Arno Penzias shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1978 with Robert Wilson for a discovery that supported the big bang theory of the universe. The two radio astronomers at what was then American Telephone & Telegraph's (AT&T) Bell Telephone Laboratories were using a 20-ft (6-m) horn reflector antenna that year to measure the intensity of radio waves emitted by the halo of gas surrounding our galaxy. And they were bothered by a persistent noise which they could not explain. At first they pinned it on two pigeons that were nesting in the antenna throat. But even after they evicted the birds, the noise continued. Eventually the scientists were able to conclude that the noise came from cosmic background, or microwave, radiation. This came to be widely considered as remnant microwave radiation from the " big bang" in which the universe was created billions of years ago. And the Penzias-Wilson...