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Robert Woodrow Wilson
said
Cosmology is a science which has only a few observable facts to work with.
— Conclusion of his Nobel lecture (December 8, 1978) emphasizing that every new experimental discovery increases significantly our knowledge.
Robert Woodrow Wilson
American astronomer (born 1936)
- Fame61.7
- Momentum2.3
- Scientists rank#242
Source-basedStable
- Fame61.7
- Momentum2.3
- Scientists rank#242
- Wikipedia3.7K
Born 1936 · age 90United States
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Summary
Updated 2026-06-09
He won a Nobel for finding the hum left over from the Big Bang — but only after scraping pigeon droppings off the antenna and eliminating every other possible source of static first.
Biography
About
Robert Woodrow Wilson was born January 10, 1936. In the mid-1960s, he and Arno Penzias were running tests with the Holmdel Horn Antenna at Bell Labs in New Jersey when they kept picking up unexplained atmospheric noise. They cleaned pigeon droppings off the equipment, checked every potential interference, and the signal persisted. It turned out to be cosmic microwave background radiation — the afterglow of the Big Bang — and in 1978 they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for it. In 1970, Wilson led the team that made the first detection of a rotational spectral line of carbon monoxide in the O…
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Fame
Stable61.7
Composite of search demand, mentions, audience & graph footprint.
Score components
Momentum2.3
Historical24.1
Source confidence65.0
Completeness75.0
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- WikidataHigh confidencewikidata · wikidata.org
- WikipediaHigh confidencewikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
- Pantheon 2.0High confidencedatabase · pantheon.world
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