So the COBE guys have been officially recognized as millenium-class badasses.
And no, I’m not talking about the guys brandishing meat cleavers at astoundingly expensive chunks of cow, though admittedly those guys are impressive. COBE is the Cosmic Background Explorer, the satellite which examined the cosmic microwave background--the mind-bogglingly faint hiss of our universe’s afterbirth.
The men and women who designed, built, launched and operated it are the people who found and definitively mapped the infinitesimal fluctuations studding that attenuated, diaphanous veil of energy.
Who extrapolated the positions of those irregularities and realized that what they were looking at was the variation of densities in the universe’s inception.
Who recognized--in those 0.001% variations in a pattern composed of energy only 2.73K, less than 3 degrees above absolute zero--what would one day be incomprehensible expanses of flaring, pulsing, dark-crowned, starlit extravagance.
Who mapped the universe’s pregnancy with the galaxies and intergalactic matter which define its limits.
These are the human beings who looked back 14 billion years and saw the warp and weft of the space and time in which we live.
These are the people who conquered, for now and always, the idea that products of a pattern cannot see its origins.
These are the homo sapiens who extended the reach of our species’ minds to the bounds of the universe in which they exist.
Oh, yeah--they also won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics today. But after being shown the borders of space, the beginning of time, the magnitude of human understanding, Sweden
