Robert Woodrow Wilson
Robert Woodrow Wilson ( born January 10, 1936 in Houston, Texas) is an American physicist and Nobel laureate in physics.
Wilson studied at Rice University and at the California Institute of Technology.
He received in 1978 together with Arno Penzias the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (English: Cosmic Microwave Background, CMB). This discovery was made by the two by accident in 1964 while working at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey on a new type of antenna. They discovered a background noise in the Earth's atmosphere, they could not explain. After they had freed the antenna from pigeon droppings, but the noise remained, it was identified in the end as the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. This is seen as an experimental confirmation of the Big Bang theory.