Arno Allan Penzias (born April 26, 1933) is an American physicist.
He was born in Munich, Germany. Penzias won the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics, together with Robert Woodrow Wilson, for their 1964 accidental discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMB (the prize that year was also shared by Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa for unrelated work). While working on a new type of antenna at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, they found a source of noise in the atmosphere that they could not explain. After clearing the antenna of pigeon droppings, the noise was finally identified as CMB, which corrected previous assumption of the Big Bang.
He received a bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1954. From Columbia University, he received his master's degree in 1958 and his Ph.D. in 1962.
