2
PARTICLE BEHAVIOR OF WAVES
The quanta really are a hopeless mess.
Albert Einstein
Figure 2.0. Images of space, captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, show the earliest images of the galaxy, 600 million years after the Big Bang, released on January 5, 2010. UPI/NASA.
Courtesy of NASA. ESA, R. Windhorst, S. Cohen, and M. Mechtley, (Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia, VA), P. McCarthy (Carnegie Observatories), N. Hathi (University of California, Riverside, CA), R. Ryan (University of California, Davis, CA), and H. Yan (Ohio State University, OH).
This image shows a rich tapestry of 7500 galaxies stretching back through most of the universe’s history. The closest galaxies observed today and seen in the foreground emitted their light ∼1 billion years ago. Alternately, the farthest galaxies, a few of the very faint red specks that you would see if the figure was in color, are seen as they appeared 13 billion years ago, or roughly 650 million years after the Big Bang that, started the universe according to the Big Bang theory. This theory predicts that the cosmic microwave background fills all of observable space. Most radiation energy in the universe is in the cosmic microwave background, a faint glow almost exactly the same in all directions, that is not associated with any star, galaxy, or other object. This glow should be strongest in the microwave region of the radio spectrum. Hence, the name cosmic microwave background radiation, because ...
