On October 17 the Nobel committee awards Robert Wilson '57 the Nobel Prize in physics. Wilson, the 1st Rice alumnus to win a Nobel, shares half the prize with Arno Penzias, his research partner at Bell Telephone Laboratories (Holmdel, New Jersey), for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation. The other half of the prize goes to Piotr Kapitsa of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow.