Accidentally discovering the Big Bang

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While trying to improve methods for satellite telecommunication, two scientists named Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson heard an annoying noise in all of the transmissions they were testing. Contemporary Physics professors, Nial Tanvir from the University of Leicester and Sarah Bridle of the University of Manchester, tell the story alongside Arno Penzias himself – through the power of archive audio – of how the two men slowly figured out that this noise was evidence for a latent heat in the universe left over by the Big Bang. (Image: The Bell Telephone Laboratories satellite communications centre, New Jersey, 1960, Credit: Nasa.)