A bang, not a whimper?

Speakers at a recent session of invited papers before the American Physical Society (28 Jan.) discussed the question whether in its remote past our present universe may have been a small “cosmic fireball,” which, among other things, burned deuterium into helium at a temperature of about $1010 °K.$ R. H. Dicke first suggested that black‐body radiation from the fireball may still exist as microwaves. The theory was discussed subsequently by Dicke and three other Princeton professors (P. J. E. Peebles, P. G. Roll, and D. T. Wilkinson) in the 1 July 1965 issue of the Astrophysical Journal [142, 414 (1965)] in connection with new observational evidence reported by Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson of Bell Laboratories in the same issue. The observations showed background radiation at 7.5 cm with an antenna temperature of around 3 °K above contributions from the atmosphere and the antenna itself. Some time later Roll and Wilkinson (Phys. Rev. Letters, in press) found a temperature of about 3.0 °K at a wavelength of 3.2 cm. Both determinations fit the spectrum of a black body of about 3 °K, and it is proposed that this spectrum may represent the greatly redshifted radiation of the cosmic fireball. The speakers at the meeting were Peebles, Wilkinson and Wilson.