Arno Allan Penzias was an American physicist and radio astronomer who won a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics 1978. He was one of the discoverers of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which helped establish the Big Bang theory of cosmology. Born into a Jewish family in Germany during the early 1930s, he grew up during a period of great political turmoil in the country. As a child, he was transported to Britain during a rescue operation just before the World War II began and was luckily reunited with his family which then migrated to the United States. His parents worked hard to rebuild their lives and soon settled into a comfortable middle-class existence. Interested in science from a young age, he enrolled at the City College of New York after completing his high school and graduated with a degree in physics. After serving as a radar officer in the U.S Army Signal Corps for two years he proceeded to complete his doctorate and joined Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, where he began his experiments on ultra-sensitive cryogenic microwave receivers. His research and findings also helped astronomers in confirming the Big Bang theory.