Arno Allan Penzias

Arnold Allan Penzias ( born April 26, 1933, Munich) is a German - American physicist and astronomer.

Penzias received in 1978 along with Robert Woodrow Wilson the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Penzias was born in Munich in a German - Jewish family. The parents ran a leather shop in Munich. As the conditions of life in Nazi Germany were increasingly untenable for the family, she was planning to emigrate to the United States. In the spring of 1939, Arno Penzias could leave at the age of six years with his younger brother on a Kindertransport to England. His parents followed a little later, and the family emigrated shortly after the outbreak of war in December 1939 on the Georgic in the U.S., where Penzias 1946 was naturalized. In 1951, he finished high school, and earned a bachelor's degree in 1954 at the City College of New York. At Columbia University, he received in 1958 a master's degree, the PhD with Charles Hard Townes was 1962.

Along with Wilson, he worked in 1965 in Holmdel, in the U.S. state of New Jersey, with the help of a large radio antenna, which belonged to the Bell Laboratories. The two came across a disturbing background noise, which was from all directions and at all times the same. The two studied one years in vain for the cause of the continuous hiss that made their actual experimental work impossible. They checked all the devices and circuits, but could not make determine cause.

Robert Henry thickness, sought in the neighboring Princeton University with a working group on the background radiation, concluded after a phone call the two that they had found the predicted by George Gamow radiation accident. A short time later, two articles in the journal Astrophysical Journal published. The article by Penzias and Wilson described how they were pushed to the background radiation and thickness explained in the second article, what they were doing.

Awards