Arno A. Penzias said his astronomical explorations provided incontrovertible evidence of a dynamically evolving universe with a clear origin, supporting what became known as the Big Bang theory, in San Francisco on Monday. He passed away. He was 90 years old.
Her son, David, said her death at the nursing home was due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Penzias (pronounced Penjias) shared half of 1978. Nobel Prize in Physics and robert woodrow wilson For his discovery in 1964 of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the remnants of the explosion that created the universe about 14 billion years ago. That explosion, known as the Big Bang, is now widely accepted as the explanation for the origin and evolution of the universe. (A third physicist, Pyotr Kapitsa of Russia, received the other half of the award for his unrelated advances in the development of liquid helium.)
The big bang theory was in competition with the steady state theory until Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson published their observations. Steady-state theory assumed a more static, timeless expanse extending into infinite space, with new matter forming to fill the gap.
The discoveries of Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson finally settled the controversy. However, that was a coincidence due to a completely different investigation.
In 1961, Dr. Penzias joined AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, to use radio antennas that were being developed for satellite communications as radio telescopes to make cosmological measurements.
“My first idea was to study galaxies in a way that no one had ever done before,” he said in the paper. 2004 interview Together with the Nobel Foundation.
In 1964, as Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, another young radio astronomer new to Bell Labs, were preparing an antenna to measure the properties of the Milky Way galaxy, they wondered where they thought it was coming from. I encountered a persistent, unexplained radio hiss. No matter what direction your antenna is facing, you will be detected anywhere in the sky. Puzzled, they considered various sources of noise. They thought they might be receiving radar, noise from New York City, or radiation from nuclear explosions. Or is it caused by pigeon droppings?
Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson examined the antenna and “scrutinized the electrical circuitry equivalent to that used to prepare manned spacecraft,” Walter Sullivan wrote. New York Times 1965. Still, the mysterious hiss remained.
The cosmological basis of noise was finally explained with the help of a Princeton University physicist who predicted that radiation could come from all directions, a remnant of the Big Bang. The buzzing sound turned out to be a cosmic echo. It confirmed that the universe was not infinitely old and static, but rather began as a primordial fireball bombarded with background radiation.
Dr. Penzias said years later that this discovery sparked his interest in astronomy. He and Dr. Wilson went on to detect dozens of molecules in the interstellar clouds where new stars form.
“Their discoveries marked a transition period between an era when there were very few observations and cosmology was more philosophical, and a golden age of observational cosmology,” said Dr. Yes, said Paul Halpern, author of Flashes of Creation. : George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang controversy,” said in a telephone interview.
This discovery not only helped solidify the grand story of the universe; It also opened a window for investigating the nature of reality. It was all the result of that unpleasant hissing sound first heard 60 years ago by a few young physicists looking for something different.
Arno Alan Penzias was born on April 26, 1933 in Munich to Jewish parents Carl and Justine (Eisenreich) Penzias. Dr. Penzias later pointed out to nearly everyone he met that his birth coincided in date and place with the founding of the German secret police, the Gestapo.
His father was a leather wholesaler. His mother, who managed the household, had converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism in 1932.
In the fall of 1938, the Penzias family was arrested and placed on a train to be deported to Poland.
“Fortunately for us, the Poles stopped accepting Jews just before our train reached the border,” Dr. Penzias said in a eulogy at his mother’s funeral in 1991. Stated. The train returned to Munich. In the late spring of 1939, six-year-old Arno and her five-year-old brother Gunter were put on a train as part of the Kindertransport, a British rescue operation that took around 10,000 children to England. I did.
His mother instructed Arno to take care of his younger brother. “I realized much later that she didn’t even know if she would ever see either of us again,” he said in her eulogy.
Günter Penzias recalled over the phone: “Each of us was given a big box of chocolates. I fell asleep on the train and mine was stolen. So Arno told me about his .”
The boys’ parents managed to leave Germany for England, and the family arrived in New York City in 1940. Carl and Justine found jobs as caretakers at a series of apartment complexes in the Bronx, giving their family a place to live.
Dr. Penzias attended Brooklyn Technical High School and “sort of drifted into chemistry,” he told The New Yorker. He entered the City University of New York in 1951 with the intention of studying chemistry, but found that he had already learned much of the material. After one of his professors assured him that he could make a living as a physicist, he changed his major and graduated in 1954. That year, he married Ann Barras, a student at Hunter College. They divorced in 1995.
After two years as a radar officer in the Army Signal Corps, he enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University, where he received his master’s and doctorate degrees in physics in 1962.
But Dr. Penzias’ road to answering one of humanity’s most central questions began a year earlier, when he joined Bell Labs as a member of Holmdel’s wireless research group.
There he saw the potential of AT&T’s new satellite communications antenna, a giant radio telescope known as the Holmdel Horn, as a tool for cosmological observations. When he collaborated with Dr. Wilson to use the antenna in 1964, Dr. Wilson said in a recent interview that one of their goals was to improve radio astronomy by accurately measuring several bright celestial sources. He said it was to advance the field in its infancy.
But as soon as I started measuring, I heard a hissing sound. They spent months ruling out possible causes, including pigeons.
“The pigeons went to the small end of the corner and roosted, depositing what Arno calls a white dielectric,” Dr. Wilson said. “And we didn’t know if there might have been any radiation coming from the pigeon droppings.” So the men climbed out and cleaned it up. The noise continued.
Eventually, Dr. Penzias’s penchant for chatting on the phone led to a serendipitous breakthrough. (“It was good that he worked for the telephone company because he liked using the telephone company equipment,” Dr. Wilson said. “He talked to a lot of people.”)
In January 1965, Dr. Penzias telephoned fellow radio astronomer Bernard Burke, and during their conversation he mentioned a mysterious hissing sound. Dr. Burke suggested that Dr. Penzias call a physicist at Princeton University who was trying to prove that the Big Bang left a trace of cosmological radiation. He did it.
Intrigued, Princeton scientists visited Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, and together they uncovered a connection to the Big Bang. The theory and observations were then summarized in his two papers published in 1965.
Dr. Penzias has been with Bell Labs for nearly 40 years, including 14 years as vice president of research. His interests extended beyond science to include business, art, technology, and politics. After giving his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm in 1978, he went straight to Moscow and lectured a group of Regesnik scientists about the results of his own research. Later, he helped some of them leave the USSR.
In 1992, Dr. Penzias arranged for the Holmdel Horn receiver and calibration equipment to be donated to the Deutsches Museum in Munich, where they remain as part of the permanent exhibition.
“It was very important to my father to remind them of what they had lost,” his daughter, Rabbi L. Shifra Weispenzias, said in an interview. “He wanted his work to be a living reminder of the refugees who left and those who died.”
Dr. Penzias married Silicon Valley executive Shelley Levitt in 1996. his son, David; His brothers, Dr. Gunter and Dr. Penzias, are survived by their wives. another daughter, Mindy Dirks; stepson Carson Levitt; stepdaughter Victoria Zaroff; 12 grandchildren. and three great-grandchildren.
Immediately after the Nobel Prize was announced, President Jimmy Carter sent a congratulatory telegram to Dr. Penzias. “I came to the United States 39 years ago as a penniless refugee from Nazi Germany,” he answered, adding that for him and his family, “America is a land of freedom and opportunity, as well as a safe haven.” It’s also a place,” he added.