Robert Woodrow Wilson (born January 10, 1936) is an American physicist.
He won the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics, together with Arno Allan Penzias, for their 1964 accidental discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMB (the prize for 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 served as important confirmation of the Big Bang theory.
Wilson studied as an undergraduate at Rice University and as a graduate student at California Institute of Technology.
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