Nearly half a dozen failed attempts/visits later, I finally got to see this piece of scientific history - thanks mainly to dear friend Pradeep and a kind-hearted employee of Alcatel, who shall remain nameless.

Constructed in 1959 to support Project Echo [NASA's Passive Communications Satellite Project], the Horn Antenna is located on the [former] Bell Telephone Laboratories campus in Holmdel, NJ. Made of aluminum, the antenna is 50 ft in length with a radiating aperture of 20x20 ft. In 1965 while using the Horn Antenna, Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson stumbled on the [Cosmic] Microwave Background Radiation [more info here] that permeates the universe.

This discovery, hailed as the most important in modern astronomy since Hubble's finding of expanding universe, provided the evidence that confirmed George Gamow's and Abbe Georges Lemaitre's Big Bang Theory of the creation of the universe. This forever changed the science of cosmology — the study of the history of the universe — from a field for unlimited theoretical speculation into a subject disciplined by direct observation. In 1978 Penzias and Wilson received the Nobel Prize for Physics for their momentous discovery.

Holmdel, NJ.

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