Okay, yeah – Disney+’s WandaVision is full of fun callouts, Easter Eggs, and hints about the Marvel Cinematic Universe to come, but episode 4, “We Interrupt This Program” had the biggest of callouts – literally.
Just after astrophysicist Dr. Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) shows up in the episode, she spots “a colossal amount of CMBR” – Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation – on her handheld device. In it, she IDs superimposed longer wavelengths on it, prompting her to ask for an “old” TV – one with a tube (a cathode ray tube). The whole town of Westfield, NJ seems to be covered in it…or something.
Later, when Director Hayward and Agent Jimmy Woo show up, Hayward gives the definition of CMBR as “relic radiation dating back to the Big Bang,” to which Lewis adds that a broadcast frequency is entwined in it – the shows we see as sitcom episodes in the series.
Now – astrophysicists, cosmologists and physics teachers aren’t necessarily an excitable bunch, but this call out to the CMBR in of all things, the debut MCU series on Disney+ was a fist-pumping, “Hell yeah it is!” kind of moment.
Okay, maybe we are excitable.
And we cannot resist a teachable moment. Let’s talk about the cosmic microwave background radiation.
CMBR: A Big Claim’s Big Evidence
The heart of science is straightforward: claims require evidence. In cosmology, there’s no bigger claim than the universe began with the big bang. The evidence that supports it is just as big – the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Think of classical hypothesis language: “if/then.” If the universe began life very small, hot, and dense, and expanded uniformly in all directions, then we should see some signal of that early state.
Let’s look.
Press rewind on the universe. It’s expanded since it began, so going backwards means it takes up less and less space. Less space means that the particles that make up the universe move faster. Faster means hotter. Keep going back, the universe gets smaller and hotter.
Around 13.8 billion years back, we reach a point where things are so small, hot, and particles are so fast that the basic bits of matter – protons, neutrons and electrons can’t hold on to each other to form atoms and molecules. This is just a handful of minutes after the actual big bang.
Press pause – subatomic particles are evenly blended in this high-energy, extremely hot, opaque soup. This is plasma, and it’s the entire universe. It’s like the heart of a star.
In that plasma is also high-energy radiation moving as waves, most likely energy released from matter – antimatter annihilation earlier in the universe’s history. The radiation is “scattered” as it moves through the plasma – it hits an electron, bounces off, hits another electron, and on and on.
Got that? Whole universe, much smaller than it is today, all hot, high energy plasma, with no matter in it more complicated than protons, neutrons, and electrons, with radiation bouncing around.
Press play. The universe keeps expanding. Press pause again about 400,000 years after the big bang.
The Plasmaverse Ends
As the universe expands, it cools. Particles lose some of their energy and move just a little slower. Given enough time, enough expansion, and enough cooling, negatively charged electrons settle in with positive protons, forming the very first atoms. That’s the end of plasma. Since the early universe is the same throughout, and cools evenly, the plasma state ends all at once. Like a light switch being flipped, the entire universe goes from opaque to transparent, instantly. And that hot, high-energy radiation bouncing off the electrons is free to go everywhere.
Press fast-forward. The universe continues to expand since the switch from opaque to transparent and the radiation changes. High energy radiation means high frequency, its wavelengths packed together tightly. But as the radiation moves through space, space itself is growing. Formerly narrow wavelengths get stretched out. All the radiation’s original energy now takes up more space, so there’s less energy in the waves, and less heat.
This is the CMBR – the oval shape is an artifact of trying to present a sphere on a two-dimensional surface, but this is in the sky, everywhere you look. The differences map out to small density differences in hte early universes which were the seeds of the universe’s present-day structures image, ESA and the Planck Collaboration
Stop that fast forward now, around 13.7 billion years after the universe left its plasma state behind. That relic radiation has cooled down and now has a wavelength that corresponds to the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. And it’s everywhere – look about 13.8 billion light years away in any direction throughout the universe with a telescope that can detect the frequency of the CMBR, and you’ll see it. It’s everywhere.
Go back to that if/then – if the universe started because of something like the big bang, there should be a signal of that small, hot and dense starting point that expanded outward that we can see today. There is. The CMBR is everywhere and astonishingly uniform in its temperature and distribution – exactly what you’d expect to see if it all came from a single source, billions of years ago.
Oh, and there are slight (very slight) differences in the CMBR as we observe it, and those are a snapshot of the ever so slight differences in density in the plasma just before it went transparent. It’s a whole other topic to get into, but long story very short – those differences in density are why we have a universe with galaxies, stars and planets, rather than just a universe-sized volume uniformly filled with hydrogen atoms and subatomic particles.
And one more thing while we’re t-crossing and i-dotting – the CMBR is one piece of evidence that the big bang happened. It’s very compelling, and has stood up to challenges, but it’s not the only piece of evidence for the big bang.
Let’s take this back to WandaVision, yeah?
Fitting the CMBR Into WandaVision and the MCU
The idea that Dr. Lewis finds the broadcast frequency superimposed on the CMBR that’s surrounding or making up Westview? That’s a nice nod to the fact that, back when we all had TVs with tubes in them, a small percentage of the static that you could see between the channels was, literally, CMBR. The tube of the television sets is sensitive enough to pick up some of this background radiation that’s everywhere. CMBR has a history with televisions. It only makes sense (albeit in an MCU way) that a part of Wanda’s manipulation of the CMBR comes out as television signals. Maybe its that her day-to-day actions require a stronger, or different type of energy, and that specific energy can be picked up by old television sets, just like bits of the real CMBR.
Wanda manipulating the CMBR and it shows up on old school televisions? Nice touch. image, Disney+
Dr. Lewis’ initial observation of a “colossal amount” of CMBR over/in Westfield is, well…okay, going from what the CMBR is, theoretically impossible to have concentrated to this much of a degree. Can’t make that work with astrophysics, but can make it work in the MCU. The idea that Wanda can manipulate the CMBR suggests, in a hand-wavey way, that reality has always been this way around Westfield. Yeah, sure – it wasn’t, but now that Wanda did her stuff, it always has been. Remember – CMBR…it’s a look back to the start of the universe. You can’t just make new CMBR. If you’re looking at it, it’s always been there.
Admittedly, that’s a head-scratcher, but a little more easy to digest is that Wanda’s manipulation of the CMBR is just MCU science shorthand for saying that she is powerful like nothing ever encountered before. Back in the day, Marvel comics were the home of metaphors for power – characters could “rend reality asunder” or an effect would be “mind-shattering.” Times change. Audiences get more sophisticated. Wanda can mess with the CMBR. She can change reality.
Yeah, yeah – Thanos and the snap of Infinity War. But Thanos had the Infinity Gems. Wanda’s changing the fundamentals of reality, making it what she wants it to be, just by herself. In MCU science-ese, this ties Wanda tightly to the quantum realm of Ant-Man and the Wasp, as well as the multiverse hinted at in Doctor Strange. Whole worlds of possibilities are open – cosmic scale beings, different worlds and realites, planet-consuming threats, and hopefully, a quartet of cosmic explorers that show up to help us all figure it out.
The MCU is getting weird and is going to get a lot weirder.
For more:
There have been three major missions to map the CMBR, in order: WMAP, COBE, and Planck. Each added more detail than the one before.
The story of the discovery of the CMBR is terrific, and shows just how human the process of science is.
More on the small differences in the CMBR? They’ve been really, really well-mapped, and are just a wealth of information about the early universe.
Want to put this all in perspective, get you some history of the Big Bang and early universe.
Advertisement
