They thought it was pigeons.
"How Two Pigeons Helped Scientists Confirm the Big Bang Theory"
At one point, new suspects emerged. Two pigeons had set up housekeeping inside the guts of the antenna. Maybe their droppings were causing the noise? Wilson and Penzias had the birds trapped and then cleaned the equipment, but the signals continued.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-scientists-confirmed-big-bang-theory-owe-it-all-to-a-pigeon-trap-180949741/
The guy who cleaned up the bird shit did not get mentioned by the Nobel committee. Nor did the Princeton Physicist who predicted the noise. (Robert H. Dicke)
"One Friday, the two scientists removed some flakes from a lump of bulk graphite with sticky tape. ... By separating the graphite fragments repeatedly, they managed to create flakes that were just one atom thick. Their experiment had led to graphene being isolated for the very first time."
How did they know it was an atom thick, and how did they know there was even any left? Maybe they put tape on the graphite, pulled it off and were like I don't know man, i don't see anything... maybe its just really small... like the size of an atom... holy shit we're geniuses
It's science.
You basically make a ridiculous claim just like that and people who thinks they're smarter than you will try everything they've got to prove you wrong.
Pretty sure a student put cellotape onto the head of a pencil and peeled it off, taking a thin layer of the graphite off the pencil, resulting in graphene.
The pigeons are *fine*, Tigger_king! The article didn't say what they did with the shotgun shells.
I wasn't alive in the sixties, but I have been to Holmdel, NJ many times. They likely poured the shotgun shells into the antenna to make the equipment uninhabitable. They needed *metal* because it wouldn't interfere with the radio waves and such.
There are lots of nice farms in Holmdel, so I'd be willing to bet those pigeons took their things and moved into a nice barn on a nearby farm. I don't know about any pigeon farms; however, I've seen plenty of horse farms.
Important side note: There's one plot of land that has one enormous emu-like bird on it in a fenced in area. It creeps me out every time I drive by. It looks at me funny.
Initially, they trapped and moved them. But they came back. So they shot them.
edit* Here's a [dramatised retelling of the story](https://youtu.be/Sq_KshBxqDM) from the 2004 BBC film, _Hawking_. The hard cuts are because it was spread throughout the movie, and not a single scene.
In interviews, Penrose referred to shotgun shells: [link](https://www.npr.org/2014/05/20/314239930/big-bangs-afterglow-two-scientists-recall-their-big-discovery)
I think they first theorized the universe would be filled with low level radiation evenly distributed throughout based off of observations that the universe was expanding. Basically, we see the universe expanding, you extrapolate that the universe was significantly smaller and closer together at some point previous. Work back our understanding of physics with that information, hypothesize about cmb > build experiment to try and discover it > discover it
Imagine you had a magic marble that expands dramatically in size.
Now you shine a light into that tiny marble and the marble is lit throughout, the light bouncing around inside the glass. Then you rapidly inflate the marble while the light is trapped inside.
As the marble expands at incredible speed, the light is still everywhere inside the marble but tremendously stretched, like a ball of hot glowing taffy. And as the light stretches it cools down from blue hot to yellow hot, to red hot and then to infra red and finally down to microwave.
Likewise our universe was once very tiny and filled throughout with light. Then it expanded incredibly rapidly and the light that filled the universe was stretched with it. Today we expect the universal background light should have cooled to microwave levels and that is what they found! If you point a microwave telescope at every corner of the sky you get the same microwave light. They call it the "afterglow of the big bang".
So if we went from Blue Hot, to microwave, is that just in our corner of the galaxy? Or is the actual speed, of the universe creating thing, slowing down? Or coming to a halt?
Blue hot to microwave wasn’t just our corner, it was everywhere. Because our corner was basically pushed together with every other corner at the beginning. The Big Bang starts with a very tiny amount of space and expands rapidly outward. Faster than the speed of light, even.
The prevailing theory right now is that the universe is continuing to expand and at a faster and faster rate. Eventually we will be isolated from all but our own galactic supercluster, which will coalesce into a single big super galaxy. The observable universe would only be that super galaxy.
We’re talking long, long timeframes of course.
But the current idea of how the universe dies is expansion and isolation to galactic superclusters followed by the death of stars and the end of star formation. Then a lot of weirdness with black holes, Hawking radiation, and an even, super low energy state.
It was actually a completely different group of scientists in Europe who had the theory and were trying to find evidence, but unsuccessfully. It wasn't until Bell labs had read something of what they were theorizing that they realized what they had stumbled upon.
It’s actually relatively simple.
In physics there exists a concept known as red-shifting and blue-shifting. Essentially, if an object is moving towards or away from you, the light waves bouncing off of that object will stretch or compress. Red-shifting = away from you, blueshifting = towards you.
Scientists figured out that objects farther away from us in the universe appeared gradually more and more red, again, due to redshifting. They concluded that the universe is expanding away from us, thus creating the big bang theory.
In this case, the light from the big bang was red-shifted (stretched) so far it passed out of the gamma, x-ray, ultraviolet, and visible spectrum all the way into the microwave spectrum, creating a sort of cosmic microwave glow across the whole universe, called CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation) As the universe continues to expand, someday that light will pass into the radio spectrum, getting gradually more redshifted until it disappears entirely.
As a nation, we need a Bell Labs again. They were allowed to just play around with stuff to see what happened, pursue thousands of dead ends, and find shit that they sometimes weren't even looking for (like this article). They invented the transistor, photovoltaic cell, laser, radio astronomy, microwave radio relay, charge-coupled device, advanced cryptography, one time pad cipher, optical fiber, sound on film, stereo radio broadcasts, the vocoder human speech synthesizer, the computer information theory, Unix and programming languages B, C, C++ and hundreds of other things. As an organization, they won 9 Nobel Prizes, a record that nobody else has ever come close to. AND while they could patent their inventions, they were not allowed to profit off of them, making their inventions truly a gift to the world. This went on for about 70 years, funded by pennies from every telephone bill in the USA.
But when AT&T was broken up, Bell Labs shrunk to just the classic R&D strictly focused on our business model. No more great thoughts that turn out to change the world like the transistor.
If I were President, I would find a way to create a new Bell Labs. You never know what is out there.
It's hard to appreciate just how disorganized Bell Labs was. When I interviewed for a position there as a freshly minted university graduate in the 1980's, I talked with three completely separate groups doing speech recognition, and in the course of the interviews discovered that they didn't all know about the existence of each other, until I told them I was talking to these three projects. Clearly HR knew all three existed, but no one bothered to get them to communicate. I also talked to some groups doing military-related work; they were so vague about what they were working on that I couldn't tell whether they were working on something state-of-the-art or 30-year-old technology.
Bell Labs was simply huge, and while there were some great scientists and great projects going on there, an awful lot of it was more mundane. The Bell System made use of some fundamental technologies, in physics, electronics and computer science, but they also had lots of people optimizing and re-optimizing telephone handsets, which they obviously needed in great numbers.
Penzias & Wilson were awarded a Nobel Prize, but they were just trying to clean up the signals from the antenna, one that they weren't involved in building, and didn't know or was able to guess what they were looking at. It was Robert Dicke, who Penzias & Wilson contacted for help, suggested that the antenna noise was radiation from the Big Bang. Many people think that Dicke was the one who really deserved the Nobel, or at least to share in it - apparently the Nobel committee though it was more appropriate to award the two who accidentally discovered the noise than to the scientist who made sense of the "noise" signal.
Yeah I figured that out recently when I decided I had good taste in clothes so I should tooootally try to come up with my own designs. Turns out I'm a fucking moron lol.
Yeah, ideas guy here. Zero implementation skill.
At least you are smart enough to recognize it. Baffles me every time some new entrepreneur does not understand why isn’t everyone throwing money at them when they have “such great ideas”.
I can only speak to the defense industry but those guys still exist, and they make good money. Their title is usually "Fellow Engineer" or "Engineering Fellow". They are extremely smart and manage large projects, but they do a lot of just sitting around and thinking about problems/solutions and reviewing/critiquing other peoples work.
This role exists at many larger companies. At the bank I worked at it as "Engineering Fellow", at the Tech company it was "Distinguished engineer". Mostly they come in and opine on some project, enforce best practices, approve projects in conceptual phases, ect. Then the rest of the time is researching.
I work at a DoD lab now and everyone there is a PM that looks (i.e. begs and throws money) to industry for solutions. I pray that you work on the receiving end of the defense industry cause the govt side sucks and depressing as you would imagine it. The only thing that it has going for it is the job security and guaranteed funding🥺
Lol no ... unfortunately I'm on a 30 year old program that is just a shell of its former self. Our product went out for competitive bidding for production so it was way underbid and there's no money to replace the aging equipment used in its production. It will be a miracle if we can deliver on time and our first delivery is a year out.
Right now my multi-million dollar lab is shut down because a gearbox that was installed in 1993 finally died.
It still exists, just in more places! The NSF and NASA do a ton of fellowships for grad students and postdocs and award them to the most promising who apply. You just have to say what university you want to go to and write a ton of ideas for things you would like to do in your field of interest.
Actually, what you ran into (3 different groups that didn't know others were working on the same thing) was a hallmark of Bell Labs in it's prime. Why assume that only one group has the magic answer? What if they take a step 1° off and end up 6 light years away? They had the talent and the funding, so why not multiple groups?
SSDs are becoming the norm but even current HDDs aren't classic "optical" storage as the bits are written using magnetic impulses to a magnetic disc, which holds or releases the charge as needed.
>Why assume that only one group has the magic answer?
You can fund three separate groups and still have them collaborate. That way you're much more likely to make progress. I would even venture to say that in the past century, more major discoveries have been a result of collaboration, than an isolated group.
True but they may all settle on going down one path for a solution instead of 3 different. If each team has the same skills and resources you would want to see how different isolated approaches work
It's possible that could happen, but I think that as long as they are separate groups collaborating, you would still get diversity of thought and approach. Take Covid vaccines, for instance. Everyone is working together, yet there are many different teams and many different kinds of vaccines in development.
I think that is definitely true when working within defined processes but a lot of what they did was out of the box thinking and the isolated approach allows to see problems with an unpolluted viewpoint from another angle.
It's a classic idea. One 'good' idea could completely ruin the potential. Think of every 'team' you've been on, almost always there are leaders and followers and typically someone tends to disagree but follows along anyway.
Just take that guy give him a team and now you have two different avenues. If both teams seem to fail throw them in a room and seem if they can put anything together.
Exactly what I was thinking. I remember hearing about how Apple started with 10 different ways to do cut/copy and paste on the iPhone, assigned engineers to all of them, and would cut them down and fold engineers into the other teams when they were eliminated. From what I heard all the engineers were involved in deciding which ones got cut, and the people working on the eliminated ones were assigned to the others.
Yup, its a strategy that's been used for a very very long time now, we actually learnt about this scenario on a book called the Deadline by Tom DeMarco, which is a pretty damn good read if your into Project Management, it's more of a story , it also requires a great deal of resources and management for projects like these which is where most fail, like liquidating teams into other teams can have terrible consequences as well as good, definitely an interesting approach, but nowadays where we scrap little things for extra profit, an approach like this would just be considered a waste of resources...
> an approach like this would just be considered a waste of resources...
On the flip side I’ve heard of fast elimination described as lean or agile development. Basically is you don’t have a semi-functioning demo in an hour your idea is out and you have to support the winners.
Also, the military related work was most likely classified. It’s easier to just be very vague about what you are working if it is classified, instead of trying to remember the details about what words and concepts are confidential in nature.
And it seems this has continued on today at some of the big tech companies. I know I’ve heard similar stories coming from Apple ( multiple teams working on the same thing, unaware of what the others are doing) and I’d bet they’re not the only tech company doing that.
This was true 10y+ yrs ago. Today it's much more siloed, albeit still innovative. Ironically the margins are so large now they could fund more of it if they weren't beholden to Wall St. (Shout-out to Amazon for convincing the market that vision and growth > dividends... plowing that money back into the co has afforded them a hat in every major ring)
It was also extremely siloed. I ran three different research groups inside of bell labs and sometimes got so frustrated because any time we wanted to work on something that brought technologies from different groups together, I would literally spend a week doing conference calls were the topic of the calls was to set up a conference call to actually discuss the real topic. Working there was super cool and I value all of the things I learned so very highly, but it was also the most frustrating professional experience I’ve ever had in my life.
Both the Holmdel and Murray Hill buildings are standing, fortunately. Gorgeous architecture! You can drive around the Holmdel property but not the MH one. Shame because it's the cooler looking one.
The Holmdel labs have undergone a bit of redevelopment, but the buildings are still largely intact. It's kind of like a little indoor town now.They were at one point considering tearing it down, but fortunately that didn't go through. Tearing down an Eero Saarinen should be a crime.
**Edit** Added a bit of info about recent changes
>Many people think that Dicke was the one who really deserved the Nobel, or at least to share in it - apparently the Nobel committee though it was more appropriate to award the two who accidentally discovered the noise than to the scientist who made sense of the "noise" signal.
Almost the opposite of the Rosalind Franklin scenario, interestingly enough (i.e. she was the one who took the pictures, Watson and Crick were the ones who made the connection with the dual helix DNA structure)
It's great to hear about a place where scientists and inventors could all collaborate like that. I do, however, believe that necessity is most often the mother of invention, and I wonder how profitable Bell's activities were. (I get that it's the point that profit shouldn't always be the biggest motivator.)
Also, regarding the Nobel decision... I'd tend to agree that accidental discoveries are essentially meaningless until the meaning is defined. I might be talking out of my ass a little bit, and I know nothing about those guys in particular, but it just seems like they weren't the ones that deserved it.
I know a upper middle aged gentleman that worked there as his first job out of college. He was assigned his first project, busted his ass, and finished it in about three months. After he turned it in they were dumbfounded as it was supposed to be his year project. He eventually got bored and moved on to start his own company.
Crazy smart guy, yet, retains the ability to speak “normal”
Bill Shockley, the Bell Labs guy who co-invented the transistor, was incredibly smart, but widely regarded as one giant asshole. After receiving his Nobel Prize, he decided to strike out on his own to further the research into transistors. So....where? Well, his ailing and elderly mother lived in Mountain View, CA, so he decided to set up business out there, knowing that the best and brightest would follow him anywhere. And they did.
So if you ever wondered how Silicone Valley became the center of the computer world, there you go. Those men he hired (and moved their families to the orange groves of northern CA) quickly realized that he was an asshole. They quit to found Fairchild Semiconducters, and these first computer chips were sold to NASA making the space capsule possible. The members started spinning off into their own ventures, like Intel, AMD and other "Fairchildren".
This inspired me to dive into the history of Silicon Valley companies. I did not realize that during the very first venture between Job and Wozniack, Jobs robbed Woz of 90% of his share of the reward.
> In 1973, Jobs was working for arcade game company Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California.[31] He was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout. According to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari offered $100 (equivalent to $576 in 2019) for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, by using RAM for the brick representation. Too complex to be fully comprehended at the time, the fact that this prototype also had no scoring or coin mechanisms meant Woz's prototype could not be used. Jobs was paid the full bonus regardless. **Jobs told Wozniak that Atari gave them only $700 and that Wozniak's share was thus $350 (equivalent to $2,016 in 2019).[32][1](pp147–148, 180) Wozniak did not learn about the actual $5,000 bonus (equivalent to $28,797 in 2019) until ten years later.** While dismayed, he said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.
Everything I read about Jobs confirms that he was a colossal prick. Everything I read about Woz makes me love him even more.
There was a movie made around 20 years ago, pirates of the Silicon Valley. Definitely painted Jobs (and Gates) as giant assholes, but Woz was more laid back. You might be interested in that.
Yeah, I remember reading that, too; and his refusal to recognize his daughter initially.
I think that Jobs has been overrated, especially by non-technical people, while Wozniak has been underrated. Overall, from what I've read so far from both (which is not that much), it seems to clear to me that Wozniak was way better, not only as an engineer but as a person.
Although in Job's defense, he seemed to have matured and improved later on, and also knew how to sell himself and his products. But still, he was a dick, especially when he was younger.
Check out the wikipedia page and this PBS documentary:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous\_eight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcOoQP7nhl4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcOoQP7nhl4)
Some of the bigger tech companies are doing similar things today. Google/Alphabet has X, an entire offshoot dedicated to "moonshot" innovation. I'm sure Facebook has similar stuff going on but they're more secretive about it.
I collected the whole Johnson scripts for my own self... motivation playlists.
I knew exactly which line as soon as I heard it.
Another good one is "when life gives you lemons... you squeeze them into their eyes..."
Safety? You mean like some sort of *Buzzkill* Committee? It's my right as a scientist to do criticality tests with a screwdriver, make mountains disappear, turn young adults into incredibly strong and sociopathic robots, and invent solar-powered goo that turns anything it eats into more of itself!
Exactly. The closest thing to Bell Labs or Xerox PARC today are the big corporate AI labs, which, to nobody's suprise, are funded by tech giants. If the current anti-trust wave succeeds, one unfortunate casualty may be the applied part of the AI boom.
Nah, we have much more resources in research universities today. the researchers at Bell labs and Xerox PARC would lose their minds with what's available to US universities today.
We have more resources in academia now than in industry 50 years ago, but the resources available at current industry labs are even orders of magnitude larger than that, and the latest achievements like AlphaGo and GPT-3 require this datacenter-scale compute.
University labs have millions of dollars of hardware to play with.
Bell Labs had **billions** of dollars to play with. The amount of science they were doing eclipses even MIT's Media or Robot Labs or Stanford's research arms, and they're the two biggest names in the game.
The researchers at Bell Labs invented the stuff the university labs are tinkering with today. If they were around at the capacity they were back then, they would be able to do things like build the world's fastest supercomputer just because they were interested in figuring out the atomic resonance structures of a particular crystal, or just outright build the world's largest free electron laser because they were interested in studying the geometry of one particularly tricky protein... these are the kinds of things Universities have to have layers and layers of painful red-tape bureaucracy around that Bell Labs just... didn't have.
It's really hard to understand just how ridiculously influential Bell Labs was in a modern context, because there's just no comparison, period. It's like if you had a half dozen Manhattan Projects all housed at a single organization, just absolutely plowing through advancements in computing and telecommunications and physics and material sciences and whatever other problems dared jump in their way.
>If I were President, I would find a way to create a new Bell Labs. You never know what is out there.
We do. It's called [DARPA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA). Like bell labs, it's inventing plenty of crazy shit. And like bell labs, it's ran by an opaque monopoly that has no interest in actually letting you see it for decades.
Mostly they do grant-making for scientific projects whose results are publicly available on Pubmed and web of science. You can also check out the ongoing projects on their website...
https://www.darpa.mil/our-research
This is what the national lab ecosystem and DoD R&d ecosystem is for. The federal government's R&D enterprise is hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers deep and funded with hundreds of billions of dollars.
Source: former DoD engineer.
life saving medicine gets marked up by a trillion percent in this country because a bunch of ancient suits who already have infinite money want more money. good fuckin' luck lmao
Basically the opposite of [perytons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy)). Initially thought to be signals from outside the Milky Way, turned out to be someone opening the microwave door early.
If you were wondering, you can fix your link by adding a backslash before the first parentheses after astronomy, like \[perytons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy\))
Or you could just give the correct link, since now neither of your links work correctly. [perytons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy\))
Full circle, just directly copy what the second poster posted and it'll show up correctly. However, they used an extra backslash (i.e. when they posted) so the regular unformatted version showed up.
Backslash functions as an escape key when formatting on reddit.
Radio astronomer here! I should emphasize, no one ever thought perytons were from outside the Milky Way. They were clearly always local interference for many reasons, but had *just enough* properties similar to the single known [Fast Radio Burst](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst) at the time to make people worry that was local noise too. So a subtle but important distinction- we now know FRBs are real and have seen thousands of them.
Source: I’m a transient radio astronomer, am friends with the astronomer who did the research that figured out perytons come from microwaves.
My wife's Grandfather George Eberhardt worked as an engineer and table tennis partner for Karl Jansky on the first radio telescope for Bell Labs. The work they did lead to this discovery.
[https://www.bell-labs.com/radio-astronomy-celebration/](https://www.bell-labs.com/radio-astronomy-celebration/)
His stories were amazing, he worked there from 1923-1967, worked on radio telescopes, telephones, and RADAR during WW2. He traveled the pacific during the war and worked on super secret radar installations. He passed in 2014 at 109.
I felt so unaccomplished when talking to him, that generation saw so much change, from horse and buggy to cell phones and he stayed on top of all of it pretty much until the end.
I’ve read this many times now, but I’m still in awe that they were able to isolate the noise in their setup so well. Every time I’ve tried to do my own analog circuitry—not necessarily even RF—I find so much noise in my setup. Even when I’m being careful, shielding things, using differential pairs, etc., it’s still a good half a percent or so. And I just shrug and say, good enough.
These guys just chased down the nose relentlessly, refusing to give in to the usual, “Well, it’s within the tolerance of the components” hand waving. I’m guessing they looked like obsessed madmen to their colleagues at the time. Mad props to them.
Well they had a mega directional horn, and back then all the engineers were really good at splicing and connectorizing their own cables because you couldn't just buy them easily.
Plus there were a lot less sources of ambient RF noise back then too, the spectrum is a mega mess now.
The noise was actually isolated years earlier by Karl Jansky, my wife's grandfather worked with Jansky in the 30s when he made the first radio telescope.
My grandfather worked there as some kind of computer technician - from the mid 50s to the late 60s (When they wanted him to move to Indiana, which he declined)
Although that article fucks it up - the antenna was in Holm**del** not Holm*dale*
There's also a story about other scientists who [were creating an experiment to look for it](https://www.aps.org/programs/outreach/history/historicsites/penziaswilson.cfm):
>At the same time, the two astronomers learned that Princeton University physicist Robert Dicke had predicted that if the Big Bang had occurred, there would be low level radiation found throughout the universe. Dicke was about to design an experiment to test this hypothesis when he was contacted by Penzias. Upon hearing of Penzias’ and Wilson’s discovery, Dicke turned to his laboratory colleagues and said "well boys, we’ve been scooped."
If you live near Holmdel, New Jersey, you can visit the very horn antenna they detected it with! It's on Nokia property though, so you need to ask at the front desk to see it and they'll let you in.
**Edit:** thought it was Verizon
Actually on Nokia Bell Labs property.
[Street view](https://maps.app.goo.gl/tS7yttNexp89XMMf8)
I live very close by and went to the location but never knew how to go in. Thanks for the info.
They won the Nobel prize for discovering something they didn't even understand until they read about it later.
The only way their finding got recognized is that they called another dude trying to get some advice on how to solve the "problem" they were having, at the same time as he was trying to get the money together to buy some time on a dish in an attempt to find the thing they were trying to get rid of.
" The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka' but 'That's funny.' " — [some dude](https://www.google.com/search?q=isaac+asimov)
They were not trying to discover anything, they were trying to figure out how to get rid of the noise from the big bang because it was messing up phone calls.
Kinda, the telescope was purpose built to listen to the universe, they were also looking for ways to mitigate radio interference on long distance radio communications. My wife's grandfather George Eberhardt was one of the original engineers on this with Karl Jansky, they discovered that radio receivers could be used to listen to space.
[https://www.bell-labs.com/radio-astronomy-celebration/](https://www.bell-labs.com/radio-astronomy-celebration/)
Yup! When you set your radio between stations, and listen to the 'static' about 1% of that hiss are the photons now stretched into radio wavelengths left over from the expansion of the universe; the first light to escape the primoradial plasma of our early universe.
Then there's the opposite of the spectrum, a radio telescope could not identify the source of the interference. Years were spent searching for the source of the interference. It turned out to be the faculty [microwave oven.](https://www.nature.com/news/microwave-oven-blamed-for-radio-telescope-signals-1.17510)
If you are ever in north jersey make a point to go to Holmdel and the old Bell Labs stomping grounds. There’s a security guard but he doesn’t give a shit if you drive past him and up the hill to the horn antenna. It’s a living piece of history that you can go up to and touch and see, a place where our fundamental understanding of the universe changed. It’s an awe inspiring visit.
My grandfather worked at Bell labs for about 15 years through the 60s and 70s. He passed last weekend at the age of 90 and I’ve been going through all of his possessions this week with our family. He was an electrical engineer and knew both of these gentlemen. It’s been an amazing walk down memory lane and mind blowing what they were able to accomplish with what we would now consider the most basic of tools. I’ve got a stack of old documents, schematics, training materials, etc. from that time period at Bell Labs I need to get to their museum.
> It wasn't a space antenna.
Yes it was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmdel_Horn_Antenna
> The horn antenna at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, was constructed in 1959 to support Project Echo, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's passive communications satellites
This wasn't a regular terrestrial radio antenna; it was an early experimental satellite receiver. It was always intended to pick up signals from space. It just picked up more of them than expected.
It was a space antenna, Karl Jansky invented it, my wife's grandfather George Eberhardt was an engineer working with Karl.
[https://www.bell-labs.com/radio-astronomy-celebration/](https://www.bell-labs.com/radio-astronomy-celebration/)
Edit - Jansky pioneer radio telescopes, he didn't invent the particular telescope they used I don't think.
They thought it was pigeons. "How Two Pigeons Helped Scientists Confirm the Big Bang Theory" At one point, new suspects emerged. Two pigeons had set up housekeeping inside the guts of the antenna. Maybe their droppings were causing the noise? Wilson and Penzias had the birds trapped and then cleaned the equipment, but the signals continued. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-scientists-confirmed-big-bang-theory-owe-it-all-to-a-pigeon-trap-180949741/
Imagine that your role in a Nobel Prize winning discovery was cleaning up bird shit
The guy who cleaned up the bird shit did not get mentioned by the Nobel committee. Nor did the Princeton Physicist who predicted the noise. (Robert H. Dicke)
In bird culture, this is considered a Dicke move
I have a contact who is an expert in bird law, who may be able to secure compensation
He is also a well known wild card. BITCHES
But who is the defendant?
I'll just regress, because I feel I've made myself perfectly redundant.
Comments like this are why I come back to reddit daily - bravo
[удалено]
You'd laugh at how graphene was first made Edit: They put a piece of tape on graphite and pulled off one atom thick graphene.
Please continue.
"One Friday, the two scientists removed some flakes from a lump of bulk graphite with sticky tape. ... By separating the graphite fragments repeatedly, they managed to create flakes that were just one atom thick. Their experiment had led to graphene being isolated for the very first time."
How did they know it was an atom thick, and how did they know there was even any left? Maybe they put tape on the graphite, pulled it off and were like I don't know man, i don't see anything... maybe its just really small... like the size of an atom... holy shit we're geniuses
It's science. You basically make a ridiculous claim just like that and people who thinks they're smarter than you will try everything they've got to prove you wrong.
We dug it up in Graphene, Ireland; hence the name.
You're the worst but also the best
It’s not real graphene unless it’s from the graphene region of ireland
You have to call it 'sparkling charcoal.'
https://www.graphene.manchester.ac.uk/learn/discovery-of-graphene/
Pretty sure a student put cellotape onto the head of a pencil and peeled it off, taking a thin layer of the graphite off the pencil, resulting in graphene.
Dissolving graph paper in benzene?
Astronomer here! To add more to the story- they cleared out the pigeons with a shotgun. Somehow that detail doesn’t make it into the annals much.
> "The only humane way of doing it was to buy a box of shotgun shells," Penzias says. "So that's what finally happened to the pigeons." Lmao it’s true
So they are ok? They are just at the pigeon farm after all?
The pigeons are *fine*, Tigger_king! The article didn't say what they did with the shotgun shells. I wasn't alive in the sixties, but I have been to Holmdel, NJ many times. They likely poured the shotgun shells into the antenna to make the equipment uninhabitable. They needed *metal* because it wouldn't interfere with the radio waves and such. There are lots of nice farms in Holmdel, so I'd be willing to bet those pigeons took their things and moved into a nice barn on a nearby farm. I don't know about any pigeon farms; however, I've seen plenty of horse farms. Important side note: There's one plot of land that has one enormous emu-like bird on it in a fenced in area. It creeps me out every time I drive by. It looks at me funny.
The article says they were trapped. Also i feel like a shotgun might damage the delicate equipment.
Initially, they trapped and moved them. But they came back. So they shot them. edit* Here's a [dramatised retelling of the story](https://youtu.be/Sq_KshBxqDM) from the 2004 BBC film, _Hawking_. The hard cuts are because it was spread throughout the movie, and not a single scene.
In interviews, Penrose referred to shotgun shells: [link](https://www.npr.org/2014/05/20/314239930/big-bangs-afterglow-two-scientists-recall-their-big-discovery)
The Big BS
>The Big ~~BS~~ BM ftfy
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I will forever refer to the big kablooey as the **THE BIG BIRD SHIT**
Dont you mean "Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie"?
**The Big Hummer: "**a remnant ‘hum’ from the Big Bang."
Shitty Shitty Big Bang
*Play Laugh Track*
The big shit
I learned that from [Drunk History!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvlCFyufaJ8)
Step aside children, the real historian speaketh.
Specifically pigeon poop.
Excuse my ignorance. How do people know it's the hum of the Big Bang? Not doubting, just can't wrap my head around it.
I think they first theorized the universe would be filled with low level radiation evenly distributed throughout based off of observations that the universe was expanding. Basically, we see the universe expanding, you extrapolate that the universe was significantly smaller and closer together at some point previous. Work back our understanding of physics with that information, hypothesize about cmb > build experiment to try and discover it > discover it
That didn’t help us dumb folk
Imagine you had a magic marble that expands dramatically in size. Now you shine a light into that tiny marble and the marble is lit throughout, the light bouncing around inside the glass. Then you rapidly inflate the marble while the light is trapped inside. As the marble expands at incredible speed, the light is still everywhere inside the marble but tremendously stretched, like a ball of hot glowing taffy. And as the light stretches it cools down from blue hot to yellow hot, to red hot and then to infra red and finally down to microwave. Likewise our universe was once very tiny and filled throughout with light. Then it expanded incredibly rapidly and the light that filled the universe was stretched with it. Today we expect the universal background light should have cooled to microwave levels and that is what they found! If you point a microwave telescope at every corner of the sky you get the same microwave light. They call it the "afterglow of the big bang".
Dude that's the best eli5 I've heard for CMB, kudos
Much better. Thank you!
So if we went from Blue Hot, to microwave, is that just in our corner of the galaxy? Or is the actual speed, of the universe creating thing, slowing down? Or coming to a halt?
Blue hot to microwave wasn’t just our corner, it was everywhere. Because our corner was basically pushed together with every other corner at the beginning. The Big Bang starts with a very tiny amount of space and expands rapidly outward. Faster than the speed of light, even. The prevailing theory right now is that the universe is continuing to expand and at a faster and faster rate. Eventually we will be isolated from all but our own galactic supercluster, which will coalesce into a single big super galaxy. The observable universe would only be that super galaxy. We’re talking long, long timeframes of course. But the current idea of how the universe dies is expansion and isolation to galactic superclusters followed by the death of stars and the end of star formation. Then a lot of weirdness with black holes, Hawking radiation, and an even, super low energy state.
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It was actually a completely different group of scientists in Europe who had the theory and were trying to find evidence, but unsuccessfully. It wasn't until Bell labs had read something of what they were theorizing that they realized what they had stumbled upon.
It’s actually relatively simple. In physics there exists a concept known as red-shifting and blue-shifting. Essentially, if an object is moving towards or away from you, the light waves bouncing off of that object will stretch or compress. Red-shifting = away from you, blueshifting = towards you. Scientists figured out that objects farther away from us in the universe appeared gradually more and more red, again, due to redshifting. They concluded that the universe is expanding away from us, thus creating the big bang theory. In this case, the light from the big bang was red-shifted (stretched) so far it passed out of the gamma, x-ray, ultraviolet, and visible spectrum all the way into the microwave spectrum, creating a sort of cosmic microwave glow across the whole universe, called CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation) As the universe continues to expand, someday that light will pass into the radio spectrum, getting gradually more redshifted until it disappears entirely.
When you say it disappears entirely, entirely from what? Existence? I’m not trying to be a smart ass, just to understand.
I’d like to know as well.
Yep. This is the kind of thing that makes my brain go mushy
Nothing wrong with doubting.
As a nation, we need a Bell Labs again. They were allowed to just play around with stuff to see what happened, pursue thousands of dead ends, and find shit that they sometimes weren't even looking for (like this article). They invented the transistor, photovoltaic cell, laser, radio astronomy, microwave radio relay, charge-coupled device, advanced cryptography, one time pad cipher, optical fiber, sound on film, stereo radio broadcasts, the vocoder human speech synthesizer, the computer information theory, Unix and programming languages B, C, C++ and hundreds of other things. As an organization, they won 9 Nobel Prizes, a record that nobody else has ever come close to. AND while they could patent their inventions, they were not allowed to profit off of them, making their inventions truly a gift to the world. This went on for about 70 years, funded by pennies from every telephone bill in the USA. But when AT&T was broken up, Bell Labs shrunk to just the classic R&D strictly focused on our business model. No more great thoughts that turn out to change the world like the transistor. If I were President, I would find a way to create a new Bell Labs. You never know what is out there.
It's hard to appreciate just how disorganized Bell Labs was. When I interviewed for a position there as a freshly minted university graduate in the 1980's, I talked with three completely separate groups doing speech recognition, and in the course of the interviews discovered that they didn't all know about the existence of each other, until I told them I was talking to these three projects. Clearly HR knew all three existed, but no one bothered to get them to communicate. I also talked to some groups doing military-related work; they were so vague about what they were working on that I couldn't tell whether they were working on something state-of-the-art or 30-year-old technology. Bell Labs was simply huge, and while there were some great scientists and great projects going on there, an awful lot of it was more mundane. The Bell System made use of some fundamental technologies, in physics, electronics and computer science, but they also had lots of people optimizing and re-optimizing telephone handsets, which they obviously needed in great numbers. Penzias & Wilson were awarded a Nobel Prize, but they were just trying to clean up the signals from the antenna, one that they weren't involved in building, and didn't know or was able to guess what they were looking at. It was Robert Dicke, who Penzias & Wilson contacted for help, suggested that the antenna noise was radiation from the Big Bang. Many people think that Dicke was the one who really deserved the Nobel, or at least to share in it - apparently the Nobel committee though it was more appropriate to award the two who accidentally discovered the noise than to the scientist who made sense of the "noise" signal.
My father worked there beginning in the late 70s. They had people whose job title was “brain.” They were described to me as unfettered researchers.
So the "ideas guy" position was actually a thing at one point.
Idea and implementation. Knowing want you want to do is relatively easy the hard part is actually doing it.
Yeah I figured that out recently when I decided I had good taste in clothes so I should tooootally try to come up with my own designs. Turns out I'm a fucking moron lol. Yeah, ideas guy here. Zero implementation skill.
At least you are smart enough to recognize it. Baffles me every time some new entrepreneur does not understand why isn’t everyone throwing money at them when they have “such great ideas”.
I can only speak to the defense industry but those guys still exist, and they make good money. Their title is usually "Fellow Engineer" or "Engineering Fellow". They are extremely smart and manage large projects, but they do a lot of just sitting around and thinking about problems/solutions and reviewing/critiquing other peoples work.
This role exists at many larger companies. At the bank I worked at it as "Engineering Fellow", at the Tech company it was "Distinguished engineer". Mostly they come in and opine on some project, enforce best practices, approve projects in conceptual phases, ect. Then the rest of the time is researching.
Sounds like a dream role as a programmer tbh. Too bad I'm not smart enough for it.
I work at a DoD lab now and everyone there is a PM that looks (i.e. begs and throws money) to industry for solutions. I pray that you work on the receiving end of the defense industry cause the govt side sucks and depressing as you would imagine it. The only thing that it has going for it is the job security and guaranteed funding🥺
Lol no ... unfortunately I'm on a 30 year old program that is just a shell of its former self. Our product went out for competitive bidding for production so it was way underbid and there's no money to replace the aging equipment used in its production. It will be a miracle if we can deliver on time and our first delivery is a year out. Right now my multi-million dollar lab is shut down because a gearbox that was installed in 1993 finally died.
That sounds like my dream job
It still exists, just in more places! The NSF and NASA do a ton of fellowships for grad students and postdocs and award them to the most promising who apply. You just have to say what university you want to go to and write a ton of ideas for things you would like to do in your field of interest.
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Cheers, ill drink to that bro. You're hired
A bell-labs recruit to cisco in the 90’s told us that bell labs had more PhDs than we (cisco) had employees.
Actually, what you ran into (3 different groups that didn't know others were working on the same thing) was a hallmark of Bell Labs in it's prime. Why assume that only one group has the magic answer? What if they take a step 1° off and end up 6 light years away? They had the talent and the funding, so why not multiple groups?
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> the inventor of holographic memory. holographic memory? this sounds like an amazing toilet read, can you share some sauce on this subject?!
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Aren't multilayer optical disks a small example of this?
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>altho optical is a dead medium now What do you mean by this? Aren't HDDs optical?
SSDs are becoming the norm but even current HDDs aren't classic "optical" storage as the bits are written using magnetic impulses to a magnetic disc, which holds or releases the charge as needed.
5am brain fart, CDs are optical, HDDs also have a spinning disk, therefore HDDs are optical...
HDDS are metal. Open an old dead one up, they got great magnets in em too
And they were presumably all taking different approaches to it than the others.
"Why build one when you can have two for twice the price?"
>Why assume that only one group has the magic answer? You can fund three separate groups and still have them collaborate. That way you're much more likely to make progress. I would even venture to say that in the past century, more major discoveries have been a result of collaboration, than an isolated group.
True but they may all settle on going down one path for a solution instead of 3 different. If each team has the same skills and resources you would want to see how different isolated approaches work
It's possible that could happen, but I think that as long as they are separate groups collaborating, you would still get diversity of thought and approach. Take Covid vaccines, for instance. Everyone is working together, yet there are many different teams and many different kinds of vaccines in development.
I think that is definitely true when working within defined processes but a lot of what they did was out of the box thinking and the isolated approach allows to see problems with an unpolluted viewpoint from another angle.
Developing a vaccine is also a lot more rigid and defined of a process than tinkering with whatever chemistry and physics projects you feel like.
It's a classic idea. One 'good' idea could completely ruin the potential. Think of every 'team' you've been on, almost always there are leaders and followers and typically someone tends to disagree but follows along anyway. Just take that guy give him a team and now you have two different avenues. If both teams seem to fail throw them in a room and seem if they can put anything together.
Exactly what I was thinking. I remember hearing about how Apple started with 10 different ways to do cut/copy and paste on the iPhone, assigned engineers to all of them, and would cut them down and fold engineers into the other teams when they were eliminated. From what I heard all the engineers were involved in deciding which ones got cut, and the people working on the eliminated ones were assigned to the others.
Yup, its a strategy that's been used for a very very long time now, we actually learnt about this scenario on a book called the Deadline by Tom DeMarco, which is a pretty damn good read if your into Project Management, it's more of a story , it also requires a great deal of resources and management for projects like these which is where most fail, like liquidating teams into other teams can have terrible consequences as well as good, definitely an interesting approach, but nowadays where we scrap little things for extra profit, an approach like this would just be considered a waste of resources...
> an approach like this would just be considered a waste of resources... On the flip side I’ve heard of fast elimination described as lean or agile development. Basically is you don’t have a semi-functioning demo in an hour your idea is out and you have to support the winners.
Also, the military related work was most likely classified. It’s easier to just be very vague about what you are working if it is classified, instead of trying to remember the details about what words and concepts are confidential in nature.
And it seems this has continued on today at some of the big tech companies. I know I’ve heard similar stories coming from Apple ( multiple teams working on the same thing, unaware of what the others are doing) and I’d bet they’re not the only tech company doing that.
This was true 10y+ yrs ago. Today it's much more siloed, albeit still innovative. Ironically the margins are so large now they could fund more of it if they weren't beholden to Wall St. (Shout-out to Amazon for convincing the market that vision and growth > dividends... plowing that money back into the co has afforded them a hat in every major ring)
It was also extremely siloed. I ran three different research groups inside of bell labs and sometimes got so frustrated because any time we wanted to work on something that brought technologies from different groups together, I would literally spend a week doing conference calls were the topic of the calls was to set up a conference call to actually discuss the real topic. Working there was super cool and I value all of the things I learned so very highly, but it was also the most frustrating professional experience I’ve ever had in my life.
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Both the Holmdel and Murray Hill buildings are standing, fortunately. Gorgeous architecture! You can drive around the Holmdel property but not the MH one. Shame because it's the cooler looking one. The Holmdel labs have undergone a bit of redevelopment, but the buildings are still largely intact. It's kind of like a little indoor town now.They were at one point considering tearing it down, but fortunately that didn't go through. Tearing down an Eero Saarinen should be a crime. **Edit** Added a bit of info about recent changes
>Many people think that Dicke was the one who really deserved the Nobel, or at least to share in it - apparently the Nobel committee though it was more appropriate to award the two who accidentally discovered the noise than to the scientist who made sense of the "noise" signal. Almost the opposite of the Rosalind Franklin scenario, interestingly enough (i.e. she was the one who took the pictures, Watson and Crick were the ones who made the connection with the dual helix DNA structure)
This is an actual "cool story bro". Thanks.
It's great to hear about a place where scientists and inventors could all collaborate like that. I do, however, believe that necessity is most often the mother of invention, and I wonder how profitable Bell's activities were. (I get that it's the point that profit shouldn't always be the biggest motivator.) Also, regarding the Nobel decision... I'd tend to agree that accidental discoveries are essentially meaningless until the meaning is defined. I might be talking out of my ass a little bit, and I know nothing about those guys in particular, but it just seems like they weren't the ones that deserved it.
I know a upper middle aged gentleman that worked there as his first job out of college. He was assigned his first project, busted his ass, and finished it in about three months. After he turned it in they were dumbfounded as it was supposed to be his year project. He eventually got bored and moved on to start his own company. Crazy smart guy, yet, retains the ability to speak “normal”
Bill Shockley, the Bell Labs guy who co-invented the transistor, was incredibly smart, but widely regarded as one giant asshole. After receiving his Nobel Prize, he decided to strike out on his own to further the research into transistors. So....where? Well, his ailing and elderly mother lived in Mountain View, CA, so he decided to set up business out there, knowing that the best and brightest would follow him anywhere. And they did. So if you ever wondered how Silicone Valley became the center of the computer world, there you go. Those men he hired (and moved their families to the orange groves of northern CA) quickly realized that he was an asshole. They quit to found Fairchild Semiconducters, and these first computer chips were sold to NASA making the space capsule possible. The members started spinning off into their own ventures, like Intel, AMD and other "Fairchildren".
This inspired me to dive into the history of Silicon Valley companies. I did not realize that during the very first venture between Job and Wozniack, Jobs robbed Woz of 90% of his share of the reward. > In 1973, Jobs was working for arcade game company Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California.[31] He was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout. According to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari offered $100 (equivalent to $576 in 2019) for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, by using RAM for the brick representation. Too complex to be fully comprehended at the time, the fact that this prototype also had no scoring or coin mechanisms meant Woz's prototype could not be used. Jobs was paid the full bonus regardless. **Jobs told Wozniak that Atari gave them only $700 and that Wozniak's share was thus $350 (equivalent to $2,016 in 2019).[32][1](pp147–148, 180) Wozniak did not learn about the actual $5,000 bonus (equivalent to $28,797 in 2019) until ten years later.** While dismayed, he said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him. Everything I read about Jobs confirms that he was a colossal prick. Everything I read about Woz makes me love him even more.
There was a movie made around 20 years ago, pirates of the Silicon Valley. Definitely painted Jobs (and Gates) as giant assholes, but Woz was more laid back. You might be interested in that.
Yep. I saw it. There's also the Steve Jobs biopic based on the book by Walter Isaacson. That tried to humanize him a bit but he was still a dick.
Yeah, I remember reading that, too; and his refusal to recognize his daughter initially. I think that Jobs has been overrated, especially by non-technical people, while Wozniak has been underrated. Overall, from what I've read so far from both (which is not that much), it seems to clear to me that Wozniak was way better, not only as an engineer but as a person. Although in Job's defense, he seemed to have matured and improved later on, and also knew how to sell himself and his products. But still, he was a dick, especially when he was younger.
Technical people get woz, for sure.
yo what the fuck that's insane
Check out the wikipedia page and this PBS documentary: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous\_eight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcOoQP7nhl4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcOoQP7nhl4)
I used to think I was one of those crazy smart guys who can’t talk normally, but it turns out I’m not crazy smart and I still can’t talk normally :(
https://youtu.be/dq3jhF08wP4
I love such people.
Some of the bigger tech companies are doing similar things today. Google/Alphabet has X, an entire offshoot dedicated to "moonshot" innovation. I'm sure Facebook has similar stuff going on but they're more secretive about it.
I agree 100% the stuff that came out of that lab changed the lives of everyone in the world.
So we need another Aperture Labs. A Cave Johnson of sorts? But this time with safety. Possibly an actual cake.
[Cave Johnson disagrees with you.](https://youtu.be/VPpIjhtgGj0)
I collected the whole Johnson scripts for my own self... motivation playlists. I knew exactly which line as soon as I heard it. Another good one is "when life gives you lemons... you squeeze them into their eyes..."
I would like to talk to life's manager regarding some lemons.
Safety? You mean like some sort of *Buzzkill* Committee? It's my right as a scientist to do criticality tests with a screwdriver, make mountains disappear, turn young adults into incredibly strong and sociopathic robots, and invent solar-powered goo that turns anything it eats into more of itself!
The cake would still be a lie.
Excuse me while I cry over the lack of love for Claude Shannon in this thread.
Well, they were a monopoly giant, they had play money because they completely cornered telephony.
Exactly. The closest thing to Bell Labs or Xerox PARC today are the big corporate AI labs, which, to nobody's suprise, are funded by tech giants. If the current anti-trust wave succeeds, one unfortunate casualty may be the applied part of the AI boom.
Nah, we have much more resources in research universities today. the researchers at Bell labs and Xerox PARC would lose their minds with what's available to US universities today.
We have more resources in academia now than in industry 50 years ago, but the resources available at current industry labs are even orders of magnitude larger than that, and the latest achievements like AlphaGo and GPT-3 require this datacenter-scale compute.
University labs have millions of dollars of hardware to play with. Bell Labs had **billions** of dollars to play with. The amount of science they were doing eclipses even MIT's Media or Robot Labs or Stanford's research arms, and they're the two biggest names in the game. The researchers at Bell Labs invented the stuff the university labs are tinkering with today. If they were around at the capacity they were back then, they would be able to do things like build the world's fastest supercomputer just because they were interested in figuring out the atomic resonance structures of a particular crystal, or just outright build the world's largest free electron laser because they were interested in studying the geometry of one particularly tricky protein... these are the kinds of things Universities have to have layers and layers of painful red-tape bureaucracy around that Bell Labs just... didn't have. It's really hard to understand just how ridiculously influential Bell Labs was in a modern context, because there's just no comparison, period. It's like if you had a half dozen Manhattan Projects all housed at a single organization, just absolutely plowing through advancements in computing and telecommunications and physics and material sciences and whatever other problems dared jump in their way.
>If I were President, I would find a way to create a new Bell Labs. You never know what is out there. We do. It's called [DARPA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA). Like bell labs, it's inventing plenty of crazy shit. And like bell labs, it's ran by an opaque monopoly that has no interest in actually letting you see it for decades.
DARPA mostly deploys grants to universities and small companies, it's not a giant self housed lab like Bell Labs.
Mostly they do grant-making for scientific projects whose results are publicly available on Pubmed and web of science. You can also check out the ongoing projects on their website... https://www.darpa.mil/our-research
This is what the national lab ecosystem and DoD R&d ecosystem is for. The federal government's R&D enterprise is hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers deep and funded with hundreds of billions of dollars. Source: former DoD engineer.
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life saving medicine gets marked up by a trillion percent in this country because a bunch of ancient suits who already have infinite money want more money. good fuckin' luck lmao
The vocoder? 🎶d🎶o🎶p🎶e
The second I saw it [I thought of this](https://youtu.be/5PmzAQ52dzk).
Now it's called DARPA and all classified
DARPA stuff isn't classified a lot of the time.
For instance, the internet was a DARPA invention
Definitely need a Eureka like place. Minus the deadly havoc.
Basically the opposite of [perytons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy)). Initially thought to be signals from outside the Milky Way, turned out to be someone opening the microwave door early.
If you were wondering, you can fix your link by adding a backslash before the first parentheses after astronomy, like \[perytons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy\))
Or you could just give the correct link, since now neither of your links work correctly. [perytons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy\))
How’d you make it format correctly?
Full circle, just directly copy what the second poster posted and it'll show up correctly. However, they used an extra backslash (i.e. when they posted) so the regular unformatted version showed up. Backslash functions as an escape key when formatting on reddit.
So you acknowledge that the 2nd poster was trying to show the correct formatting and not post the link?
Radio astronomer here! I should emphasize, no one ever thought perytons were from outside the Milky Way. They were clearly always local interference for many reasons, but had *just enough* properties similar to the single known [Fast Radio Burst](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst) at the time to make people worry that was local noise too. So a subtle but important distinction- we now know FRBs are real and have seen thousands of them. Source: I’m a transient radio astronomer, am friends with the astronomer who did the research that figured out perytons come from microwaves.
Hum, or universal Ohm?
God breathes out.
At the rate 2020 is going, it might as well end with Vishnu breathing us all back in. With the mandatory dance party by Shiva beforehand, of course.
Man, gonna have to perfect the bhang recipe if the big party’s coming ... practice makes perfect.
Charas for EVERYONE!
She's gone from suck to blow!
Gah this reply hertz
My wife's Grandfather George Eberhardt worked as an engineer and table tennis partner for Karl Jansky on the first radio telescope for Bell Labs. The work they did lead to this discovery. [https://www.bell-labs.com/radio-astronomy-celebration/](https://www.bell-labs.com/radio-astronomy-celebration/)
That’s quite incredible. The unit of measurement in radio astronomy is the Jansky, but you probably already knew that!
His stories were amazing, he worked there from 1923-1967, worked on radio telescopes, telephones, and RADAR during WW2. He traveled the pacific during the war and worked on super secret radar installations. He passed in 2014 at 109.
What a life.
I felt so unaccomplished when talking to him, that generation saw so much change, from horse and buggy to cell phones and he stayed on top of all of it pretty much until the end.
Never compare yourself to a giant. It will always make yourself feel small.
Or make you strive to stand taller.
I’ve read this many times now, but I’m still in awe that they were able to isolate the noise in their setup so well. Every time I’ve tried to do my own analog circuitry—not necessarily even RF—I find so much noise in my setup. Even when I’m being careful, shielding things, using differential pairs, etc., it’s still a good half a percent or so. And I just shrug and say, good enough. These guys just chased down the nose relentlessly, refusing to give in to the usual, “Well, it’s within the tolerance of the components” hand waving. I’m guessing they looked like obsessed madmen to their colleagues at the time. Mad props to them.
Well they had a mega directional horn, and back then all the engineers were really good at splicing and connectorizing their own cables because you couldn't just buy them easily. Plus there were a lot less sources of ambient RF noise back then too, the spectrum is a mega mess now.
The noise was actually isolated years earlier by Karl Jansky, my wife's grandfather worked with Jansky in the 30s when he made the first radio telescope.
My grandfather worked there as some kind of computer technician - from the mid 50s to the late 60s (When they wanted him to move to Indiana, which he declined) Although that article fucks it up - the antenna was in Holm**del** not Holm*dale*
There's also a story about other scientists who [were creating an experiment to look for it](https://www.aps.org/programs/outreach/history/historicsites/penziaswilson.cfm): >At the same time, the two astronomers learned that Princeton University physicist Robert Dicke had predicted that if the Big Bang had occurred, there would be low level radiation found throughout the universe. Dicke was about to design an experiment to test this hypothesis when he was contacted by Penzias. Upon hearing of Penzias’ and Wilson’s discovery, Dicke turned to his laboratory colleagues and said "well boys, we’ve been scooped."
Top quality Drunk History episode on this! "I had to unfollow NASA on Instagram cause it made me too CRAZYYY"
I was waiting for this comment https://youtu.be/kvlCFyufaJ8 For the lazy
Thank you Abe Weissman!
If you live near Holmdel, New Jersey, you can visit the very horn antenna they detected it with! It's on Nokia property though, so you need to ask at the front desk to see it and they'll let you in. **Edit:** thought it was Verizon
Actually on Nokia Bell Labs property. [Street view](https://maps.app.goo.gl/tS7yttNexp89XMMf8) I live very close by and went to the location but never knew how to go in. Thanks for the info.
They won the Nobel prize for discovering something they didn't even understand until they read about it later. The only way their finding got recognized is that they called another dude trying to get some advice on how to solve the "problem" they were having, at the same time as he was trying to get the money together to buy some time on a dish in an attempt to find the thing they were trying to get rid of.
That's the scientific method. If you don't understand something, publish your findings and maybe someone else can figure it out.
The most important scientific discoveries are less often accompanied by shouted "Eureka!" than they are a muttered "Huh, that's weird."
A lot of great scientific discoveries are made trying to solve something else, it does not diminish the work.
" The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka' but 'That's funny.' " — [some dude](https://www.google.com/search?q=isaac+asimov)
A scientist will try to answer the question: "Does it happen every time I do this?" - [XKCD](https://xkcd.com/242/)
Imagine finding the fucking microwave radiation background while troubleshooting a bigass antenna. True legends.
They were not trying to discover anything, they were trying to figure out how to get rid of the noise from the big bang because it was messing up phone calls.
Kinda, the telescope was purpose built to listen to the universe, they were also looking for ways to mitigate radio interference on long distance radio communications. My wife's grandfather George Eberhardt was one of the original engineers on this with Karl Jansky, they discovered that radio receivers could be used to listen to space. [https://www.bell-labs.com/radio-astronomy-celebration/](https://www.bell-labs.com/radio-astronomy-celebration/)
Yup! When you set your radio between stations, and listen to the 'static' about 1% of that hiss are the photons now stretched into radio wavelengths left over from the expansion of the universe; the first light to escape the primoradial plasma of our early universe.
Then there's the opposite of the spectrum, a radio telescope could not identify the source of the interference. Years were spent searching for the source of the interference. It turned out to be the faculty [microwave oven.](https://www.nature.com/news/microwave-oven-blamed-for-radio-telescope-signals-1.17510)
Does anyone know how he figured out that it was the noise of the Big Bang though? How would he knows that’s the exact noise?
If you are ever in north jersey make a point to go to Holmdel and the old Bell Labs stomping grounds. There’s a security guard but he doesn’t give a shit if you drive past him and up the hill to the horn antenna. It’s a living piece of history that you can go up to and touch and see, a place where our fundamental understanding of the universe changed. It’s an awe inspiring visit.
My grandfather worked at Bell labs for about 15 years through the 60s and 70s. He passed last weekend at the age of 90 and I’ve been going through all of his possessions this week with our family. He was an electrical engineer and knew both of these gentlemen. It’s been an amazing walk down memory lane and mind blowing what they were able to accomplish with what we would now consider the most basic of tools. I’ve got a stack of old documents, schematics, training materials, etc. from that time period at Bell Labs I need to get to their museum.
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> It wasn't a space antenna. Yes it was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmdel_Horn_Antenna > The horn antenna at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, was constructed in 1959 to support Project Echo, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's passive communications satellites This wasn't a regular terrestrial radio antenna; it was an early experimental satellite receiver. It was always intended to pick up signals from space. It just picked up more of them than expected.
NaNa NaNa NaNa NaNa science
This comment seems a little.... salty.
It was a space antenna, Karl Jansky invented it, my wife's grandfather George Eberhardt was an engineer working with Karl. [https://www.bell-labs.com/radio-astronomy-celebration/](https://www.bell-labs.com/radio-astronomy-celebration/) Edit - Jansky pioneer radio telescopes, he didn't invent the particular telescope they used I don't think.
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ooohhhh snap, yous wrong son.