Once you find the cache, look north along the sidewalk at the street sign for Penzias Place. This is named after Dr. Arno Penzias, a renowned scientist who lived in Highland Park with his family for many years. Penzias was awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for his role in discovering the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Arno Penzias lived on South 5th Avenue, near the intersections with Graham and Mansfield Streets. He was working at Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ when he and Dr. Robert W. Wilson began using a 20 ft horn shaped radio antenna to conduct research in the emerging field of radio astronomy. During their studies they found that no matter where in the sky they pointed the antenna, they detected uniform low-level radiation around the wavelength of 7 cm, in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. This radiation corresponded to a spectral emission temperature of 3 Kelvin. After doing meticulous checks to confirm that the radiation source was indeed from space and not from earth, Penzias and Wilson published their groundbreaking discovery in 1965. The existence of the cosmic microwave background radiation is key evidence supporting the big bang theory, which describes the physical origin of the universe.
Penzias was born in Germany in 1933. He left Germany at age 6 in the famous WWII Kindertransport campaign and then immigrated to the United States with his parents and brother. He studied at the City College of New York (CCNY) and Columbia University, and served for 2 years in the US Army Signal Corps. He lived until age 90, when he passed away in California in 2024. Penzias shared the 1978 Physics Nobel Prize with Robert W. Wilson and Pyotr Kapitsa.
In addition to his Nobel-prize winning finding, Penzias made numerous other groundbreaking discoveries in the field of radio astronomy. He found the first molecule in space containing the hydrogen isotope deuterium, he discovered the CO, CS, SiO, and H2S molecules in space, and he published notable studies on astronomical carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and silicon isotope abundances.
You can see the famous horn antenna that Penzias and Wilson used - it is displayed in Holmdel in Dr. Robert Wilson Park, a 30 minute drive from here.
This photo shows Penzias and Wilson with the 20 foot horn-reflector antenna in Holmdel in 1962.
This photo shows Penzias (left) recieving his Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1978
Sources:
Arno Penzias – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach 2025. Mon. 4 Aug 2025. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1978/penzias/facts/>
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