In 1964 two physicists at a telephone company’s research lab accidentally discovered something that became one of the most significant discoveries in the history of cosmology.
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were given access to an old corporate antenna at Bell Labs. Their task was to gather some useful data about radio signals from the Milky Way Galaxy.
When they started using the equipment they soon noticed a background static which was continuous and increasingly annoying. They tried pointing the antenna in many different directions but the static never changed.
For over a year they tried figuring out the source of the static with no luck. They even thought it might be due to pigeon droppings on the antenna, so they cleaned it and made sure no pigeons came near it. But the signal still remained constant.
Then one day by pure luck Penzias was talking to a friend who mentioned that another physicist named Robert Dicke had a theory that if Big Bang actually happened there must exist a faint background radiation throughout the entire universe.
Hearing this, Penzias was stunned. This is exactly what he had been detecting for over an year and could not explain.
Penzias and Wilson contacted Dicke and this is what led to the discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. In 1978 both Penzias and Wilson received a Nobel Prize in physics for this discovery.
One of their colleagues jokingly said most people look for gold and find dung. These two went out looking for dung and found gold.