Professor Arno Penzias, you discovered, with Robert Wilson, the ‘cosmic microwave background radiation’,19 which helped establish the Big Bang theory of cosmology. For this, you won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978. Briefly, you were using an antenna to capture signals. A strange background noise remained after all the interferences had been eliminated. After checking the equipment, removing pigeons nesting in the antenna and cleaning out their droppings, the noise remained: the cosmic microwave background radiation.