This old-style television set, complete with antennae to pick up broadcast signals, is considered tremendously archaic by modern standards. Yet these antennae are, in some sense, a very specific type of radio telescope, and can be used by a clever-enough scientist to actually reveal the Big Bang. (Credits: Andreas -horn- Hornig/Gbleem of Wikimedia Commons)

How to prove the Big Bang with an old TV set

If you have an old TV set with the “rabbit ear” antennae, and you set it to channel 03, that snowy static can reveal the Big Bang itself.

When it comes to the question of how our Universe came to be, science was late to the game. For innumerable generations, it was philosopher, theologians and poets who pontificated on the matter of our cosmic origins. But all of that changed in the 20th century, when theoretical, experimental, and observational developments in physics and astronomy finally brought these questions into the realm of testable science.

When the dust settled, the combination of cosmic expansion, the primeval abundances of the light elements, the Universe’s large-scale structure, and the cosmic microwave background all combined to anoint the Big Bang as the hot, dense, expanding origin of our modern Universe. While it wasn’t until the mid-1960s that the cosmic microwave background was detected, a careful observer could have detected it in the most unlikely of places: on a run-of-the-mill television set.

The GOODS-North survey, shown here, contains some of the most distant galaxies ever observed, a great many of which are over 30 billion light-years away already. The fact that galaxies at different distances exhibit different properties was our first clue that led us towards the idea of the Big Bang, but the most important evidence supporting it didn’t arrive until the mid-1960s. (Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (UCSC), P. Oesch (UCSC/Yale), R. Bouwens and I. Labbé (Leiden University), and the Science Team)