Arno Penzias (1933–2024)

Arno Penzias was born to a Jewish family in Munich, Germany. His parents were Justine (Eisenreich) and Karl Penzias, and he had a younger brother, Gunther. His comfortable childhood ended abruptly at age six in 1939, when the family was rounded up by the Nazis for deportation to Poland. His parents sent the two boys on a Kindertransport to the UK for safety. His mother received her exit permit a month later, just a few weeks before World War II began, and was able to join them in England; his father, who had already arrived, was interned as an "enemy alien." In December 1939, the family was reunited and allowed to leave for the USA. They settled in New York City, where his parents found work. Penzias went to school in the Bronx and learned English. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School and City College of New York, a tuition-free institution, where he majored in physics. Following raduation, marriage, and two years in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, Penzias entered Columbia University in 1956. His army experience helped him get a job as a research assistant in the Columbia Radiation Laboratory under Nobel Prize-winning scientists I.I. Rabi, P. Kusch, and C.H. Townes. In 1961, after completing his PhD, Penzias went to work at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he remained for 37 years. From 1967 to 1985, he was a lecturer and visiting professor in Astrophysical Science at Princeton University. In the 1960s, working with his research partner Robert Woodrow Wilson, he discovered the background radiation (now known as Cosmic Microwave Background or CMB) left over from the primordial explosion billions of years ago from which the universe was created -- the Big Bang hypothesis. For this work, Penzias and Wilson received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics, sharing it with Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa (whose work was unrelated). The two also received the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences in 1977. Their horn antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey was later decommissioned and designated a National Historic Landmark. From 1976 to 1979, Penzias was director of the Bell Radio Research Laboratory. He later served as vice president of research and as vice president and chief scientist at Bell Labs. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975.