Scope and Content Note
The papers of Arno Allan Penzias (1933- ) span 1931-2006, with the bulk of the collection dating from 1963 to 1998. Penzias enjoyed a thirty-seven year career with Bell Laboratories and its successor Lucent Technologies, serving these organizations as an astrophysicist and eventually as chief scientist and vice president directing the corporate laboratory’s research and product development. Penzias with his colleague Robert Woodrow Wilson discovered a uniform microwave radiation emanating from beyond our galaxy the charting of which documented the Big Bang theory of the origins of the universe. For this achievement Penzias and Wilson shared a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1978.
Most of the collection is in English but includes material in German, Chinese, French, Swedish, Japanese, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, and Russian. The papers are organized into six series: General Correspondence , Speeches and Writings , Subject File , Oversize , Artifact , and Digital Files .
The General Correspondence contains letters exchanged with colleagues and friends including David Block, Paul A. Fleury, George Gamow, Hiroshi Inose, Roy Radner, and Charles H. Townes.
The Speeches and Writings include files on Penzias’s two books about information technology, Ideas and Information: Managing in a High-Tech World and Harmony: Business, Technology & Life after Paperwork, published in 1989 and 1995 respectively. Correspondence relating to the books is extensive and correspondents include E. A. Ash, Pierre J. Encrenaz, Midhat J. Gazalé, George F. Gilder, Hiroshi Inose, Bela Julesz, Philip Morrison, Dieter Nachtigall, Hans J. Queisser, Masakazu Shoji, Lyman Spitzer, George R. Stibitz, and Michiyuki Uenohara.
Penzias took on his duties directing Bell Laboratories in 1981, the year its parent company, AT & T, was ordered by court order to divest. The Subject File documents Penzias’s leadership during the period when Bell Laboratories became Lucent Technologies. It also sheds light on his earlier research career, such as his discovery of the cosmic background radiation for which he won the Nobel Prize, and his work on another indicator of a Big Bang, the abundance in the universe of deuterium, a stable isotope of hydrogen. A file relating to Penzias’s work on the origin of the elements includes correspondence with Big Bang theorists Ralph Alpher, Robert H. Dicke, Robert Herman (1914), P. J. E. Peebles, and Steven Weinberg (1933). Documentation obtained from Bell Laboratory’s Horn Antenna, with which Penzias and Wilson made their discovery on Crawford Hill in Holmdel, New Jersey, is available in photographs and a rolled, scroll-like “chart record” dating from 1964.
The Digital Files document Penzias's career as a venture capital partner with New Enterprises Associates after his retirement from Lucent Technologies and also include personal correspondence, family photographs and biographical material.