Science
Two engineers tried to fix noise in their antenna and found the echo of the Big Bang
In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson kept picking up a faint, uniform hiss in a radio antenna in New Jersey no matter where they pointed it. After ruling out pigeon droppings and every equipment fault they could think of, they realized they had detected the cosmic microwave background, leftover radiation from the universe's hot early state. It became the strongest evidence for the Big Bang and won them the 1978 Nobel Prize.