that's what robert wilson and arno penzias discovered in the mid-1960s at bell labs. they aimed a radio antenna at the sky and noticed that no matter where they pointed it, they received the same steady microwave signal, which sounded like static. with the help of some princeton physicists, they realized that this wasn't any old static, rather it was very likely to be the spectral remnants of the big bang, the leftover vibrations from that initial explosion of densely packed energy that presumably gave us our universe. for this discovery of the cosmic microwave background, penzias and wilson received the nobel prize in physics in 1978. the connection to music lies in fourier analysis, or more properly, fourier analysis as it is created in the setting of a sphere, which is how we analyze the microwave background. fourier analysis as we've been describing it is about periodic functions, those regularly repeating patterns in time. fourier showed that these could be broken up into sinusoids of different frequencies. on a sphere, rather than get sinusoids, spherical symmet