1933-
Astrophysicist

Big Bang.

In 1978 Arno Penzias and his colleague Robert W. Wilson shared the Nobel Prize for physics for their detection in 1965 of microwave background radiation, a discovery that proved that the universe had been created in a big bang of exploding matter. This discovery settled an argument among scientists. Opponents of the big bang theory argued for a steady-state theory that said the universe had always existed in its present form, with new matter created spontaneously as it expands. If all the matter in the universe had been generated in a single big bang, scientists argued, energy traces from that explosion should still be detectable in the universe. Penzias and Wilson claimed to have found it.

Immigrant Childhood.

Penzias was not always confident about his abilities as a researcher and scholar. He has referred to his graduate thesis at Columbia as "dreadful" and described...