Big anniversary for Rice Nobel laureate

Big anniversary for Rice Nobel laureate

Robert Wilson, left, and Arno Penzias at the Bell Labs horn radio antenna in Crawford Hill, N.J., where they discovered cosmic background radiation. COURTESY PHOTO

For a Houston native who had, by his own account, ”barely been admitted to Rice University,” Robert Woodrow Wilson ’57 really made a name for himself. This week marks the 30th anniversary of the Rice alumnus’s receipt of the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he won as co-discoverer of cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the ”big bang.”

Wilson made the discovery while trying, with co-winner Arno Penzias, to tune in to signals from the Milky Way using Bell Labs’ radio antenna in New Jersey in 1964. The pair were frustrated by interference they couldn’t explain until a phone call to a professor at Princeton helped match their findings to the big bang theory of the creation of the universe.