Robert Woodrow Wilson was born in Houston, Texas, on January 10, 1936. He attended Rice University where he received a B.A. in physics in 1957. He then moved on to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for graduate study and received his Ph.D. in 1962. Wilson's thesis work, and post-doctoral research, involved making radio surveys (the use of radio waves bounced off of stellar bodies to create visual approximations) of the Milky Way Galaxy. When he heard of the existence of specialized radio equipment at Bell Laboratories, he left Caltech and accepted a job at Bell's research facility in Holmdel, New Jersey. Wilson and Arno Penzias, who had preceded Wilson at Bell Labs by about a year, were about to embark on a research odyssey that would culminate in an extremely important discovery almost by accident.

Wilson and Penzias were studying the possible causes of static interference that impaired the...