PHYS 180 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Photon Gas, George Gamow, Photon
Document Summary
Cosmic microwave background: structure formation: formation of everything we see around us today, everything that has a temperature radiates energy (black body radiation, the sun emits radiation in the optical region. They found constant noise that always existed no matter where they pointed the antennae. After months of very careful checks they concluded that the signal was celestial and came from everywhere in the sky. Celestial: coming from the universe: they were not able to find an explanation for the constant background until they communicated with the princeton group. Big bang model at the time and effectively killed the steady state model: recap: 1940s: solid predictions of early universe physics. 1960s: finally a detection of cmb relic. 1990s first measurement of fluctuations: origin of the cmb, the space between stars and galaxies is dark but there is actually a. The idea that electrons were coupled into the radiation through the scattering process.
