他们不知道，就在50公里以外的普林斯顿大学，一组以罗伯特·迪克为首的科学家正在设法寻找的，就是这两位天文学家想要除去的东西。普林斯顿大学的研究人员正在研究20世纪40年代在苏联出生的天文物理学家乔治·伽莫夫提出的假设：要是你看到空间深处，你就会发现大爆炸残留下来的某种宇宙背景辐射。

　　如何营造一个宇宙.jpg

　　Gamow calculated that by the time it crossed the vastness of the cosmos, the radiation would reach Earth in the form of microwaves. In a more recent paper he had even suggested an instrument that might do the job: the Bell antenna at Holmdel. Unfortunately, neither Penzias and Wilson, nor any of the Princeton team, had read Gamow's paper.

　　伽莫夫估计，那种辐射穿过茫茫的宇宙以后，便会以微波的形式抵达地球。在新近发表的一篇论文中，他甚至提出可以用一种仪器达到这个目的，这种仪器就是霍尔姆德尔的贝尔天线。不幸的是，无论是彭齐亚斯和威尔逊，还是普林斯顿大学小组的任何专家，都没有看过伽莫夫的论文。

　　The noise that Penzias and Wilson were hearing was, of course, the noise that Gamow had postulated. They had found the edge of the universe, or at least the visible part of it, 90 billion trillion miles away. They were "seeing" the first photons—the most ancient light in the universe—though time and distance had converted them to microwaves, just as Gamow had predicted.

　　彭齐亚斯和威尔逊听到的噪声，正是伽莫夫所假设的。他们已经找到了宇宙的边缘，至少是宇宙150亿光年以外的可见部分。他们在"观望"第一批质子--宇宙中最古老的光--果然不出伽莫夫所料，时间和距离已经将其转变成了微波。

　　In his book The Inflationary Universe , Alan Guth provides an analogy that helps to put this finding in perspective. If you think of peering into the depths of the universe as like looking down from the hundredth floor of the Empire State Building (with the hundredth floor representing now and street level representing the moment of the Big Bang), at the time of Wilson and Penzias's discovery the most distant galaxies anyone had ever detected were on about the sixtieth floor, and the most distant things—quasars—were on about the twentieth. Penzias and Wilson's finding pushed our acquaintance with the visible universe to within half an inch of the sidewalk.

　　艾伦·古思在他的《不断膨胀的宇宙》一书中提出一种类比，有利于摆正这一发现的位置。要是你把观望宇宙深处比做是在美国纽约帝国大厦的100层上往下看（假设100层代表现在，街面代表大爆炸的时刻），那么在彭齐亚斯和威尔逊发现那个现象的时候，已经有人发现的最远的星系是在大约60层，最远的东西--类星体--是在大约20层。彭齐亚斯和威尔逊的发现，把我们对宇宙可见部分的认识在大厅的地板上推进了约1厘米。