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what is in their surroundings, WMAP listens for echoes – in the form of heat radiation – from the early universe to tell us what was there. We are blind to the first moments of creation because they took place too long ago. But we can still pick up the echoes, and these echoes are clear enough to give us insights into the beginning of everything. They tell us, for instance, when and how the first atoms formed, and that in turn is enough to tell us when the first subatomic particles formed, and when the forces of nature first appeared, right back to an infinitesimal fraction of time after the Big Bang itself. Thanks to the WMAP probe, and other experiments like it, we have worked out pretty much the entire history of the universe. After more than four centuries of arguments based on speculations and prejudice, we now have data. We are living in the Golden Age of cosmology.

Because of that, we might be forgiven for looking around in awe at this assembly of the ‘expert and the god’. These are, after all, the people who have given us an astonishing perspective on the universe, a perspective that humans have dreamed of since the time of the ancient Greeks. However, their story serves as a useful primer for what we are about to learn about science. Don’t be fooled into thinking that their discoveries are part of a smooth progression in our knowledge.

WMAP examines the details of microwave radiation known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB. The first prediction that a Big Bang would fill the universe with this type of radiation was made in 1948, just after the end of the Second World War. And it was forgotten almost as soon as it was made.

At that time, most people didn’t believe there was a start to the universe. To the majority of physicists, the universe simply existed, and always had. What’s more, the new theory about microwave radiation was born out of a combination of particle physics and astronomy, and, although plenty of people knew about either particle physics or astronomy, almost nobody was well versed in both. As if that wasn’t enough of a problem, looking for this radiation would require microwave knowhow – and that was still a specialist area. That’s why it took two decades and a set of lucky breaks to work out the history of the universe.

In 1963, a couple of astronomers based at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey found the CMB radiation by accident. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson had been given a microwave detector in the form of a 15-metre long, 6-metre wide horn antenna to investigate why distant galaxies were emitting radio waves. Their first task was to identify the amount of noise in the detector, to make sure that any signal could be properly identified. As it turned out, there was an annoying amount of noise – far more than they had expected. They tried everything to get rid of it, even going as far as shooting the pigeons that were nesting in the horn antenna and removing the accumulated droppings.

Eventually, while at a conference in Montreal, one of them mentioned the problem to another astronomer, Bernard Burke. Burke thought nothing of it until he happened to be sent a paper by some Princeton astrophysicists. The Princeton group were suggesting that if the Big Bang really had occurred, the universe ought to be filled with microwave radiation. It was Burke’s job to decide whether the idea merited publication – whether it was novel, and whether the idea stood up. He failed on the first call: he didn’t make the connection with the same prediction made nearly twenty years earlier. However, Burke did make a connection with the troublesome noise in Penzias and Wilson’s microwave detector. He put the Princeton theorists and the Bell Labs researchers in touch with one another. The result of that collaboration became front page news in the New York Times, and earned Penzias and Wilson a Nobel Prize.

Brand Science presents itself as if it takes a series of cool and logical (but brilliant) steps, a graceful flow of ideas from concept to irrefutable proof. That is a long way from the truth. ‘Nearly all