"stephen hawking: for thousands of years, people have wondered about the universe." "did it stretch out forever or was there a limit?" "and where did it all come from?" "a moment of creation, as the church thought or had the universe existed forever, as many philosophers believed?" "the debate between these two views raged for centuries without reaching any conclusions." ", but while i was growing up the debate was virtually settled." "one view of the universe prevailed." "narrator: what sparked creation?" "for half the 20th century, the best minds of cosmology were consumed with that question, and the struggle between two conflicting theories." "it all began right here." "we're at an altitude of just over a mile, and there's cool air coming in from the ocean," ". on top of a layer that's in the los angeles basin below so there's a pressure lid in the atmosphere that keeps the warm air and the haze down below and keeps the smooth, cool air flowing over the mountaintop." "the images here are the crispest a in the north american continent." "narrator: the year was 1917." "mount wilson in los angeles was chosen for construction" "of the largest and most optically perfect telescope the word had known its observations would call into question our vision of the cosmos." "but at the same time, as if on cue, albert einstein was already pursuing some answers of his own." "his theory of relativity held predictions that would ultimately bear out the revelations from mount wilson." ". still, he was bothered by one baffling contradiction the models of the universe you build in general relativity have to have the universe either expanding or contracting." "they can't be static." "this disturbed einstein." "his assumption that the universe is static was so strong, he didn't see the expansion or contraction of the universe as a prediction of the theory." "he just thought of it as a problem that had to be overcome by changing the theory in some way." "narrator: einstein mistakenly dismissed the possibility of an expanding universe, striking it from his theory." "s he simply fudged his formula with what he called a cosmological constant." "but einstein should have had more confidence." "it would take a catholic pries t to tell him so." ". his name was george lemaitre" "lemaitre believed science and religion could go hand in hand today, father michael heller agrees." "heller: there are two ways of making dialogue" ". between science and religion one is a direct dialogue, when theologians and scientists sit together, and they try to speak to each other," ". and usually it is a disaster but there is another way of making a dialogue between science and religion, when, for instance, a priest or a religious man simply does science." "narrator: centuries ago, the scientific world produced within the church had a profound influence on the world beyond." "the vatican maintains that tradition." "today it is hosting a cosmological conference." "father heller has been invited to rome to attend." "heller: the vatican established the pontifical academy to have scientific counsel to the pope." "i think it was an intention to engage the church into the dialogue with science." "and the best way of doing this dialogue is just doing science within the vatican ." "narrator: in the early 20th century, the burning question debated at the pontifical academy was," "?" "how did the universe begin for some, the scriptures held the answer." "for lemaitre, science did, as well." "heller: george lemaitre was elected a member of this academy." "he studied both theology and mathematics." "he was rather a mathematician by training, but he got very early interested in einstein's theory of relativity." "narrator: a priest and theorist as devout as he was radical, lemaitre had a way of winning people over." "heller: unfortunately, i never met him, but i learned a lot about him." "he was a big man." "he liked good food and good drink." "he had a very good sense of humor." "he was very often laughing in a good company," ". and his laugh was contagious" "narrator:" "lemaitre had the gumption to challenge einstein and to present the church with his own ideas of genesis." "the universe, he said, had a precise moment of creation." "he imagined everything sprang from a dense, primeval atom." "he invoked hard science with a flair for poetry." "heller: "the evolution of the world can be compared to a display of fireworks that just has ended, red wisps, ashes, and smoke. e few standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the slow fading of the suns," "and we try to recall the vanished brilliance" "" of the origin of the worlds." "hawking: this cataclysmic beginning and expanding universe that lemaitre proposed are what we now accept as a big bang." "few scientists took the beginning of the universe seriously." "narrator:" "lemaitre had to rise to his theory's defense." "he even won an audience with the master, himself, to no avail." "dowker: einstein definitely rejected the model as something unpleasant, and he told lemaitre that his physics was not very good." "everyone assumed that the universe was static, and einstein was no exception." "so probably the idea that the universe was expanding was just simply not something that he was prepared to consider." "narrator: the conflict had reached a stalemate, and there it would have remained," ". had it not been for a new marvel of technology balliunas: the 100-inch telescope was the largest in the world when it was built in 1917." "it drew observers here, the people who could use the telescopes the best" ". to tickle out the details of how the cosmos operated" ". narrator: edwin hubble was one it would take an observer of his uncanny instinct, plus the priest and the theorist, to resolve the ultimate riddle of creation." "balliunas: edwin hubble came to mount wilson in the early 1920s." "for his thesis guess, for his thesis he had made a guess, which is unlike hubble to have done, a speculation." "he thought that some of the faint, wispy clouds that you could see in the nighttime sky -- and these are clouds on the sky, not clouds in the earth's atmosphere -- these nebulae, as they're called," "had a spiral shape, have a spiral shape." "and he thought they might be external to our own galaxy." "narrator: his conjecture was a conceptual breakthrough we had long imagined our galaxy" ". as the whole of the universe assumed to be gaseous object s within our milky way." "now hubble trained his gaze on them." "newly revealed by the 100-inch telescope," ". the nebulae shown at a distant frontier of space they were, in fact, galaxies themselves." "hubble set out to capture them in photographs." "to track a cloud in space as the earth is turning took great patience and endurance." "to take a picture of it, keeping thousands of stars in perfect registration, was a monumental feat." "balliunas: some of his exposures are 30 or 40 hours, which means he did this for one night, left the plate in, came back the next night and re-opened the plate and began exposing again." "hubble would be standing on this platform all night long, guiding and guiding and guiding." "narrator: hubble's persistence was rewarded with images of breathtaking clarity." "suddenly, he could make out the distinct presence of individual stars within the fold of the andromeda spiral." "by meticulous measurements of their brightness, he could tell how far away the galaxy was." ", he found that this, our nearest neighboring galaxy was over a million light-years away." "he turned around our notion of the size of the he increased the volume by something like a factor of a thousand million, because now all these faint smudges of light were not interior to our small milky way galaxy," "but were each individual galaxies holding 100 billion stars or so." "so he increased the size of the universe into this vast cosmos that we know today, and also made our place, simultaneously, made the universe large and own place very humble." ". narrator: but hubble didn't stop there the light from distant galaxies, he could tell they are speeding away." "balliunas: hubble looked at galaxies, and as he analyzed the light of the galaxies, within the light that he is looking at he could tell whether or not and how fast the galaxies are moving towards or away from us." "the and he found out that the more distant a galaxy was, the faster it was moving away from us." "this is hubble's law." ". narrator: that galaxies were racing apart meant one thing the universe is expanding." "incredible as the discovery was," ". hubble approached it with a scientist's caution it was the same impulse that had prompted einstein to question the predictions of his theory." "but when george lemaitre heard of hubble's claim, he knew this was the proof he'd been waiting for." "in 1931, while einstein was visiting hubble, lemaitre seized the moment to pay them both a surprise call." "balliunas: so imagine these three incredible ideas all in the same room at the same time " ", einstein's very beautiful theory of general relativity" ", which talks about space-time lemaitre's elegant solution, mathematical solution," ", that says an expansion is allowed from a primeval atom a primordial start, and then hubble's evidence taken from observations that traced the motion of galaxies from this initial expansion." "hawking: when theory and observation come together, science often takes a great leap forward." "the basis of modern cosmology was established at this meeting." "looking back, i can recognize this as the foundations for my own work." "[ ding ]" "balliunas:" "lemaitre had to work through einstein's theory through the mathematics which are extraordinarily complex." "and after presenting this to einstein and pressing and pressing and pressing his point, and then having the evidence of hubble there to top this all off, einstein was beginning to be convinced of the evidence for the expansion." "he begins to realize, as lemaitre presses his point, that he had made a great blunder -- that is, putting in this cosmological constant to offset the natural expansion" ". that falls out of his theories einstein rose at the end of the meeting and said," ""this is the most beautiful thing i've ever seen."" "narrator: from then on, einstein called the adjustment s he'd made to his theory the biggest blunder of his life." "hubble's work, lemaitre, and einstein, i think, make up the big bang of cosmology." "that is, this is the origins of modern cosmology." "hubble's work started it all first by investigating what these nebulae were, and then seeing this motion," ", this large-scale motion of the universe, the expansion how that linked to einstein's theory, showing that the universe had a beginning" "and this is where cosmology has risen from." "hawking: i was fascinated by the expansion of the universe even when i heard of it as a boy at school." "but many scientists didn't like the idea that the universe had a beginning, a moment of creation." "from cambridge university." "fred hoyle wasn't content to voice his rebuttal to his students alone." "he took to the airwaves, delivering his message straight to the public." "the question of how the universe began, he told them, was far from settled." "hoyle: perhaps like me you grew up with a notion that the whole of the matter in the universe g was created in one big ban at a particular time in the remote past." "what i'm now going to tell you is that this is wrong." "narrator: fred hoyle made it his personal mission to challenge what he derisively christened" ""the big bang."" "the name stuck." " it was hoyle versus the primeval atom - the steady state theory versus the big bang." "the debate consumed young cosmologists." "today, dennis sciama teaches in italy." "as a young graduate student at cambridge, he sided with hoyle." "you've got to remember at that time there were not many people working in cosmology, so one or two rebellious characters could make a very big impact on the subject." "hoyle: now this big bang idea seemed to me to be unsatisfactory even before detailed examination, for it's an irrational process that can't be described in scientific terms." "sciama: so in 1948, they proposed the famous steady state theory which was a contradiction to the big bang, accepting the universe was expanding, but supposing that as the galaxies" ", move away from one another new matter was created between the galaxies continuously on this idea." "narrator: hoyle argued that an expanding universe need not necessarily have begun g." "rather, it could simply be endlessly spreading, generating more and more additional matter to fill the voids." ", if you go backwards in time, there's no increase of density and therefore no big bang." "so you have this rather grand picture of a universe which is expanding, but which stays the same in it's overall properties for all time." "i personally liked the theory because i thought it had a grand architectural sweep." "it just seemed so grand to have a universe" ", that didn't change in its large-scale structure ever and had no awkward initial moment." "[ bell chimes ] narrator: still, a steady state universe that rejects a moment of creation offers no accounting for how its matter was first formed." "this was the one advantage big bang proponents had over hoyle's followers." "they could explain how the elements that make up the cosmos were created in the throes of the big bang itself." "sciama: fred hoyle developed this idea that we wanted to do without the hot big bang." "the question was where to make the heavy elements." "hoyle had to find places in the universe which were hot enough for the nuclear reactions to make the elements we now see." "narrator: the search had its beginnings on this planet." "only 92 simple elements are the building blocks for everything on earth." "where, then, did they come from?" "going back to basics is a consuming pursuit for geologist chris halls." ". to study a site, he uses traditional panning techniques heavy elements don't dissolve, so they can be sifted out." "in fact, they stand up to any natural forces the earth can muster." "gold isn't subject to any natural forces the earth can muster to chemical breakdown in the atmosphere." "and once you have gold accumulating in a river, it's likely to stay there." "one suspects, of course, that things which are so durable one suspects, of course, must themselves have had their origin in some place of very intense physical conditions." "narrator: no process on our planet is extreme enough to produce the elements." "so proponents of the steady state school had to turn elsewhere." "they looked to the stars." ", halls: the great achievement" ", in terms of understanding the origin of the elements came from the theoretical work" ". done by the astronomers of the steady state school and they were able to demonstrate what was possible in terms of putting elements together to synthesize new and heavier elements in stars." "narrator: deep in space, vast clouds of hydrogen roll and churn." "gravity pulls them together." "the pressure builds and the temperature rises igniting a massive fusion reaction." "the hydrogen atoms meld together to form helium, a heavier element." "this is the process these stars burn so brightly." "they are hot, dense furnaces stoked by fusion." ", as gravity exerts its relentless pull inward the energy of a star's nuclear reactions pushes outward." "these opposing forces are held in awesome equilibrium, as long as there is enough hydrogen to keep the process going." "once the star uses up that fuel, its fusion reactions begin to die down." ". but gravity is unrelenting the star is squeezed ever tighter." "the helium atoms fuse." "in a more massive star, elements yet heavier begin to form, one after another, until at last it hits a dead end with iron." "the process of fusion can go no further." "the fate of the star then depends on its size." "in small stars, gravity is too weak to crush them any further." "they cool and gently fade into oblivion." "but large stars suffer a more violent death." "halls: in massive stars, the masses draw together in a tremendous cataclysmic contraction, and this produces a kind o f elastic nuclear rebound" ", which drives all the matte r outwards in a gigantic burst" ". which we know as a supernova narrator: it is the single most violent event in the present universe." "in a few short seconds, a supernova produces more energy than the sun will in its lifetime." "when astronomers analyzed the light of supernovas, they saw the signatures of the elements heavier than iron." "supernovas scatter their seeds across the universe." "they spill into other dust clouds" ". to form new stars, planets , and eventually life itself halls: the steady state theorists proceeded to build up stage by stage a logical explanation of how these elements could originate successively by synthesis in the stars," "but the problem was that they had to find the fundamental fuel to start the process itself." "and of course that fuel is hydrogen." "and the million-dollar question is, where did the hydrogen come from?" "narrator: fred hoyle thought hydrogen must somehow be created continuously throughout space." "but nothing short of a new law of physics would make that possible." "just as baffling, astronomers detected e far more helium in space than could possibly have com from the fusion of hydrogen in stars." "the obvious answer was that the big bang itself" ". created hydrogen and helium in its monstrous explosion that was the last thing hoyle wanted to concede." "halls: fred hoyle said that if there had been a big bang, there should be a trace of that event preserved for us in the universe " ". a kind of fossil radiation and this is exactly what the big bang theorists went out to look for." "narrator: if, indeed, the universe began with a great explosion, it would have been so intense that even today some faint afterglow should be in evidence across space." "hawking: as a research student working for a doctorate, i realized how significant it would be if the radiation could still be detected some 15 billion years later." "by now, it would have cooled to almost the lowest temperature possible," ". minus 273 degrees centigrade" "conceived a way to detect the big bang one of his students was david wilkinson." "wilkinson: one afternoon he came in and he was -- seemed particularly excite d about something." "he started outlining this idea about proving that there's a big bang." "well, of course, at that time the big bang was very controversial." "not everybody believed it, by a long shot." "the steady state theory was very popular." ", but one thing the big bang would predict if there were a big bang, is that there must have been some heat radiation in it." "thought it was a long shot , kind of a risk, such a radical idea, but it looked like it was possible to do an experiment and check it out." "and it wasn't going to take a lot of time, and i didn't have anything else to do, so i decided to pitch in and help on the experimental side." "narrator: wilkinson was 28 years old when the opportunity presented itself to take part in what might be the discovery of a lifetime." ".you have to imagine that we are embedded in this explosion so if you're thinking of an explosion, say, a bomb going off, and you see this big fireball, we're actually inside that fireball." "so the radiation is coming from all directions." "we're not outside looking at it and having it go by us." "we're embedded inside, so we see the same thing looking all around." ", narrator: their tools were primitive by today's standards but a directional horn antenna , hoisted on a rooftop, would hear whispers from the moment of creation." "it's purpose -- to detect the minute amounts of radiation in space left in the wake of the big bang." "wilkinson: we can measure the temperature up above if we put a good calibrator, what's called a cold load, at this point." "if you pour a little liquid nitrogen on it, we'll know exactly what its temperature is." "the radiation from the sky comes into this horn," "with the radiation coming into this h then we see a reading that's the difference between the temperature of space and the temperature of our cold load." "narrator: but while david wilkinson and his group were fine tuning their equipment, events were conspiring against them." "bob wilson had just started work at bell laboratories." "a radio astronomer by trade, he'd been recruited by the company's research department." "bell, too, had a special horn-shaped antenna." "its purpose -- to receive satellite radio transmissions." "wilson: when we were given control of the horn reflector, we saw something which we had hoped not to see." "that is that there was more noise coming out of the horn than we expected." "we expected a little bit from the earth's atmosphere, an even smaller amount from the walls of the horn itself, and then we thought space would essentially zero, so that should be it." "narrator: but zero, it wasn't." "wherever wilson's team pointed their detector, it picked up an annoying hiss." "the radio noise didn't stop, even if the antenna was directed at empty space." "wilson: we worried because we were living on a hill which overlooks new york city, not the typical place that a radio astronomer would go." "so we turned our horn reflector down and looked at new york city, and there was nothing unusual from there." "new york city doesn't radiate at those frequencies." "so, you know, sort of one by one we eliminated the sources of excess noise that we could think of." ". we still believed in physics what came out had to come from somewhere." "narrator: they pondered the possibilities." "perhaps the hiss wasn't coming from space at all." "maybe there was a problem with the horn itself." "the most obvious was that there was a pair of pigeons living in it, and whenever we weren't using it," ", which was most of the time" ". they would climb up near the cab and roost there s of course they covered it with white pigeon dropping the same as they do all sorts of things in cities." "and we knew that that could very well have an effect." "narrator: so bob wilson and his group of highly qualified radio astronomers spent two weeks cleaning pigeon droppings." "finally the birds were trapped and sent by company mail miles away to whipeny, new jersey." "but these were homing pigeons." "well, a couple of days later , same pigeon's back." ". later on, our technician brought in a shotgun and.." "narrator: that took care of the culprits, but not the hiss." "for another year, the noise lingered." "in the spring of 1965, in desperation, wilson's team phoned princeton university for help." "the call was put through to bob dicke." "wilkinson: we were in bob dicke's office having lunch one day, and the telephone rang." "and his phone rang a lot, so we didn't think much of it, until we heard him say something about "horn antenna."" "" and a few minutes later, "cold load, liquid helium." "so then we perked right up because it was pretty clear that he was talking to somebody who had the equipment that we were building." "this turned out to be arno penzias and bob wilson from bell labs, only 35 miles away." "and bob hung up the phone, and i'll never forget exactly what he said." "his precise words were," ""well, boys, we've been scooped."" ""well, boys, for dicke and his students the quick drive to bob wilson's lab was no doubt the longest rid e they'd ever taken." "when david wilkinson saw wilson's equipment" ". and his meticulous records , he knew there was no mistake the big bang had revealed itself." "hi, there. good to see you." "wilkinson: it was quite disappointing to find out that another group had got there first." "t i personally was only giving i about a 50-50 chance of working anyway." "and then when we found out that, yes, indeed, there was this radiation coming from space that might be coming from the big bang, that of course was very exciting." "this is a paradigm shift in cosmology research, and it would have been nice to be the first to see it." "here you see the antenna, and this is cold load plus... narrator: in a stroke, a half-century of debate was essentially settled." "definitely hotter than the cold load." "sure is." "wilson: the discovery of the background radiation along with a number of other things that were coming up at the same time really drove the final nail in the coffin" ". of the steady state theory i think it would be very hard to support or to understand the source of the background radiation" ". in a steady state universe" "narrator: it's said that lemaitre himself heard of the discovery just days before he died." "in 1978, the ultimate accolade in science was awarded to bob wilson and his colleague arno penzias." "wilson: it was 13 years or something before we received the nobel prize for it." "the nobel prize is given for discoveries." "it's not given for being the best physicist or the best scientist, it's given for discovering things that are interesting or useful to mankind." "i still have a hard time putting myself in the same category as einstein," ", but i do realize that this was an important discovery and feel that i was very lucky to be in the right place when that happened." "and i have enjoyed the results from it." "hawking: radiation was discovered while i was finishing my doctorate." "here at last was observational evidence" ". that could confirm my work" "i had gone to cambridge university because i had wanted to work with hoyle on cosmology and the expansion of the universe." "but luckily for me, i didn't get the supervisor i wanted." "he was hoping to work with fred hoyle, but hoyle was not taking new students at that time, and i was the only other person in the department able to supervise students in cosmology, hen wanted to work on." ". so i became his supervisor and we talked together about various projects." "hawking: i made a bad start at cambridge." "i had just been diagnosed with als, or motor neuron disease, and didn't know if i would live long enough to finish my doctorate." "and i was having difficult finding a problem for my thesis." "you have to write a thesis which contain a substantial original contribution to knowledge." "and that's a very heavy requirement, and it's very unnatural in a way because you are supposed to produce this particular substantial original contribution to knowledge" ". in a given three-year period and so you're forced a bit artificially" "in a given time scale" ",in stephen's particular case, cosmology was fallow at that time, and he couldn't find a really good problem." "and i couldn't find one for him." "narrator: time was running out." "there was less than a year left when a worthy project was finally found." "hawking set his sights on developing a theory to describe the precise conditions for the big bang." "his inspiration was the work of a young luminary of the field." "sciama: roger penrose was by that time a good friend of mine and he was working on a problem which led to a remarkable discovery of his, which i suppose was the most important contribution to relativity since the very early days of the theory," "around 1916 or so." "the issue involved not the whole universe -- that was stephen's later contribution -- but a star." ". narrator: when a large star runs out of fuel, it collapses only one star in a thousand is massive enough to collapse into what's called a black hole." "at the core of a black hole, all the star's matter would be crushed into a point infinitely dense, called a singularity." "it was thought this would only happen if the star was exactly symmetrical," ". so its collapse would be the same in all directions but it seemed altogether impossible that a star could have that quality." "penrose's great claim was to show if a star is big enough it can become a singularity no matter what its shape." "and it so happened that, possibly at my suggestion, steve hawking heard a seminar given by penrose in which he announced this result." "and a little later, stephen said to me," ""but look," he said," ""we can adapt roger's argument to the whole universe."" "in a certain sense the universe is like a big star." "of course the universe is expanding, but if in your mind you reverse the sense of time, then the universe is collapsing." "it's a bit like a collapsing star, very large star." "perhaps you can prove that in that collapse you again must achieve a singularity." ", so going back to the ordinary direction of time it would mean that the big bang origin of the universe would have to be singular." ""should i work on that?"" "so i said that sounds like a very good problem, stephen, yes, i think, because that would be a great discovery." "so he went away, and in his last year he proved his first singularity theorem for the universe, that on the basis of certain very reasonable assumptions, the big bang had to be singular." "hawking: i was awarded my ph.d." "for showing that einstein's general theory of relativity" ". implied that the universe must have begun with a big bang it couldn't have" ". collapsed, bounced, and then have expanded again from lemaitre's primeval atom to my own work" ". had taken only a few decades the case for the big bang was now almost complete." "narrator: almost." "for galaxies to have been able to form," ", the early universe had to have irregularities cooler and denser pockets where matter could have coalesced." "but the radiation signal bob wilson had detected with his antenna" ". should have reflected that instead, the hiss seemed the same in every direction." "if the big bang model was really right," "?" "why weren't there slight irregularities in the signal" "a young cosmologist in california would produce the big bang's final confirmation." "george smoot began a quest to find temperature variations in the early universe, tiny imperfections that would mark the future birthplaces of galaxies." "smoot: for the big bang to be right, we had to look out and we had to see these imperfections that tell us how the universe formed and started expanding, and also what were going to be the seeds" "for the large structure that we see -- that is, the stars and the galaxies" ". and the clusters of galaxies all of those things had to be there." "when you start out, you think, well, we should discover i t pretty easily right away." "we'll point our antenna up here and see what the temperature is." "we'll point it over here and see what the temperature is." "we'll compare and see if we see the variations." "when you start realizing those imperfections are going to be a part in a hundred thousand, it becomes a very great experimental challenge." "narrator: using directional horns like the one built by bob wilson's team, smoot began a series of experiments." "he set out to create a detailed map of the big bang radiation, an image that would reveal the cold spots where galaxies would eventually form." "one thing stood between smoot and his data -- the earth's atmosphere." "he launched giant helium balloons, each as long as a football field." "they had to be big." "their payload of equipment was as heavy as a small car." "but balloons are hard to control." "smoot's equipment often got lost or damaged." "he turned to something more manageable, u-2 spy planes." "but smoot's data took time to collect." "the pilots ran out of fuel before enough accurate measurements could be taken in any one direction." "smoot: from the beginning it was clear to me if we could get into space that was the right way to do it." "i had to wait for an opportunity, s a chance for nasa to say, we're looking for new idea for experiments for satellites that could go into space." "narrator: after years of waiting, nasa gave smoot his chance, the first satellite ever devoted to cosmology, cobe." "smoot: finally, in 1989, they scheduled us for a dawn launch, and it was windy." "if you were on the team, you knew too much that it might go or might not go." "there was this problem and that problem." ". we had a problem in the test there are all these things to be concerned about." "and then it became time for the launch." ". we had only a few minutes left in the window, and it was okay 5, 4, 3, 2... we have main engine start." "smoot: you saw suddenly a second sun, which was the fire out of the rocket coming out." "and i was going, "what's the matter?" "i don't hear any sound."" ", then i realized light goes faster than sound and then suddenly your chest is shaking." "it's like you're being hit at a rock concert, you're standing at the speaker s at the rock concert, just being vibrated like this." "and this thing lifts off majestically and goes up." "it's just a spectacular thing, and you're going, everything is crossed," ""please make it up, please make it up."" "was a spectacular success." "smoot: at the end of that first day, we had made a map that covered half the sky, and it was as good a map as we'd ever had before, but it was way less than what we eventually ended up." "it took a whole year's worth of data, almost 300 million observation s to be summed together, before we got a map that started to show" ". some interesting structure" "narrator: a portrait of the universe as it was 15 billion years ago." ". in its traces is the signature of star systems coalescing" "the colors represent minute temperature differences." "the blue areas are cooler, and it's here matter is beginning to cluster to eventually form galaxies." ". smoot: cobe really puts the big bang on a firm footing not only do you know the big bang is right, but now you have some idea about how structure is going to form." "but also you can learn about how the universe itself was created." "narrator: the project has no w come to an end." "the smithsonian institution is preparing to commemorate cobe's historic achievement." "a single snapshot of creation." "smoot: if you're religious , it's like, d you know, you're seeing go or you're seeing the handwriting of god when he wrote out how he was going to make the universe." "it's like getting the 10 commandments in front of you and being able to read, except instead of the commandments these are, here's how the universe is put together." "s just read between the line and you'll know the recipe for making the universe." "narrator: in this technological cathedral, a successor to cobe called the planck surveyor is being planned." "whatever it is destined to reveal, the big bang seems irrefutable" "in lemaitre's primeval atom, we have found consensus between the claims of the scriptures and the rigors of science." "we are at last witness to the dawn of time." "hawking: in 1975, i was awarded a medal by the pope for my part in proving the big bang theory." "i went back to the vatican in 1981 for a conference on cosmology, this time under a different pope." "he told us that it was fine to study the universe after the big bang, but that we should not inquire into the big bang itself, because that was the moment of creation and the work of god." "if science and religion were now at one, perhaps they were still not quite seeing eye to eye."