A slice of the static on an old untuned television was the afterglow of the Big Bang, which means millions of people spent decades staring at the oldest light in the universe without knowing it.

A slice of the static on an old untuned television was the afterglow of the Big Bang, which means millions of people spent decades staring at the oldest light in the universe without knowing it.

The claim is true, though the version of it that gets repeated most often is softer than it sounds. When an analog television was tuned to a channel with nothing broadcasting on it, the snow on the screen and the hiss from the speaker were built from several sources of noise at once. One of those sources was the cosmic microwave background, the faint radiation left over from the hot, dense early universe. A part of the static really was ancient …