Overview

• Arno A. Penzias, Nobel laureate in physics, has passed away at the age of 90 due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
• Penzias, along with Robert W. Wilson, discovered cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964, providing key evidence for the Big Bang Theory.
• Their discovery helped dispel the steady-state theory, which proposed a static, unchanging universe, and led to the widespread adoption of the Big Bang Theory.
• Penzias was born in Munich in 1933 and fled Nazi Germany as a child, settling in the United States.
• He spent nearly four decades at Bell Laboratories, and his work marked a transition from a more philosophical approach to cosmology to an era of observational cosmology.