Arno Penzias
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Arno Allan Penzias
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1978
Born: 26 April 1933, Munich, Germany
Died: 22 January 2024, San Francisco, CA, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ, USA
Prize motivation: “for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation”
Prize share: 1/4
Work
Radiation falls toward the earth from outer space. This cosmic radiation initially appeared to become weaker as wavelengths of the radiation became shorter. However, when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson studied cosmic radiation in 1964, they discovered that microwaves with a wavelength of about 7 centimeters were stronger than expected. At first they thought that the results were caused by distortions or faults in the measurements, but that was not the case. This cosmic background radiation probably is a remnant of the Big Bang when the universe was created.
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