"Along with John Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics for finding the background radiation that finally pinned down the Big Bang theory, the idea that the universe was born in a rapid cosmic expansion some 14 billion years ago. The Florida native earned a PhD in particle physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970."
"At the lab, George led a research team that produced detailed maps of the infant universe. They revealed a pattern of minuscule temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background, relic light from billions of years ago. Those early tiny fluctuations evolved into the galaxies we observe today, Witherell wrote. It was that research that led to Smoot and Mather winning the Nobel Prize."
George Smoot, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist renowned for mapping minute temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, died at 80 in Paris of a heart attack on Sept. 18. His work, shared with John Mather, provided decisive evidence for the Big Bang and traced how primordial fluctuations evolved into present-day galaxies. Smoot earned a PhD in particle physics at MIT in 1970 and built a distinguished career at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley. He used Nobel funds to launch the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, traveled after retiring in 2014, and engaged with climate issues and popular media.
Read at www.berkeleyside.org
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