Arno Allan Penzias (1933-2024) American Physicist
Arno Allan Penzias (1933-2024) American Physicist, Arno Allan Penzias (1933-2024) Find a Grave Memorial, Biography, Life, Career and Cause of Death
Nobel Laureate Scientist. He was best known for sharing the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics with fellow physicist Robert Woodrow Wilson for their discovery of a faint electromagnetic radiation throughout the universe. Their detection of this radiation lent strong support to the big-bang model of cosmic evolution.
Arno Allan Penzias Personal Details |
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| Born | 26 April 1933
Munich, Bavaria, Germany
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| Died | 22 January 2024 (aged 90)
San Francisco, California, U.S.
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| Known for | Cosmic microwave background radiation |
| Spouse |
Sherry Levit (1996)
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| Children | 5 |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics |
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| Thesis | A tunable maser radiometer and the measurement of 21 cm line emission from free hydrogen in the Pegasus I cluster of galaxies (1962) |
| Doctoral advisor | Charles H. Townes |
| Doctoral students | Pierre Encrenaz |
He was educated at City College of New York in New York City and Columbia University, where he received a doctorate in 1962. In between his education at CCNY and Columbia, he served for two years as a radar officer in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. After college, he joined Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey. During the 1960s, he, In collaboration with fellow physicist Robert Woodrow Wilson, he began monitoring radio emissions from a ring of gas encircling the Milky Way Galaxy.
Unexpectedly, the two scientists detected a uniform microwave radiation that suggested a residual thermal energy throughout the universe of about 3 K. Most scientists now agree that this is the residual background radiation stemming from the primordial explosion billions of years ago from which the universe was created. From 1976 to 1979, he was director of the Bell Radio Research Laboratory. Join TELEGRAM
He later served as vice president of research from 1981 to 1995 and as vice president and chief scientist from 1995 to 1998 at Bell Laboratories, which was spun off as part of Lucent Technologies in 1996. In 1978, he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Wilson for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation. He also received many other awards and honors for his work.