What is Arno Penzias known for?
I'm best known for co-discovering the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964 with Robert Woodrow Wilson at Bell Labs. We were working on a sensitive horn antenna designed for satellite communication, and we kept picking up a persistent, uniform noise that we couldn't eliminate—no matter how carefully we cleaned the antenna or pointed it away from known sources. After ruling out everything from pigeon droppings to New York City interference, we realized the signal was coming from all directions in the sky. That noise turned out to be the afterglow of the Big Bang, the oldest light in the universe. It was a classic case of the data speaking for themselves. We weren't looking for it; we were just trying to get rid of the noise. That discovery earned us the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 and provided the first direct experimental evidence for the Big Bang theory.
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