This January 22nd will mark the second anniversary of the death of Arno Penzias. For those who follow science closely or at least stayed awake in Physics 312, you’ll know that Dr. Penzias was awarded the Nobel Prize along with Robert Wilson for a discovery that eventually confirmed the Big Bang Theory. I was fortunate to have met this man and to have received an encouraging word from him.
I met Dr. Penzias when I was an adolescent. My parents ran a resort in the Catskills for German ex-pats, particularly Jews from Europe who survived or escaped the Holocaust. One of my family’s best friends was Karl Penzias and his wife, the parents of Arno Penzias. I recall—perhaps incorrectly—that Arno’s mother was referred to as Lola, though I cannot find anything online to substantiate that. Each summer they would spend two weeks at the resort run by the Workmen’s Benefit Fund and for one weekend during each summer, Dr. Penzias would join them. I recalled him to be a slender, young man and I believe I saw him once in lederhosen. Arno was a bit ore reserved than his dad who was positively boisterous.
One summer, my mother reminded me to congratulate Dr. Penzias on winning some sort of prestigious award, but she didn’t know what the award was or why he had won it. I do know that Dr. Penzias visited me one night as I was stargazing with my Unitron 2.4” refractor and he encouraged me to pursue my interests which at the time was astronomy. A twelve-year-old boy in a country field at night was something of an oddity back then. Some people who passed by thought I should try to make more friends. Others wondered whether I was secretly a Soviet spy peering at someone. A few people who passed by would ask to look through my telescope but tried to peep through the wrong end of the instrument. While I never became an astronomer, I continued my interest in science and knowing Dr. Penzias and that he was interested (and knowledgeable) in what I was doing as well as taking time t encourage me impressed me to no end.
I regret that our paths never crossed again, but I feel immensely richer that they crossed at all.
The Big Bang in simple terms
If you put five astrophysicists in a room, you’ll get eight opinions on how the universe began. The prevailing theory is that the Big Bang was the mother of all explosions and that time itself did not exist before the Big Bang; some scientists say that it is folly to talk of a previous state. In this sense, creation was ex nihilo, or from nothing, much as the book of Genesis suggests (sort of).
The theory made sense to many cosmologists, but it lacked proof. It was this proof that Penzias and his colleague Robert Wilson provided. These two scientists were
working on behalf of Bell Laboratories on a radio telescope in New Jersey called the Holmdel Horn Antenna. This instrument served two purposes: it assisted with communication to and from the first generation of U.S. satellites, and it also charted the radiation hotspots in our galaxy.
Penzias and Wilson reported faint static when testing the horn, and it did not matter which part of the sky they pointed it toward; the static was always there. Methodically, they ruled out everything from radio interference to pigeon droppings, but the static persisted. Given the uniform strength of the static and the fact that it permeated every sector of the sky, the unavoidable conclusion was that it was residual heat from creation. With theoretical and mathematical proofs already in hand, this empirical data was the missing piece of the puzzle.
#Penzias, #big_bang
