Robert Woodrow Wilson (born 10.1.1936) is an American experimental physicist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1979). He was born in Houston. In 1962 he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the California Institute of Technology. Since 1963 he has worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (from 1976 as head of a department).
His work concerned radio astronomy and space physics, in particular the study of the Galaxy and of interstellar molecules by means of millimetre radio waves. Together with A. Penzias he detected experimentally (1965) the cosmic microwave background radiation, at a temperature of about 3 K, which fills the Universe (Nobel Prize, 1978). This discovery confirmed the hot model of the Universe, was a major contribution to modern cosmology and stimulated theoretical and experimental research in cosmology and high-energy astrophysics. In 1973 he discovered cosmic deuterium and determined its abundance in the Universe.