Arno Penzias was born in 1933 in Munich, Germany. In 1939 his family emigrated to the United States.

Arno Penzias was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1978, Together with Robert Wilson, “for their discovery of cosmic background radiation”, the echoes of the creation of the universe in the `big bang’, eighteen billion years ago.

Penzias’ discoveries constituted an empirical confirmation of the ‘big bang’ theory and turned it into the central model for describing the history of the universe.