Robert Woodrow Wilson - “Dicke put the phone down and said… ‘Boys, we’ve been scooped!’”

When radiation left over from the heat of the Big Bang was discovered by astronomers Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias in 1964, it caused a revolution in cosmology. All About Space catches up with the Nobel prizewinning Wilson to uncover just how much

- Giles Sparrow

BIO

Robert Woodrow Wilson

An American radio astronomer, Robert Wilson graduated from Rice University in Houston before completing his graduate work with the California Institute of Technology. Wilson and fellow astronomer Arno Penzias jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), and they also won the Henry Draper medal of the National Academy of Science in 1977. Wilson worked at Bell Laboratories until 1994, when he was named a senior scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is based today.

What were the origins of radio astronomy at Bell Labs? I like to start the story in 1928. That was the year Bell Laboratories hired people of interest to us, Art Crawford and Karl Jansky. Karl was tasked with understanding the sources of noise on a proposed transatlantic short wave radio-telephone circuit. He built a large, rotating, directional antenna and sensitive radio receiver and recorded his output for a long time. In addition to thunderstorms and man-made noise, just like old AM radios used to produce, he found a hiss of noise that repeated every day. In 1933, after several years of observation, he identified the source as the centre of our galaxy. This started the science of radio astronomy.