Two scientists climbed inside a giant metal horn antenna to scrub out pigeon droppings, certain the bird mess was causing a stubborn radio hiss ruining their experiment. They were actually listening to the echo of the birth of the universe.

This episode tells the story of Arno Penzias, a stateless refugee child who fled Nazi Germany and went on to fundamentally change our understanding of the cosmos, proving that the biggest breakthroughs often disguise themselves as frustrating anomalies.

• His escape from Munich on the Kindertransport at age six, classified stateless until 1946
• The U.S. Army Signal Corps radar training that gave him hands-on mastery of microwave hardware and signal noise
• Why the mysterious hiss was isotropic, coming from everywhere equally, and how that ruled out New York City and the pigeons
• Robert Dicke’s ‘boys, we’ve been scooped’ moment and the side-by-side 1965 papers that killed the steady-state theory
• The 1978 Nobel Prize, the cosmological redshift that stretched gamma rays into cold microwaves, and a full-circle telescope dedication in Germany