Arno Penzias

Origins and early life

Arno Allan Penzias was born in Munich on 26 April 1933, the son of Karl and Justine Penzias, in a Jewish family whose grandparents had come from Poland and were among the leaders of the Reichenbachstrasse synagogue.

Work and career

As a small boy he saw his family rounded up for deportation to Poland and sent back, and began to understand, as he later wrote, that something bad was happening, something to do with being Jewish. In the late spring of 1939, shortly after his sixth birthday, his parents put him and his younger brother, Gunther, on a train to England with the Kindertransport, and the family sailed for New York in December 1939. The family settled in the Bronx, and he graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 1951 and in physics from the City College of New York in 1954, before two years as a radar officer in the Army Signal Corps.

After a doctorate at Columbia University under Charles Townes, he joined Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, in 1961, and stayed there for thirty-seven years. In 1964, working with Robert Wilson on the large horn antenna at Holmdel, he found a faint microwave signal that came equally from every direction and that no fault in their equipment could explain. The physicist Robert Dicke, whom he consulted, suggested that it was the radiation predicted as a remnant of the Big Bang, and the cosmic microwave background, reported in 1965, became landmark evidence for that theory.

In 1978 he and Wilson shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, the other half going to Pyotr Kapitsa. He went on to find interstellar molecules, among them in 1973 the first deuterated one, DCN, became vice-president of research at Bell Labs in 1981, and later advised start-ups for the venture firm New Enterprise Associates. He died in San Francisco, California, on 22 January 2024, at the age of ninety.