Bill Bryson

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson

the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase,

where the universe went from a form we can’t understand to one we almost can.

Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang.

Of course, it is possible that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in Wiltshire or frightening the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in Arizona (they must have teenagers, after all), but it does seem unlikely.