Only birdbrains would bring up a family inside a microwave antenna built for satellite communications. But that's just what they were, the pair of pigeons which had set up home in the throat of the giant "horn" antenna at Holmdel in northern New Jersey. Every time the antenna swung round the sky, it upended the nest and the hapless pigeons had to rebuild it. But rebuild it they did. Soon the interior of the antenna was completely coated with pigeon droppings, or "a white dielectric material", as radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson liked to call it. Could this be the source of the maddening radio static that had been driving them crazy for months? Or was it something else?
SWEEPING pigeon droppings wasn't what Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson had in mind when they answered the call from AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories for radio astronomers to come and ...
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