Arno Allan Penzias

Arno Allan Penzias 1933-, German-American physicist, b. Munich, Germany, Ph.D. Columbia Univ., 1962. He fled Nazi Germany with his family and after finishing school began work at Bell Telephone Laboratories. In 1964 he and colleague Robert Wilson began monitoring radio waves in the Milky Way galaxy with a radio telescope and discovered cosmic background radiation. Their discovery has been used as evidence in support of the "big bang" theory that the universe was created by a giant explosion billions of years ago (see cosmology ). Penzias and Wilson shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics with Peter Kapitza .

Penzias, ArnoAllan (1933– )German‐Americanphysicist. In the early 1960s he and R. W.Wilson were using a low-noise horn antenna in connection with satellite communications, and picked up a mysterious, persistent signal. They consulted R. H.Dicke and colleagues, and concluded that they had detected the cosmic microwave background. This, the single most important piece of observational evidence for the Big Bang, gained Penzias and Wilson the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.