Wilson studied initially at Rice University in his native city of Houston, where he gained his BA in physics in 1957; he went on to obtain his PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1962. He joined the Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey, in 1963 and served as head of the radiophysics research department from 1976 to 1990.

It was at the Bell Laboratories that he and his coworker Arno Penzias found the first evidence in 1964 of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is now widely interpreted as being the remnant radiation from the ‘big bang’ creation of the universe several billion years ago. The two men were jointly honored with the 1978 Nobel Prize for physics, which they shared with Pyotr L. Kapitza for his (unrelated) discoveries in low-temperature physics.

Wilson is continuing his astrophysics work with Penzias, looking for interstellar molecules and determining the relative abundances of interstellar isotopes.