Robert Wilson

Robert Woodrow Wilson was educated at Rice University and the California Institute of Technology, where he earned a PhD in 1962, then worked at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey from 1963 to 1976. There, in collaboration with Arno Penzias, he used a sensitive horn antenna to monitor radio emissions and, from 1964, detected a faint, uniform microwave signal from every direction of the sky that indicated a temperature of about 3 kelvins above absolute zero; the signal was identified, with help from a nearby Princeton group who had independently predicted it, as the cosmic microwave background, a remnant of the big bang. Wilson shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics with Penzias for the discovery. He became head of Bell's Radio Physics Research Department in 1976, joined the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in 1994, and was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1979.