Wilson, Robert W. (1936- )
American physicist
Robert Woodrow Wilson is best known for the discovery, with co-researcher Arno Penzias, of the cosmic background radiation believed to be the remnant of the "big bang" that started the Universe. For their work, Wilson and Penzias were honored with numerous awards, including the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics, which they shared with Pyotr Kapitsa.
Wilson was born in Houston, Texas. He attended Rice University where he received a B.A. in physics in 1957. He then moved on to the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) for graduate study and received his Ph.D. in 1962. Wilson's thesis work and post-doctoral research involved making radio surveys (the use of radio waves bounced off of stellar bodies to create visual approximations) of the Milky Way Galaxy. When he heard of the existence of specialized radio equipment at Bell Laboratories, he left Cal Tech and accepted a job at Bell's research facility in Holmdel, New Jersey. This was the very same research facility from which Karl Jansky, in the 1930s, almost single-handedly invented the science of radio astronomy. Wilson and Penzias, who had preceded Wilson at Bell Labs by about a year, were about to embark on a research odyssey that would culminate in an extremely important discovery almost by accident.
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