Smoot, George

George is a Nobel Laureate in Physics (2006). An astrophysicist and cosmologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he was instrumental in corroborating the Big Bang theory of how the universe began by measuring the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the residual radiation from the Big Bang that had cooled over time and with the expansion of the universe. These measurements, which George and his team labored over and checked and rechecked innumerable times, has been called, arguably, one of the most important in the history of science. According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the COBE-project can also be regarded as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science." Initially, from airborne instrumentation (detector on a U-2 plane), it appeared that the CMB to be homogenous, perfectly uniform (excluding distortions and artifacts). This result obviously contradicted observations of the universe as it stands today, with various structures such as galaxies, and galactic clusters. However, these structures formed slowly. Thus, if the universe is heterogeneous today, it would have been somewhat (or relatively) heterogeneous in the very early universe at the time of the emission of the CMB as well, and therefore observable today in the form of minute or weak variations in the temperature of the CMB. It was the detection of these variations (or “anisotropies”) that George was working on in the late 1970s. He then proposed to NASA a project involving a satellite equipped with an appropriate detector. The proposal was accepted and gave rise to the satellite COBE, which was launched in November 1989. On April 23, 1992, after more than two years of observation and analysis, the COBE research team announced that the satellite had detected tiny fluctuations in the CMB, a breakthrough in the study of the early universe. The observations were "evidence for the birth of the universe" and Smoot said on the importance of his discovery that "If you're religious, it's like looking at God." The success of COBE was the outcome of prodigious team work involving more than 1,000 researchers, engineers and other participants. John Mather coordinated the entire process and also had primary responsibility for the experiment that revealed the blackbody form of the CMB measured by COBE. George Smoot had main responsibility for measuring the small variations in the temperature of the radiation. Both won the Nobel.