Tuesday, November 10, 2009

The design of the universe

George Smoot: Nobel Prize Winner in Physics

George Fitzgerald Smoot III (born February 20, 1945) is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, as well as a $1 million TV quiz show prize winner. He won the Nobel Prize in 2006 for his work on COBE with John C. Mather that led to the measurement "...of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation."

This work helped further the Big Bang theory of the universe using the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE). According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the COBE project can also be regarded as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science." Smoot donated his share of the Nobel Prize money, less travel costs, to a charitable foundation.

He is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2003, he was awarded the Einstein Medal.


References

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c64Aia4XE1Y

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Smoot

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