Arno A. Penzias, 90, deceased; Nobel Prize physicist confirmed the Big Bang theory

Arno A. Penzias, whose astronomical probes provided irrefutable evidence of a dynamic, evolving universe with a clear origin point, confirming what became known as the Big Bang theory, died Monday in San Francisco. He was 90.

His death, in an assisted living facility, was caused by complications of Alzheimer's disease, his son David said.

Dr. Penzias (pronounced PEN-zee-as) shared half of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics of Robert Woodrow Wilson for their 1964 discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, remnants of an explosion that created the universe some 14 billion years ago. That explosion, known as the Big Bang, is now the generally accepted explanation for the origin and evolution of the universe. (A third physicist, Pyotr Kapitsa of Russia, received the other half of the prize, for unrelated progress in developing liquid helium.)

Until Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson published their observations, the Big Bang theory competed with the steady-state theory, which envisioned a more static, timeless expanse expanding into infinite space, with new matter forming to fill the gaps.

The discovery of Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson ultimately settled the debate. Yet it was the accidental product of a completely different study.

In 1961, Dr. Penzias employed AT&T's Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ, with the intention of using a radio telescope developed for satellite communications to make cosmological measurements.

“The first thing I thought of was studying the galaxy in a way that no one else could have done,” he said in a speech. Interview from 2004 with the Nobel Foundation.

In 1964, while preparing the antenna to measure the properties of the Milky Way Galaxy, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, another young radio astronomer new to Bell Labs, detected a persistent, unexplained hiss of radio waves that seemed to come from anywhere in the sky, regardless of which way the antenna was pointed. Bewildered, they looked at different sources of the noise. They thought maybe they were picking up radar, or noise from New York City, or radiation from a nuclear explosion. Or could pigeon droppings be the culprit?

While examining the antenna, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson “subjected the electrical circuits to a close examination comparable to that used in preparing a manned spacecraft,” wrote Walter Sullivan in The New York Times from 1965. Still, the mysterious hissing persisted.

The cosmological underpinnings of the sound were eventually explained with the help of physicists at Princeton University, who had predicted that radiation left over from the Big Bang might come from all directions. The buzzing turned out to be just that: a cosmic echo. It confirmed that the universe was not infinitely old and static, but rather began as a primordial fireball that left the universe in background radiation.

The discovery, said Dr. Penzias, years later, intensified his interest in astronomy. He and Dr. Wilson went on to detect dozens of types of molecules in interstellar clouds where new stars are being formed.

“Their discovery marked a transition between a period when cosmology was more philosophical, with very few observations, and a golden age of observational cosmology,” says Paul Halpern, a physicist at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia and author of “Flashes of Creation: George Gamow, Fred Hoyle and the Great Big Bang Debate,” said in a telephone interview.

The discovery not only helped solidify the grand story of the cosmos; it also opened a window through which we could explore the nature of reality – all as a result of that annoying hiss first heard sixty years ago by a few young physicists looking for something different.

Arno Allan Penzias was born on April 26, 1933 in Munich to Jewish parents, Karl and Justine (Eisenreich) Penzias. Dr. Penzias would later point out to virtually everyone he met that his birth coincided with the day and place of the founding of the Gestapo, the German secret police.

His father was a leather wholesaler; his mother, who managed the house, had converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism in 1932.

In the fall of 1938, the Penzias family was arrested and put on a train for deportation to Poland.

“Luckily for us, the Poles stopped accepting Jews just before our train reached the border,” said Dr. Penzias in a eulogy at his mother's funeral in 1991. The train returned to Munich. In the late spring of 1939, 6-year-old Arno and his brother, Gunter, 5, were put on a train as part of Kindertransport, the British rescue effort that brought some 10,000 children to England.

His mother instructed Arno to take care of his brother. “I didn't realize until much later that she didn't know if she would ever see either of us again,” he said in his eulogy.

Gunter Penzias recalled on the phone: “Each of us received a big box of chocolates. I fell asleep on the train and mine got stolen. So Arno shared his with me.”

The boys' parents managed to leave Germany for England, and the family arrived in New York City in 1940. Karl and Justine found work as supervisors in a series of apartment buildings in the Bronx, providing the family with a place to live.

Dr. Penzias attended Brooklyn Technical High School and “kind of went into chemistry,” he told The New Yorker in 1984. He entered the City College of New York in 1951 with the intention of studying chemistry, but found that he had already learned much of the material. After one of his professors assured him that he could make a living as a physicist, he changed his major and graduated in 1954. That year he married Anne Barras, a student at Hunter College. They divorced in 1995.

After serving two years as a radar officer in the Army Signal Corps, he attended graduate school at Columbia University, where he received both his master's and doctoral degrees in physics, the latter in 1962.

But Dr.'s path Penzia's quest to find the answer to one of humanity's most central questions began a year earlier, when he joined Bell Laboratories as a member of the radio research group in Holmdel.

There he saw the potential of AT&T's new satellite communications antenna, a giant radio telescope known as the Holmdel Horn, as a tool for cosmological observation. By working with Dr. in 1964. Wilson to use the antenna, said Dr. Wilson in a recent interview, one of their goals was to advance the emerging field of radio astronomy by accurately measuring various bright sky sources.

However, shortly after they started their measurements, they heard the hissing. They spent months ruling out possible causes, including pigeons.

“The pigeons settled on the small end of the horn and released what Arno called a white dielectric material,” said Dr. Wilson. “And we didn't know if the pigeon droppings produced any radiation.” So the men climbed up and cleared it away. The noise continued.

Ultimately, it was Dr.'s predilection. Penzias for making a phone call that led to an accidental breakthrough. (“It was a good thing he worked for the telephone company because he loved using their instrument,” Dr. Wilson said. “He talked to a lot of people.”)

In January 1965, Dr. Penzias Bernard Burke, a fellow radio astronomer, and in the course of their conversation he mentioned the mysterious hissing. Dr. Burke suggested that Dr. Penzias would call a physicist at Princeton who had tried to prove that the Big Bang had left traces of cosmological radiation. He did.

Intrigued, scientists from Princeton visited Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, and together they made the connection with the Big Bang. Theory and observation were then brought together in a pair of articles published in 1965.

Dr. Penzias spent nearly four decades at Bell Labs, fourteen of them as vice president of research. His interests extended far beyond science to business, art, technology and politics. After his 1978 Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm, he flew straight to Moscow to give a lecture about his findings to a group of reluctant scientists. He later helped some of them leave the Soviet Union.

In 1992, Dr. Penzias donated the Holmdel Horn's receiver and calibration equipment to the Deutsches Museum in Munich, where it remains as part of a permanent exhibition.

“It was very important for my father to remind them of what they had lost,” his daughter, Rabbi L. Shifra Weiss-Penzias, said in an interview. “He wanted his work to be a living memory of the refugees who left and the people who died.”

Dr. Penzias married Sherry Levit, a Silicon Valley executive, in 1996. Next to his daughter; his son, Robert; and his brother Gunter, Dr. Penzias is survived by his wife; another daughter, Mindy Dirks; a stepson, Carson Levit; a stepdaughter, Victoria Zaroff; 12 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Shortly after the Nobel Prize announcement, President Jimmy Carter sent a congratulatory telegram to Dr. Penzias. He replied, “I came to the United States 39 years ago as a penniless refugee from Nazi Germany,” adding that for him and his family America has been “a haven of safety, but also a land of freedom and opportunity.” .'