Robert Woodrow Wilson
active c. 1936, Houston, Texas, United States
American radio astronomer who, with Arno Penzias, discovered the cosmic microwave background; they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Wilson was born in Houston, Texas, studied physics at Rice University, and earned a PhD from Caltech in 1962. He joined Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, where he and Arno Penzias conducted radio astronomy with the Holmdel horn antenna. While calibrating the system, they measured a nearly uniform excess microwave noise arriving from all directions in the sky.
After excluding instrumental effects and local sources, they recognized the signal as the cosmic microwave background, consistent with radiation left from the universe's hot early phase. Wilson and Penzias shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics. Wilson continued at Bell Labs and later worked at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Nobel-winning work
Wilson shared half of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics with Penzias 'for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation'. While testing the 20-foot horn antenna at Bell Labs (1964–65) they measured an isotropic excess temperature near 3.5 K at 7.35 cm wavelength. The signal, matching the Big Bang relic spectrum, provided the decisive evidence for hot Big Bang cosmology over the steady-state theory.
Workplaces: Bell Telephone Laboratories
United States