In 1963, physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig postulated the existence of the sub-atomic particles called quarks – the ultimate smallest building blocks of matter. Just two years later, researchers at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, working with a new generation of radio telescopes, found a faint signal emanating from literally the entire sky – wherever they chose to look. At first they attributed the phenomenon to human interference or equipment defects, but astrophysicists soon came to realize that they had detected nothing less than the distant echoes of the primordial Big Bang. They were seeing nearly to the beginning of time and the limits of the universe.