“White dielectric material” – that’s what Arno Penzias called the legacies of some pigeons in 1964. The birds had made themselves comfortable in the 15-meter-long horn antenna that Penzias and his collaborator Robert Wilson wanted to use to study the Milky Way. The antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey, 44 kilometers south of New York, belonged to their employer, Bell Laboratories, and was built to pick up radio signals reflected from passive mirrored balloons in space and those from the first commercial communications satellites Telstar 1 and 2. But by the time Penzias joined Bell Laboratories in 1963, the antenna was no longer needed for satellite communications, so he was able to use it for something that had previously occupied him as a graduate student at New York’s Columbia University: the Research into radio emission of high-energy electrons in the interstellar space of our Milky Way.
Penzias had only come across astrophysics during his studies. He initially enrolled in chemistry at City College New York. However, Arno Allen Penzias was not born on the Hudson or the East River, but on the Isar. His parents ran a leather goods store in Munich. But in 1933, the year he was born, life for the Jewish family there began to become increasingly unbearable. It was just fine. In the spring of 1939, his parents managed to place the six-year-old and his younger brother Gunther on a Kindertransport to England. And while most of the other children never saw their parents again, Arno and Gunther were reunited with their father and mother in December 1939 and were able to start a new life after crossing to New York.
The Big Bang goes mainstream
Arnos Penzias often came back to his “German upbringing” later in interviews. This explains his pedantry. In 1964, the obsession with precision that he perceived in himself was for the Holmdel horn antenna and the 7-centimetre radio receiver that was left over from working for Telstar. However, Penzias and Wilson not only aimed it at the Milky Way, but also at other points in the firmament as a control experiment. To their annoyance, there was no zero signal, but a constant noise from all directions. First they suspected the radio smog of the city of New York, then the consequences of the nuclear weapons tests that took place in the Pacific in 1962, and finally the aforementioned white dielectric material. But after Penzias and Wilson scrubbed their antenna clean, the noise was still there.
They only found the explanation in 1965 when they learned that such radiation had been predicted as a result of the Big Bang model. A team of researchers in nearby Princeton had even begun trying to detect the radiation themselves. Penzias and Wilson inadvertently forestalled them and were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978.
In fact, their discovery is of similar importance as Johannes Kepler’s proof of the correctness of Copernicus’ assumption that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa. Because in 1965 there were quite a few researchers who stuck to the ancient idea that the universe had always existed. The neologism “Big Bang” was coined by one of them, the British Fred Hoyle, to ridicule the idea of a first beginning of the scientifically fathomable world. However, after the discovery of the cosmic background radiation by Penzias and Wilson, this view soon became untenable and the Big Bang became mainstream. The idea of a physical eternity, at least as far as its beginning was concerned, was finished. And Arno Penzias turns 90 today.
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