Clifford’s expression made any comment unnecessary.
Aub continued. “So I started getting curious. Like I didn’t like the idea of being just some kind of barrel organ that you turn the handle on and tunes start coming out. I started digging around on the quiet for myself—contacts, whispers, guys who know guys who know guys—you know the kind of thing; there are ways and means. Anyhow, to cut out all the details, I traced the paper back to the place you work—ACRE. You know a guy there called Edwards, and another one called Jarrit?”
“Edwards is number two there,” Clifford confirmed. “Jarrit’s his boss.”
“Yeah, they were mixed up in it. Seems they got contacted by the famous Fritz on the back of the Moon . . .”
“Zimmermann?”
“Zimmermann. That’s him. I couldn’t find out how he got to know about it but . . .”
“That’s okay; I know that much myself,” Clifford told him. Unable to contain a grin, he went on to describe briefly how he had been driven by pure exasperation to bring the whole thing to Zimmermann’s notice by decidedly irregular channels—an action that Aub seemed to approve of wholeheartedly and without hesitation.
“What happened after that?” Clifford asked.
“Well, it looks like your pal Zimmermann and his bunch had been hitting all kinds of problems to do with cosmic background radiation.” Aub went on to describe how the astronomers at Joliot-Curie had been involved with measurements of the spectrum of background radiation that pervades all of space and is absolutely regular in whatever direction one cares to choose. The Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe required the early stages of the Bang to be characterized by a totally radiation-dominated situation. In the expansion and cooling that followed, the radiation would become decoupled from matter and continue to exist as a steadily cooling background field, exhibiting the energy distribution spectrum of a blackbody radiator. Calculations based on this model showed that in the course of the twelve billion years thought to have elapsed since the Bang, the temperature of this background radiation would have fallen to somewhere in the region of fifteen degrees Absolute.
Measurements taken from the late 1960s onward had indeed established the existence of an isotropic background field having a temperature of three degrees Absolute—close enough to the theoretical figure when allowance was made for all the uncertainties involved. It all seemed to be very much as Big Bang predicted.
Because of the relatively narrow radio “window” through the Earth’s atmosphere, however, the range of these early measurements was necessarily confined to the band of wavelengths between 3 millimeters and 70 centimeters; inside this range the agreement between the observed energy distribution and that of an ideal blackbody was good. But later on, as more information became available, first from satellite-borne and subsequently from lunar-based instruments, a steadily increasing departure from the theoretical values became evident. The further the range was extended, the larger the error became. Big Bang Theory was meticulously re-examined, but still the answer came out the same—the energy distribution of the cosmic background radiation ought to be as for a blackbody. But it wasn’t. Could it be then that the radiation being detected hadn’t come from any Big Bang after all? If not, where did it come from?
“Then,” Aub explained, “your paper appeared. It described particles appearing and disappearing spontaneously all through the universe, with each such event producing a pulsed k-wave which, in normal space, would be detected as radiant energy. Particle annihilations were concentrated in masses and resulted in the phenomenon of localized gravity; what about the particle creations, spread evenly and diffusely all through space? What kind of radiation would they produce?”
Clifford had become mesmerized by Aub’s account.
“At that point,” the young man continued, “Zimmermann became interested and instructed his mathematicians to run computations of the cumulative energy-distribution profile that should follow from your equations. The results matched extremely well with the observed data that classical Big Bang models couldn’t explain. That was when Zimmermann became excited.
“He passed details of his findings and their implications back to the senior management at ACRE, at the same time urging that attempts be made to test other aspects of the theory. Since much of the theory concerned basic particle phenomena, ACRE reported back to the folks in Washington, who then brought in Berkeley plus a few other places. That’s how I came to be involved and how, as you’ve already seen, another prediction of your theory was found to have been already proved.