The Noise of Creation: Cosmology, Communication and Commerce in the long 1960s
| Dates: | 21 April 2015 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Faculty of Life Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Kendrick Oliver |
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This seminar is part of the CHSTM Seminars Series Feb-May 2015. CHSTM seminars will be held fortnightly on Tuesdays at 4pm in room 2.57 Simon Building, Brunswick Street, Manchester, M13 9PL, with tea and biscuits from 3.30pm. All are welcome and please feel free pass this list on to interested colleagues. The detection of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) in 1964, and its subsequent identification as the decisive evidence in support of 'big bang' cosmology, has been credited with producing a transformation in scientific and public understanding comparable with the impacts of the Copernican revolution and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. There have been many valuable accounts of the discovery of the CMBR, some written or strongly influenced by the physicists and radio astronomers involved. In these accounts, questions of credit and priority have been forcefully contested, often through the use of a discourse of serendipity that was ostensibly self-effacing but also strategic - not just for the individuals who worked on the CMBR, but also for the scientific disciplines and institutions to which they belonged, which were being simultaneously criticized for their 'bigness,' scrutinized for signs that their 'discoveries' were socially determined and forced to negotiate cuts to funding for basic research. This paper, as part of a broader attempt to write a social and cultural history of the origins of the universe, draws upon a wide variety of hitherto-unstudied archival materials alongside the wealth of participant accounts to explain the identification of the CMBR as conditioned by a spectrum of factors and forces, from the personal and the local to the corporate and the global. In particular, it considers the extent to which the confirmation of the big bang theory was dependent upon both the development of AT&T's ambitions to dominate global satellite communications and the company's failure to achieve that ambition, leaving a large horn antenna on Crawford Hill, New Jersey, in the hands of two young radio astronomers who went on to record a precise and persuasive measure of the noise of creation.
Speaker
Kendrick Oliver
Organisation: University of Southampton
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Room 2.57
Simon Building
Manchester
