Alpher and Gamow

IN 1948, George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Ralph Herman had investigated an early version of a big bang model. They pointed out that if there had been such an event there should be radiation left over from it. Because of the expansion of the Universe, the radiation should have been redshifted since the beginning, and they calculated that it would have redshifted by now to a blackbody spectrum with a characteristic temperature a few degrees above absolute zero (see the animation in the left frame). This was the radiation that Dicke's Princeton group sought.