Wilson, Robert Woodrow 1936-
US physicist and Nobel Prize winner

Born in Houston, Texas, he was educated at Rice University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He then joined Bell Laboratories in New Jersey and became head of the radiophysics research department in 1976. There he collaborated with Arno Allan Penzias in using a large radio telescope designed for communication with satellites; they detected in 1964 a radio noise background which came from all directions with an energy distribution corresponding to that of a black body at a temperature of 3.5 K. Robert Dicke and Phillip Peebles suggested that this radiation is the residual radiation from the Big Bang at the universe's creation, which has cooled to 3.5 K by the expansion of the universe. Such a cosmic background radiation had been predicted to exist by George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, Hans Bethe and Robert Herman in 1948. Wilson and Penzias (jointly with Peter Kapitza) shared the 1978 Nobel Prize for physics for their work, which can reasonably be claimed to be of the most important contributions to cosmology in the 20th century. In 1970 he continued his collaboration with Penzias and they discovered (with K B Jefferts) the 2.6mm wavelength radiation from interstellar carbon monoxide.