I was born in Munich, Germany, in 1933. I spent the first six years of my life comfortably, as an adored child in a closely-knit middle-class family.… - Arno Allan Penzias

After a painful but largely successful struggle with courses and qualifying exams, I began my thesis work under Professor Townes. I was given the task of building a maser amplifier in a radio-astronomy experiment of my choosing; the equipment-building went better than the observations. In 1961, with my PhD thesis complete, I went in search of a temporary job at Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey. Their unique facilities made it an ideal place to finish the observations I had begun during my thesis work. “Why not take a permanent job? You can always quit,” was the advice of Rudi Kompfner, then Director of the Radio Research Laboratory. I took his advice, and remained a Bell Labs employee for the next thirty seven years. Since the large horn antenna I had planned to use for radio-astronomy was still engaged in the ECHO satellite project for which it was originally constructed, I looked for something interesting to do with a smaller fixed antenna. The project I hit upon was a search for line emission from the then still undetected interstellar OH molecule. While the first detection of this molecule was made by another group, I learned quite a bit from the experience.

Well, if we read the Bible as a whole we would expect order in the world. Purpose would imply order, and what we actually find is order.

The Bible talks of purposeful creation. What we have, however, is an amazing amount of order; and when we see order, in our experience it normally reflects purpose.