Unknown to them, just thirty miles away at Princeton University, a team of scientists led by Robert Dicke was working on how to find the very thing they were trying so diligently to get rid of. They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as "white dielectric material," or what is known more commonly as bird shit. They climbed into the dish and placed duct tape over every seam and rivet. They rebuilt instruments, checked circuits, wiggled wires, dusted plugs. For a year the young astronomers did everything they could think of to track down and eliminate the noise. It came from every point in the sky, day and night, through every season.
In 1965, they were trying to make use of a large communications antenna owned by Bell Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, but they were troubled by a persistent background noise-a steady, steamy hiss that made any experimental work impossible. Their names were Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson.
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