Remembering George F. Smoot III

Dear colleagues,

I am saddened to share that George F. Smoot III, a pioneering astrophysicist and Nobel Laureate in Physics, has passed away at the age of 80. George joined UC Berkeley in 1971 and Berkeley Lab in 1974, where he spent a distinguished career uncovering the secrets of the universe.

At Berkeley Lab, George was the leader of a research team that produced detailed maps of the infant universe. They revealed a pattern of minuscule temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), relic light from billions of years ago. Those early tiny fluctuations evolved into the galaxies we observe today. George was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with John Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, for “their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.”

After graduating from MIT with degrees in math and physics, George turned his attention to cosmology – then considered a fringe field. He used an instrument called a Differential Microwave Radiometer (DMR), flown on a U-2 airplane, to find evidence of the Doppler effect as our galaxy moves through the universe relative to the CMB. He went on to lead the team that developed the DMRs that flew on NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite and made the Nobel Prize-winning “baby picture” of the universe. The findings provided strong support for the Big Bang theory and established cosmology as a truly quantitative science.

George’s contributions to cosmology were recognized with many other awards, including NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (1992), the Department of Energy’s E.O. Lawrence Award (1994), the Albert Einstein Medal (2003), and the Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2006). He was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Physical Society, and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors for his development of instrumentation to study the CMB.

In addition to his groundbreaking research, George was committed to engaging with the public and helping the next generation of scientists. He wrote a popular book about cosmology and the CMB experiments entitled Wrinkles in Time. In 2007, he used a portion of his Nobel award to launch the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics at UC Berkeley, which was established as a premier cosmological research center to support postdoctoral students, graduate students, and faculty.

After retiring from Berkeley Lab in 2014, Smoot continued to engage actively in scientific research and education. In 2009, he joined Université Paris-Cité as an affiliate of the Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie, and as a professor of physics, he mentored postdocs and played an instrumental role in the founding of the Paris Center for Cosmological Physics. He also launched the long-running Physics In and Through Cosmology Workshop, an annual outreach event hosted by the Berkeley Lab Physics Division for Bay Area high school physics teachers and students, now in its nineteenth year.

Please join me in honoring the legacy of George Smoot.

Michael Witherell

 

Honoring the Legacy of George Smoot

Nobelist George Smoot, whose satellite experiments validated the Big Bang theory, dies at 80