ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA:
In
1963 Bell Laboratories assigned Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson the task of
tracing the radio noise that was interfering with the development of
communication satellites. Penzias and Wilson discovered that no matter where
the antenna was pointed there was always non-zero noise strength, even where
the sky was visibly empty.
A
simple solution would have been to reset their receivers to zero, but they
persisted in tracing the source.
This
major discovery made by Penzias and Wilson was the cosmic background radiation
and the strongest evidence for the big bang.
Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel
Prize in physics for their discovery in 1978.