Arno Allan Penzias Biography

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World of Scientific Discovery on Arno Allan Penzias

Arno Allan Penzias was born in Munich, Germany, in 1933. His family fled from the Nazi regime and came to the United States. Penzias attended Columbia University and, in 1961, went to work at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey.

Penzias had received a Ph.D. for his research in using masers (an acronym for "microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation") to measure radio signals coming from intergalactic hydrogen. It was his hope to use the nearly 20-foot (6-m), horn-shaped antenna at Bell Laboratories to continue his work, but it was in use at the time, sending and receiving signals that were being bounced off the earth-orbiting Echo satellite.

While waiting for the antenna to become available, he met Robert Wilson (1936- ). Wilson, a Texas native, had attended Rice University and the California Institute of Technology before coming to Bell Laboratories. Like Penzias, Wilson was interested in radio astronomy and had made a map of the radio signals coming from the Milky Way galaxy.

Finally, in 1963, the antenna was theirs. As part of the preparation for making their sensitive measurements of the sky, they had to calibrate the antenna and identify any outside "noise" that would affect their work. Once identified, it would be possible to compensate for it. They used liquid helium to cool an artificial source of radio waves and measured the source. This measurement would serve as a reference foundation allowing them to determine how much noise the antenna's electronic control circuits were adding into their instruments.

Once that was done, they began their work observing the sky and immediately ran into a major problem: unexplained excess noise was everywhere. Thinking man-made noise might be the problem, they aimed their antenna directly at New York City to see if that would cause the interference to increase. There was no difference. They even chased roosting pigeons from the antenna, hoping for an improvement. There was none. If the source was coming from an object within the solar system, such as the Sun or a planet, a change should be noticed as the Earth moved along its orbit; however, none was apparent. Since Penzias and Wilson could not get a definite fix on the position of the noise, they could eliminate celestial objects, such as our Milky Way or other galaxies, as the source.

Penzias and Wilson were bedeviled by this problem for nearly a year, and all they could conclude was that the infernal noise appeared uniform in all directions. They eventually contacted the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and learned that P. J. Peebles and Robert H. Dicke, both at Princeton University, had theorized that the entire universe should be permeated with a faint background radiation ("noise"). This would be the remains of the big bang that had created the universe billions of years ago. Wilson found this very hard to believe, having been educated by scientists who had embraced the steady state theory of cosmology, which held that matter was created slowly and constantly. He searched for another explanation but could find none.

Astronomer George Gamow, one of the leading supporters of the big bang, had suggested as early as 1948 that it should be possible to detect the residual effects of the creation of the universe. Even with the passage of billions of years something faint should be detectable, just a few degrees above absolute zero (0° K). It should be red shifted into the radio portion of the spectrum, where it would be "heard" rather than "seen." The noise measured by Penzias and Wilson was exactly typical of an object radiating at about 3° K.

Both men remained skeptical, however, and it was not until the early 1970s that enough additional data had been gathered for scientists to conclude that Penzias and Wilson had, indeed, detected the remnants of the big bang. This put a large nail into the coffin of the steady state theory of creation. The measurement of the background radiation has been called one of the most important discoveries of the century. In 1978 Penzias and Wilson shared the Nobel Prize for physics.

Since then, Penzias has served as senior technology adviser to Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs Innovations. He has also written several books, including The Grace A. Tanner Lecture: In Human Values (Computer-Enhanced Human Beings) (1987), Ideas and Information: Managing in a High-Tech World (1989), and Digital Harmony: Business, Technology, and Life after Paperwork (1995). Penzias became a venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, a California-based venture capital firm specializing in information technology and medical and life sciences, in 1998.