Earlier discovery of cosmic microwave background

In his book _The First Three Minutes_, Steven Weinberg devotes a chapter to explaining why the 3 degree Kelvin cosmic microwave background -- the signature of the Big Bang -- wasn't discovered until 1965.

It needs some explaining. The microwave background was first predicted in 1948 by George Gamow and others, and the technical means to detect it were in place by the early 1950s. The equipment needed was fairly cheap and involved no major technical leaps. (By 1965 it was so easy that it was discovered by accident, by two guys who were looking for something else.)

Weinberg's explanation is basically that the 1948 Gamow paper predicting the background was seriously flawed -- it assumed the universe started as a bath of hot neutrons, an idea which was proven wrong almost at once -- and that the correct prediction, which didn't rely on the neutron business, got tossed out with the bathwater. And after that, nobody was looking.

If that seems a bit thin... well, maybe it is. It seems like OTL's discovery came rather late. By 1964 it was ripe and then some; two teams were starting to look, and then Penzias and Wilson stumbled across it by accident. (And picked up a Nobel for their trouble,thanks very much.)

So say someone looks at the Gamow paper and says, "hm, even if this is wrong, the background radiation should still appear" and writes a paper to that effect. A few years later, someone else gets a modest grant. The background is first detected a dozen years earlier than iOTL, in 1953.

Any effects?

-- I'm not sure there are, much. The Big Bang crushes the Steady State sooner. This in turn might nudge certain branches of particle physics forward a bit. Maybe things like the electroweak connection get sussed out a bit earlier; the Standard Model of particle physics might be in place by 1970. But cosmology is going to stall out for a decade until the first IR satellites are launched; ordinary radio telescopes will be able to see the background, but won't be able to measure its variations.

I think this might be sort of a dead end, though I welcome correction.

Anyone?


Doug M.
 
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