Who and how was the cosmic microwave background radiation discovered?
It wasn’t that much of an accident. Engineers at Bell Labs had developed “horn” antennas that were used across the country in the microwave relay link for long distance telephones and for the Echo satellite experiments. It was known from accurate engineering measurements by E. Ohm and others that these antennas suffered from a few degrees of excess noise, and Bell Labs management thought it might be an astronomical source. So they hired two young physicists, Penzias and Wilson, who had written thesis projects on sensitive radio detections of astronomical sources, and set them to finding an explanation. Furthermore, the Dicke/Wilkinson group at Princeton University was already searching for the radiation, but did not have the extensive engineering facilities available at Bell Labs. If you look at the publication of the result, there are back-to-back papers from Penzias and Wilson and the Dicke group. So in terms of raw scientific priority, it’s a tie. Dicke deserved a Nobel for several
