2024-01-23 14:00:00
Physicist Arno Panzias, who escaped Nazi Germany as a child and discovered the cosmic background radiation, a discovery that strengthened the “Big Bang” theory, has passed away.
In 1963, two young researchers in the laboratories of the “Bell” communications company began to adapt a sophisticated radio antenna for astronomical observations of radio waves. Bell Labs advocated a combination of applied research and basic research, and the antenna, originally intended for satellite communications, became available for use after the communications satellite project was completed. Arno Penzias, who was 30 years old at the time and had joined the company two years earlier, got the opportunity to use it in an attempt to locate hydrogen molecules in distant galaxies. To his delight, he was joined by another radio astronomer, Robert Wilson, who had just been hired at Bell Labs. To calibrate the antenna for the sensitive observations, the researchers aimed it at an area of the sky that was not supposed to have radio waves, but the device still picked up high levels of “noise” – interference originating from radio waves.
The two researchers began a systematic effort Find out the source of the noise. At first they assumed it was an external source, such as a satellite or an airplane, or even radio activity originating in New York City. But no matter where we pointed the antenna – the noise was still there. In the next step, they switched to neutralizing internal noise factors, such as instability of parts of the antenna itself, or components that may emit radio waves. At one point they thought the problem was fixed in the secretions of a pair of ions who chose to nest in the antenna. The pair chased after honor to a remote location, but soon found their way home, leaving the researchers no choice but to get rid of the pigeons permanently. Wilson and Panzias cleaned their radio telescope and eliminated any possible source of noise. “They tested the electronic instrumentation with a level of rigor similar to that of preparing a manned spaceship for launch,” the New York Times described In an article from 1965. But the mystery of the noise was not solved. No matter where we pointed the antenna, there was always background noise at the same frequency and intensity.
Look for the sources of the noise, find the sources of the universe. Bell Labs’ Shofar antenna in 1962, shortly before the research that produced the historic discovery | Source: NASA / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
The secrets of the universe
As early as 1948, several physicists predicted the lead George Gamow (Gamow) the possibility of the existence of Cosmic background radiation – a remnant of the very early activity of the young universe, shortly after the big bang. According to their calculations, the material formation processes that took place about 300 thousand years after the big bang, when the universe cooled down enough, led to radiation with a wavelength of one thousandth of a millimeter. However, since the universe has expanded since then, this wave has also stretched and nowadays should have a wavelength of about a millimeter, in the range of radio waves.
In those days, the notion that the universe began with a single event, the Big Bang, and had been expanding ever since, was far from the scientific consensus. Many researchers believed that the universe is stable, and not expanding. The debate was also in progress in the 1960s, when several cosmologists from Princeton University, led by Robert Dicke (Dicke) and James Peebles (Peebles), separately reached the same conclusion as Gamow and his colleagues, without knowing their work. The Big Bang, they argued, was supposed to leave a mark in the form of a radio wave that would have a more or less uniform intensity in all directions.
Wilson and Panzias could seemingly ignore the noise in the antenna, and move forward with the research they planned. But the matter continued to trouble them. Penzias discussed this with a colleague from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and about two months later the colleague called him and excitedly told him about the draft of Dickey and Peebles’ article. “Suddenly, all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place as far as Panzias was concerned. He finally understood the source of the noise that was bothering his radio telescope, and insisted on the enormous significance of it,” wrote Simon Singh in his book “The Big Bang” (translation: Dafna Levy, “Yediot Books” publishing house). “Finally the mystery of the incessant noise was solved. It had nothing to do with pigeons, loose strings or New York, but it had something to do with, and how, the creation of the universe.”
Penzias rushed to talk to Dickey, telling him that he had discovered the cosmic background radiation that he and his colleagues had predicted in their paper. The findings of the two teams were published in 1965 in two adjacent articles in the Astrophysical Journal. An article by Penzias and Wilson On the discovery of the cosmic background radiation, andAn article by the researchers from Princeton, which explains the theory. The discovery paved the way for the recognition of the correctness of the expanding universe theory. The nickname “the big bang” was coined later, precisely by one of the opponents of the theory.
All the pieces fell into place. Penzias (right) with Wilson against the radio antenna in New Jersey source: The X (Twitter) account of Bell Labs
temporary work
Arno Panzias was born in Munich on April 26, 1933, a few months after the Nazis came to power in Germany. Despite the danger that hung over his Jewish family, which was even greater because his father was a Polish citizen, the first years of his life worked relatively peacefully. His father had a leather trading business, and the family’s financial situation was reasonable. However, after “Crystal Night” in November 1938, the parents realized the extent of the danger, and put six-year-old Arno and his younger brother on “The children’s train” that rescued Jewish children to Britain. Fortunately, the parents also managed to leave Germany a short time later, and a few months later the family sailed in full from England to New York.
In the United States, the family’s financial situation was much less good, and both parents had to work as maintenance workers for residential buildings in New York, to barely support the small family. Education was the key to getting out of poverty, and Panzias enrolled in chemical engineering studies at New York Public College, which offered subsidized tuition. already in his first year of study Captivated by the magic of physicsand decided to change the direction of his studies, even though the possibilities of making a living in the field were much limited.
After his studies, he volunteered for two years of military service in the “Signal Corps”, the equivalent of today’s communication and ICT units, and thanks to his grades and his military service as a radar operator, he was accepted for a master’s degree and then for a doctorate at the prestigious Columbia University. He did his research work under the guidance of Charles Towns ( Townes), who developed the “Maser” technology for controlled emission in microwaves, and was Partner in the development of the lasera job that earned him fame for days in the Nobel Prize in Physics. In his work, Penzians built an extremely sensitive radio receiver based on the Townes maser, designed to detect radio waves originating from clouds of hydrogen gas in the space between galaxies. He succeeded in building the device, but the observational work did not provide the hoped-for results, and he even called it “horrific”. Despite this, the work did earn him a doctorate in physics, which he was awarded in 1961. Since there were not many job offers in the field of radio astronomy, he accepted a friend’s offer to get a position at Bell Labs as a temporary job. “You can always leave,” said the friend. Panzias ended up staying in this temporary job for 37 years.
From Nazi Germany to the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the “Big Bang”. Arno Penzias Photo: HANK MORGAN / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Science and politics
Penzias was initially involved in the work on the company’s communication satellite, and even found a method to help direct the ground antennas to the satellite by receiving radio waves from galaxies whose location is known. But his passion was basic research, and he was able to realize it with the help of the antenna that became available. A little luck and a lot of resourcefulness and tenacity yielded him one of the most important discoveries in the study of cosmology. In 1978, Wilson and Panzias received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the important discovery, jointly with the Russian Piotr Kapitsa.
The “Big Bang” theory was given a real boost by Panzias and Wilson’s discovery, but it still had some problems. One of them was that the background radiation appeared to be the same intensity in every direction, which was inconsistent with the asymmetry in the distribution of matter in the universe – the same asymmetry that allowed the formation of stars and galaxies. In the 1990s, this problem was also solved, with measurements by the “Coby” satellite (COBE, short for Cosmic Background Explorer), which showed that the radiation is indeed not uniform, and positioned the theory as the main accepted explanation for the formation of the universe. This discovery credited two other physicists, John Mather and George Smoot in the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006. in 2019 The award was also given to James Peebleson predicting the existence of the cosmic background radiation and the theoretical explanation for the work of Penzias and Wilson (Dickie was no longer alive).
The non-uniformity of the background radiation strengthens the theory about the formation of the universe and its expansion. Radiation map provided by the WMAP satellite in 2008 Source: NASA / WMAP SCIENCE TEAM / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Despite his enormous contribution to cosmology, Penziens did not change the direction of his research. In the years after the discovery, he continued to work with Wilson on the original research, of detecting hydrogen in space using radio waves, and later the two identified the radio wave signature of many other molecules. Penziens continued to work at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey until his retirement in 1998, including serving as vice president for research, a position he held for 14 years, forcing him to cease active research. “When I had to manage about a thousand researchers and a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, the responsibility was so great that it was no longer fun to engage in astronomy,” he said In an interview with the Nobel Prize website in 2004. Over the years, he was awarded many awards and certificates of appreciation for his important contribution to science.
In 1954, during his undergraduate studies, Panzias married Ann Barras, a marriage that produced his three children, and later 12 grandchildren and even three great-grandchildren. The two divorced in 1995, and a year later Panzias married Sherry Levitt, a businesswoman from California. After his retirement, the two moved to San Francisco, where Panzias passed away yesterday, January 22, 2024, at the age of 90, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
In addition to his scientific work, Penzias was quite involved in political activity. In 1978, immediately after receiving the Nobel Prize, he flew to Moscow to lecture about his work to scientists who refused to leave the Soviet Union – many of them Jews who wanted to immigrate to Israel. He later managed to help some of them leave the country. In 1992 he made sure that part of the original equipment of the radio telescope in which he made the historic discovery was donated to a museum in Munich, his hometown. “It was important for my father to remind the Germans what they lost,” said his daughter, Penzias Weiss. In an interview quoted in the New York Times. “He wanted his work to be a living memorial to the refugees who were forced to leave Germany and to those who died there.”
The antenna that broke boundaries. A Bell Labs video about the radio telescope and the work of Panzias and Wilson (in English):
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