Nobel Laureate Arno Penzias Retires After 37 Years at Bell Labs

Murray Hill, N.J. (May, 1998) -- Arno Allan Penzias certainly has the curriculum vitae to qualify for the title of 20th Century Renaissance man.

Heading the list, of course, is his Nobel Prize in physics; but he is also respected as an inventor with a number of patents to his credit, an engineer, an author of two books and numerous articles, a global lecturer, a philosopher, a humanitarian, as well as a highly sought after "soothsayer" in this era of dizzying technological advance. The springboard for all his activities has been Bell Labs, where he has served as both a leading researcher and research leader for the past 37 years.

Arno Penzias, a man of many parts

Retiring after 37 years

Following rounds of dinners, parties and Bell Labs employee receptions, the man who has been part of many technological advances during this half-century and who has served as the personification of Bell Labs for the past two decades, has officially retired as Lucent's chief scientist and vice president.

He will, however, continue to work as a senior technology advisor for Lucent and serve as a spokesperson, speaking to customer and industry groups on Lucent's behalf. He also plans an active role in Silicon Valley's venture capital community, where he serves as an advisor and board member to several emerging companies.

"In addition to my ongoing relationship with Lucent, I'll be spending most of my time prowling Silicon Valley for new technologies and entrepreneurs, much of it teamed with New Enterprise Associates, a leading venture capital firm," Penzias notes.

Found proof of the Big Bang

His name became a household word throughout the scientific community following the Nobel Prize that he and Bell Labs colleague Robert Wilson received in 1978 for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, which gave unprecedented support to the "Big Bang" theory of the universe's creation.

His journey to scientific fame, however, began quite humbly 45 years earlier in Munich, Germany. He was born there April 26, 1933, the eldest son of Karl and Justine Eisenreich Penzias.

Early life in Nazi Germany

The family lived modestly in a rented apartment on the father's wages as a self-employed leather broker. Life was relatively comfortable for the Penzias family, even in Hitler's Germany -- until 1938. At that time the Nazis herded the Penzias family with other Jews of Polish origin for deportation to that country.

Since Penzias' grandfather was born in Poland, the Nazis refused to recognize the family's German citizenship. But when the family arrived at the border, they found that the Poles' deadline for accepting immigrants had passed. Their train was turned back, and the Penzias family members may well have been spared their lives. Arno was then six years old.

"I remember the train trip and the large cell we were all herded into before we left, but I don't think I was frightened at the time," Penzias says. "Many years later, I learned that the people who had arrived 'in time' had been put into an open enclosure where more than half froze to death."

Seeking a way out of Europe

Back in Munich after the reprieve, the elder Penzias was relentless in seeking ways to get the family out of Germany. Penzias says the first English word he learned was "affidavit" -- his father having spoken it so often in his effort to get the required paperwork needed to emigrate to the United States.

The first step was getting to England. When the British government agreed to accept 10,000 Jewish children on humanitarian grounds, young Arno and his brother Gunther were put on the kindertransport. Fortunately, affidavits soon arrived for their parents and the four Penzias family members were reunited in England some weeks later.

After a brief waiting period there, the family obtained passage to the U.S., arriving in New York City in January 1940.

Settling into the United States

Penzias' early years in the U.S. were spent attending public schools in the Bronx. His father was a superintendent of an apartment building, and the family lived rent-free in a basement apartment. It meant the family could have a much-needed second income without the mother having to go to work and leave the sons alone at home.

As the boys grew older and could be left on their own, his mother got a sewing job in a coat factory. The elder Penzias' wood-working skills helped land him a job in the carpentry shop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He later found time to hold office in a fraternal insurance company and serve as president of his local labor union.

It was taken for granted that young Arno would go college, studying science, presumably chemistry... "the only science I knew much about," Penzias says. As a teenager, he attended Brooklyn Technical High School, a specialized public school for boys. Following graduation, he attended City College of New York. "I discovered physics in my freshman year and switched my 'major' from chemical engineering," Penzias remembers. In 1954, he graduated near the top 10 percent of his class at CCNY, but well behind most of his fellow physics majors.

From college to the Army

After graduation, Penzias served for two years as a radar officer in the U.S. Army Signal Corps at Fort Devens, Mass. He also spent a few weeks at the Signal School in Fort Monmouth, N.J. The facility is only a few miles from the Bell Labs complex in Holmdel, where Penzias would start his career in 1961.

Penzias has received more than 20 honorary degrees.

Penzias' Army experience helped him get a research assistantship in the Columbia University Radiation Laboratory, then heavily involved in microwave physics. He enrolled as a student at Columbia in 1956.

His first contact with the Labs

After a "painful, but ultimately successful struggle" with courses and qualifying exams, Penzias started writing his thesis. He was given the task of building a maser amplifier in a radio-astronomy experiment of his choosing. "The equipment-building went better than the observations," he admits.

He studied under Charles Townes, a Bell Labs consultant who was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the maser, and its optical successor, the laser.

Following completion of his thesis in 1961, he went in search of a temporary job at Bell Labs in Holmdel. Bell Labs' unique facilities made it an "ideal place" to finish the observations he had begun during his thesis work. His Ph.D. in physics was conferred by Columbia in 1962.

'You can always quit'

Penzias remembers that then-director of the Radio Research Laboratory at Bell Labs--Rudi Kompfner--advised the eager Columbia grad, "Why not take a permanent job? You can always quit." Penzias took his advice.

Penzias became a member of the technical staff. He conducted research in radio communications and took part in the pioneering Echo and Telstar communications satellite experiments. As a researcher, he focused on radio astronomy, radio transmission, satellite communications and radio reception.

Historic partnership begins

In 1963, Bell Labs hired a second radio astronomer, Bob Wilson, who came from Caltech. It was the beginning of a partnership that would make scientific history.

By 1964, Penzias and Wilson were using the most sensitive radio astronomy antenna available, developed by Bell Labs, to conduct research in radio astronomy and satellite communications at Bell Labs Crawford Hill facility, just a few miles from Holmdel.

With their sophisticated equipment, the youthful researchers discovered that a faint signal pervaded all space. No matter what direction they pointed their horn-shaped antenna, the signal--three degrees above absolute zero--persisted. The noise signal never wavered from day to day or season to season, thus marking itself as particularly unique.

Because the signal was so faint and pervasive, the two scientists felt the noise could have any one of a number of sources, including the antenna itself.

Eliminating every possible signal source

Systematically and painstakingly, they eliminated the possibilities --such as the Milky Way, the Sun, poorly fitted antenna joints, and a white sticky substance left by pigeons nesting in the antenna--until it was undeniable that the entire universe itself was the source.

Disturbed by this puzzling cosmic effect, Penzias by chance was discussing his findings to a physicist in Boston, who told him of the work of Princeton physicist Robert H. Dicke on the so-called Big Bang Theory of the universe--how the universe supposedly was created roughly 15 billion years ago.

Dicke, who was in the process of building his own antenna to search for the radiation, immediately came to Bell Labs at Crawford Hill for a first-hand look at the horn antenna.

The discovery is confirmed

Convinced of the accuracy of Penzias' and Wilson's findings, Dicke--in what had to be a bitter-sweet moment for him--concurred that they had discovered what he had predicted--the background radiation remaining from the initial Big Bang.

While the theory was well-known to astrophysicists, there was no direct experimental verification of it until Penzias and Wilson discovered the 3-degree Kelvin background radiation. This was a fundamental breakthrough in understanding the origin of the universe.

The 1978 Nobel Prize cited Penzias and Wilson for their 1965 discovery of cosmic background radiation -- a residual "heat" that fills the space between all stars and galaxies. (See a related story on the impact of the Nobel Prize-winning discovery.)

Science and philosophy

Philosophically, Penzias recognized that the question of the origin of the universe, or life as we know it, goes even deeper than mere science. In his explanation of the "Big Bang Theory," Penzias told a reporter that he found nothing incompatible with the religious view of the creation of the universe.

For example, "in the beginning..." -- the biblical assertion that the beginning of the universe occurred at a definite time. And that it was a specific event. Penzias acknowledged that "Western religion deals with progress, and progress to some extent suggests purpose. Scientists, on the other hand, try to describe phenomena without invoking purposeful creation."

"The theologians," he mused, "seem to have won this time."

Finding your own freedom

Penzias credits Bell Labs for his success and the success of others by providing a dynamic working environment for scientists, engineers and technicians.

"It's a tremendous experience being a working scientist. Everybody has more freedom than they think they have. As long as you can do your main job, why not also do what you want to do?"

Penzias has spent much time working with children and young people from underrepresented groups, encouraging them to become scientists.

The freedom Bell Labs gave him as a scientific researcher allowed him to attack problems in a wide range of areas, as well as to forge numerous links to the scientific community. He has more than a dozen patents to his credit--including a computer-orchestrated public transportation system and active databases for the real-time auctioning of network connection. On the academic side, he served as a thesis advisor to Princeton graduate students in astrophysics from the mid-1960s to 1982.

Divestiture changed a few things

"Divestiture of the Bell System put a stop to my academic work," Penzias recalls. "I just got too busy with making sure that Bell Labs research survived that break-up in good order."

Penzias was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. He and Bob Wilson received the NAS Henry Draper Medal in 1977 for outstanding original investigations in astronomical physics.

In addition, he continues to serve as vice chairman of the Committee of Concerned Scientists, a national organization devoted to working for the political freedom of scientists in countries where it is endangered.

First American honored by Paris Observatory

He was the first American to be awarded an honorary doctorate degree in 1976 from the Paris Observatory, a 309-year-old institution founded by King Louis XIV and recently chartered as a French university. Since then, Penzias has been awarded more than 20 honorary degrees.

Penzias also has been honored for his pioneering work in interstellar chemistry, discovering the presence of key chemicals among the stars. Using his pioneering techniques to observe millimeter-wave radio spectra emanating from space, Penzias and his colleagues identified carbon monoxide and several other simple molecules in the dusty clouds in interstellar space.

Among other finds, the team pinpointed the nuclear composition of the constituent atoms of these molecules--the remnants of burned-out stars and the raw materials for new ones. This work gave astronomers an important new window into stellar composition and life cycles, and has grown into a flourishing branch of astronomy.

Discovering deuterium in outer space

Penzias, Wilson and their Bell Labs co-worker Keith Jefferts discovered the existence of deuterium (heavy hydrogen) in outer space in 1973, providing additional clues to the birth of the universe.

"The most personally satisfying portion of this work for me was the discovery in 1973 of a deuterated molecular species, DCN," Penzias said. "This work provided us with evidence for the cosmological origin of this important substance, which earned the nickname 'Arno's white whale' during this period" - a reference to the elusive whale in Herman Melville's classic, Moby Dick.

Penzias with his second book, Digital Harmony.

'Curiosity is a precious gift'

Penzias attributes much of his scientific success to an insatiable curiosity he traces to his boyhood years. In accepting the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, Sweden, Penzias told the students participating in the event to keep a strong sense of curiosity.

"Curiosity is a precious gift which comes so naturally to us that we sometimes fail to appreciate it," he notes.

In Penzias' prolific, multi-faceted career, he has written more than 100 scientific papers, two books, two science fiction stories, numerous technical and business articles, and holds several patents.

Bridging language and technology

The books led to Penzias' induction into the Literary Hall of Fame, founded in 1976 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). At the induction ceremonies, Penzias remarked, "I guess I'm the token technologist," adding that his reason for writing is to "try to bridge the gap between language and technology."

His highly acclaimed first book, Ideas and Information, examined the impact of information technology on business and society. It was published in the U.S. by W.W. Norton, and was translated into most major foreign languages.

The more recent book, Digital Harmony, envisions machines that will work in harmony with each other, with their human users, and with the natural environment. Subtitled Business, Technology and Life After Paperwork, the book explores how emerging technologies will change the way people work and live.

Penzias sees Lucent, as well as other corporations, organizing themselves less like snowballs and more like drifts of snowflakes in which every part touches the outside environment. He covers such technologies as fiber optics, very large-scale integration in microelectronic chips, middleware, asynchronous transfer mode, design for the environment, the National Information Infrastructure, the Internet, video calling, and personal digital assistants.

Broadening his perspective

Over the years, Penzias' writing has reflected a broadening perspective, one which tracks his move up the research management ladder. After eight years as a technical staff researcher, including those years he was "listening" to the universe with the Crawford Hill horn antenna, he was promoted to supervisor of the technical staff in 1969. In 1972, he became head of Radio Physics Research and, in 1976, director of the Radio Research Lab.

Shortly after the Nobel Prize, he was elevated to executive director of the Communications Sciences Research Division, and in 1981 he was appointed vice president of Research, a position which he held for the next fourteen years. During that crucial period, Bell Labs Research transformed itself, tying its output much more closely to business needs and opportunities, while still maintaining its long-standing reputation for scientific excellence.

Forging a new Bell Labs

In 1995, he became vice president and chief scientist of AT&T Bell Laboratories, a position which continued when Bell Labs split from AT&T in 1996 and became part of Lucent.

"By 1995, I felt that I had taken research as far as my vision of the future could allow me to. At that point, I felt that I needed an updated vision, and that research deserved the benefit of a new point of view. It's certainly worked well on both counts.

"Out in Silicon Valley, I'm learning by doing--working out of a one-person office in my San Francisco home. Looking back at Bell Labs, I can't begin to describe how proud I am of what its people have accomplished in these past two years.

Bell Labs - "Amazingly bright light"

"I remember the long years of uncertainty which marked Bell Labs' transition, from a captive supplier of technology for a regulated monopoly to today's unique innovation engine. Lots of doubts, numerous arguments, and much well-thought-out disagreement.

"Through it all, I've always maintained that there would be light at the end of the tunnel--even when my own conviction might have wavered momentarily--but I never suspected how amazingly bright that light would be."

(Written by freelance writer Gordon Bishop.)