George Smoot, Blackbody, and Anisotropy
of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

· Resources with Additional Information

'George Smoot, ... has been awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics.  He shares the award with John C. Mather of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.  The citation reads "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." '¹ Smoot previously won the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award.

'Smoot has been an astrophysicist at Berkeley Lab since 1974 and a UC Berkeley physics professor since 1994. ...'¹

Courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory

In 1992, 'Smoot made an announcement that essentially silenced all the scientific critics of the Big Bang theory and helped change the course of future investigations into the origin and evolution of the universe. Smoot and his research team, after analyzing hundreds of millions of precision measurements in the data they’d gathered from an experiment aboard NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, had produced maps of the entire sky which showed “hot" and "cold" regions with temperature differences of a hundred-thousandth of a degree. These temperature fluctuations, produced when the universe was smaller than a single proton, were consistent with Big Bang predictions and are believed to be the primordial seeds from which grew our present universe.'¹

' “I offer my congratulations to George Smoot and John Mather for their outstanding contributions to science ...” Secretary Bodman said. “The groundbreaking work of these two American scientists showed us how to look back in time to the very infancy of our universe, so we might better understand how it came to be, and where it is going. They began a scientific journey that we are still on today, one I am sure that will lead to more amazing discoveries in the future.” ...

“DOE takes particular pride in the contributions of George Smoot and our Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,” DOE Under Secretary for Science Raymond L. Orbach said. “The DOE Office of Science supported Dr. Smoot’s research during the period in which he worked on the COBE experiment, and we continue to support him today. In addition, one of the principal instruments for the NASA COBE experiment used to make the discoveries was built at Berkeley Lab at facilities maintained by the Office of Science. This is an example of the scientific excellence that DOE supports.”'²

Resources with Additional Information

Documents:

Top

Additional Web Pages:

Media Resources

Other Publications

Biographical Information

Top