Robert Woodrow Wilson

Who is Robert Woodrow Wilson?

Robert

Woodrow Wilson (born January 10, 1936) is an American astronomer. He

won the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics, together with Arno Allan Penzias,

for their 1964 accidental discovery of the cosmic microwave background

radiation or CMB (the prize for that year was also shared by Pyotr

Leonidovich Kapitsa for unrelated work). While working on a new type of

antenna at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, they found a source of

noise in the atmosphere that they could not explain. After removing all

potential sources of noise, including pigeon droppings on the antenna,

the noise was finally identified as CMB, which served as important

confirmation of the Big Bang theory. Wilson studied as an undergraduate

at Rice University, where he was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa

society. His graduate work was done at California Institute of

Technology. Wilson and Penzias won the Henry Draper Medal in 1977.