Robert W. Wilson

Robert W. Wilson, born in 1936, American physicist, radio astronomer, and Nobel Prize winner. Wilson shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics with German-born American physicist Arno A. Penzias for their 1965 detection of long-wavelength, low-temperature radio emissions coming from the entire universe, and with Soviet physicist Peter Kapitza, for his studies of liquid helium.

Born in Houston, Texas, Wilson received his B.S. degree in physics from Rice University in 1957. In 1962 he received his Ph.D. degree from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and that same year became a research fellow at Caltech. In 1963 he went to work at the Radio Research Laboratory of Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey. In 1976 he was appointed head of the Radio Physics Research Department at Bell Labs. Wilson became an adjunct professor at the State University of New York in 1978. Today he continues his research at Bell Labs.

At Bell Labs, Wilson and Penzias worked with a 6-m (20-ft) antenna converted into a radio telescope. The precision of the instrument and the scientists' ability to account for radio waves from the ground, the atmosphere, and other local sources enabled Wilson and Penzias to measure the intensity of the radiation from a point of interest in the sky.

In 1964 the two scientists used their system for the first time, measuring radio waves from the remnants of a supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia. Despite all their efforts to account for every source of radiation that could interfere with their measurements, the researchers found they were picking up background noise. They tried measurements in many different areas of the sky, but the background radiation was always there.

Around the same time Wilson and Penzias discovered this mysterious radiation, a group of theoretical astrophysicists at Princeton University was working on a model of the universe in which the universe expands and contracts in turn. This group theorized that the universe is currently expanding from an extremely hot, dense state, which would have produced radiation that might still be measurable.

In 1965 Wilson and Penzias joined the Princeton group and found that their measurements of the wavelength of the background radiation corresponded with the theorists' predictions. This result supports the big bang theory, which describes an explosion that gave rise to all the matter and radiation in the universe.