Willy Pragher · CC BY 3.0 de

Escaped Nazi Germany as a six-year-old on a Kindertransport train in 1939, and grew up to make one of the accidental great discoveries of twentieth-century physics: while trying to eliminate mysterious noise from a Bell Labs antenna in New Jersey — at one point suspecting pigeon droppings — he and Robert Wilson realized in 1964 that the signal was cosmic microwave background radiation, leftover heat from the Big Bang itself. The find, confirming a decades-old theoretical prediction, won them the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.