Arno Allan Penzias

Arno Allan Penzias was born in Munich to a Jewish family that fled Nazi persecution via the Kindertransport to Britain before emigrating to the United States in 1939. He studied at City College of New York and earned his doctorate from Columbia University under Charles Townes. Joining Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, Penzias focused on microwave radio astronomy.

In 1964, while using the Holmdel Horn Antenna to search for faint radio signals from the Milky Way, Penzias and colleague Robert Woodrow Wilson detected an isotropic, persistent low-level thermal noise that could not be accounted for by instrument defects or terrestrial interference. Physicists at Princeton University identified this signal as the relic thermal echo of the early universe, the cosmic microwave background radiation. The discovery transformed modern cosmology from speculation into a precision observational science, earning Penzias and Wilson half of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics. Penzias later served as vice president of research at Bell Labs and became a venture partner in Silicon Valley.