness.com for support. This message comes from NPR sponsor, U.S. Bank. With U.S. Bank Business Essentials, you get more than just a bank. You get a dedicated partner that provides you a powerful combo of checking and card payment processing with quick access to the money you've earned, proving that there is nothing as powerful as the power of us. Visit usbank.com today to learn more. Member FDIC. Copyright 2025 U.S. Bank. This message comes from NPR sponsor Fixable, a podcast from TED. Hear unfiltered expert advice from CEO Anne Morris and Harvard business professor Francis Fry on how to build, regain, and maintain your confidence.

6:06Find Fixable wherever you listen. So we talked about how the cosmic microwave background was found with this serendipitous accident, basically. And the scientists found out we could detect radiation from the beginning of the universe. And so, Renee, based on this background, this CMB, what do we know about the early universe? Okay, so the universe is hot at this early time. And it's so hot that it sort of, we think of the three phases of matter as, you know, solid, liquid, gas. But really, there's a much more important phase of matter to my heart, which is plasma. It's so hot that you don't have atoms.

6:42You just have electrons and nuclei atoms. And because the electrons are free, they can interact with photons. So they basically bounce around as if you're trying to walk through a big crowd or you're at a nightclub. The photons and the electrons are interacting with each other, right? They're bouncing around. It's the same reason why the sun is opaque. And it's opaque because of this bouncing around. We basically say that the photon can't travel very far without interacting with another electron. And so what happens is as everything gets older, everything gets cooler, of course. The same is true of the universe.

7:21I slowly got that. Okay. So as the universe is cooling, eventually it gets cool enough that in fact the electrons and protons can now combine and they can become neutral atoms. And what happens is at that moment, which we call the last scattering surface, so the last scattering between photons and electrons, it's kind of like the photons are now free to stream away. And so that is the moment when essentially we can see the photons because they're now streaming towards us from the distant past. And that radiation is what we call the cosmic microwave background. So it's this light from about 400 ,000 years after the beginning of the Big Bang in this Big Bang era, and we can see it on the sky.

8:08And it's not like only in the sky. It's all around us, right? Yeah, absolutely. We're actually just, you know, swimming in the light of the Big Bang. Yeah. A nice thought that I like to say to people is if you get on the subway in a city and you sit down and you feel that the seat is warm, you know that someone was there before you, right? Because you have the heat, residual heat under the chair. And that's sort of the same thing. We look out everywhere in the sky and we see this microwave light just everywhere. It's that, you know, hot subway seat, but all over the sky. I have sat in many of those subway seats.

8:47I love that analogy. Okay, Chanda, but this light in the cosmic microwave background generally has like this very specific temperature of about like 2.726 Kelvin or roughly negative 455 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm just reading these numbers. I don't have them in my brain. And like shout out to our producer Hannah Chen for that research. Thank you so much. And that's like super cold. Like how is temperature associated with this light? Right. So if we think back to the earlier moments in the cosmos, so kind of that hot Big Bang era, we have this time period where the universe is very hot. As Renee was talking about, there is this plasma, photons are bouncing around, they're hitting electrons.

9:28and then at some point the universe is just cool enough that those photons start flying freely. They're not running into things. They can kind of travel for long distances without hitting something. This is like the Doppler effect, like an ambulance coming towards you and then away from you. First the sound waves compress and then the sound waves stretch out. And so the same thing can happen with light and this is happening as space-time is expanding. And so this effect is also happening with the light that makes up the cosmic microwave background radiation. And that means that the light as we see it today has a different energy and wavelength associated with it than the energy and the wavelength that it started out with.

10:13Simply because space time has had over 13 billion years to expand since that time happened. And so that means, yes, that in the future, like very distant future, like in about 4.5 billion years when the sun goes nova, that that temperature is actually going to be different than the one that we measure today. So this is that that temperature that we're measuring today is a snapshot of the CMB, the cosmic microwave background radiation now. OK, so when we're looking at this like cosmic microwave background temperature, what does that tell us about the early universe? So the key thing is that we're not only interested in that overall temperature, but we're interested in does the temperature differ slightly from position to position on the sky?

11:00Because any temperature differences actually start to give us insights into the theory of how this cosmic microwave background happened and what the physics was like. And what we found is that from place to place on the sky, the cosmic microwave background is different by only one pot in 100 ,000. Now, that's like phenomenally uniform across the sky. It's kind of like saying a drop of water in a gallon if you put like a tiny drop of food coloring or whatever. But those fluctuations in the temperature from place to place tell us something about what the physics was like at that early time. Right.

11:40I mean, they tell us about the variations in density during that early time, which in turn tell us something about the origin of galaxies, right? So what do you use to make these heat maps of the cosmic microwave backgrounds? How do scientists measure these tiny fluctuations? So the devices are called transition edge sensors. So we don't think of the telescope as a mirror in the same way you do for an optical telescope. We have these huge detectors with all these tiny little individual detectors, thousands and thousands of them into a big array. And then we scan the sky. Typically, we'll scan the sky from different places.

12:16So there are a bunch of different experiments. So we have a big telescope that allows us to collect this microwave light. And then at the back of the telescope, there are these detector arrays typically. And those are either put in telescopes in Chile or telescopes at the South Pole or sometimes in space. Got it. Got it. What I think I would like to kind of talk about next is like how do we use that data for theory? So Chanda, when we have all of this data that's like building up, you know, over the decades and now we're going to probably get even more sophisticated devices in the future. What does that tell theory?

12:52What does that tell us about the beginning of our universe? Yes, I will actually just say that this is a hard problem because part of the work is making sure that what we call the data analysis pipeline is well understood, that the instruments are very well calibrated and that we know how those things work. Then assuming all of those things are true, there are a series of assumptions that have to be made about what the correct model of cosmology is in order to actually process the data. And so in fact, this is not something that's widely known. The cosmic microwave background radiation is actually our strongest piece of evidence for the existence of dark matter.

13:36Because you get that match between the theory and the experiment so beautifully if you put dark matter into it. You take dark matter out of it and the line, they don't match anymore. Dark matter being this like invisible, mysterious matter in the universe scientists are trying to understand. But it is in many ways a little bit like putting a puzzle together where you're like, if I put the wrong piece here, then none of the other pieces around it are going to fit. Which brings me to like my last question. Earlier, we talked about the early cosmic microwave background as opaque. We can see the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang era, but we don't know what caused it, right?

14:14Is there any way for us to like kind of figure out what caused the Big Bang by looking at all these like parameters and trying to fit these models? Does it tell us anything about what happened before the very first milliseconds of time? Or is it, is that impossible? Yeah. So I think, you know, as with most things in science, we have to get kind of specific about what we're looking for. And on some level, this question is also about what is the boundaries of what science can do and what we think science actually is. I think the bigger point that I would want people to walk away with is that there are times when we come up with ideas that we think we can't test or that we don't know how to test.

14:56And that later it becomes clear that we actually can test them and that it is a matter of time and human ingenuity. Yeah, I mean, that's part of Penzias and Wilson's story, right? Like they make this discovery by accident and it turned out to be like foundational. That's one of my favorite things about science and being a scientist. And you know this, Chandra and Renee. It's all about this constant discovery of new things. Right. I spend my life on dark matter. It could be that the first real definitive evidence for direct detection of dark matter in the laboratory is going to happen the day after I die.

15:31I work every day knowing that that is just how the cookie crumbles. I think my hope as a scientist is not that I will be the one to make the great discovery or idea. And I think that's a very outdated way of thinking about what science is about. My hope is that the work that I do now helps to continuously lay the foundation for us to push the boundaries of our understanding forward. Whether it's this generation or a generation, like seven generations from now, that works out some of the problems that I've committed my life to. Science is a multi-generational enterprise. And so I think that that's really the way to think about these questions is maybe right now we're not sure that we can test or answer that question.

16:16But as scientists, it's not our job to say never. It's our job to figure out, could this be possible later? I love that. Thank you so much, Chanda and Renee, for coming to talk with us today. Thank you for having me. It's super fun. This episode was produced and fact-checked by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. It was engineered by Maggie Luthor. Julia Carney is our Space Camp Project Manager. Beth Donovan is our Senior Director. And Colin Campbell is our Senior Vice President of Podcasting Strategy. Special thanks to our friends at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, home of Space Camp.

16:51I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. That was Regina Barber and our friends over at Shortwave. Listen to all of their Space Camp episodes wherever you get your podcasts. And don't miss our hour with paleontologist Ken LaCovara. You're going to want to hear how he's figuring out exactly what happened 66 million years ago to the dinosaurs. And also, y 'all, I found a fossil. You'll get to hear that, too. See you then. This message comes from NPR sponsor Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 % of all e-commerce in the U.S.

17:32from household names like Mattel and Gymshark. Get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready-to-use templates. Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash NPR. This message comes from NPR sponsor Fixable, a podcast from TED. Hear unfiltered expert advice from CEO Ann Morris and Harvard business professor Francis Fry on how to build, regain, and maintain your confidence. Find Fixable wherever you listen.