Faculty Honors

Cosmologist George Smoot wins Berkeley’s 20th Nobel Prize

George Smoot was greeted with “Congratulations, Prof. Smoot!” on his LeConte Hall chalkboard — amid electric field equations — on the morning after his Nobel win. (Steve McConnell photo)

Winter 2007 | Berkeley cosmologist George Smoot, who led a team that obtained the first images of the infant universe — findings that confirmed the predictions of the Big Bang theory — won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics this fall. This is the Berkeley faculty’s 20th Nobel Prize and its eighth in physics.

Smoot said the early morning call from Sweden announcing the prize caught him off guard — the Nobel committee had obtained his unlisted cell phone number by waking his neighbor. “There were no rumors,” said Smoot, 61. Though he got two calls from Sweden congratulating him on winning, he said, “I wasn’t absolutely sure until I ran to my computer and pulled up the Nobel web page. Then I believed it.”

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau hailed Smoot’s achievement, saying, “There are few more exciting moments than this in the life of a university — I know the entire campus community is enormously proud of George’s achievement and joins me in sending him hearty congratulations.”

Smoot, Birgeneau added, is “a great researcher, obviously, as recognized by the Nobel committee,” but he’s “also someone who’s in the classroom teaching undergraduates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 11 a.m” — the fall schedule for his lower-division Physics for Scientists and Engineers course.

“He’s the kind of faculty member who gives our undergraduates the opportunity of pursuing knowledge at its very frontier,” said the chancellor, citing the four undergrads who work in Smoot’s lab. “There are not many places where that can happen, and not many places have the kind of faculty members who do Nobel Prize work and include undergraduates in that work.”

A Big Bang breakthrough
Smoot, a Berkeley professor of physics and an astrophysicist at the nearby Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, shared the prize with John C. Mather of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

In 1989, Smoot and Mather, who earned his Ph.D. in physics at Berkeley in 1974, led the building and launch of NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite to look for telltale signs of the primordial explosion. According to theory, the Big Bang fireball 13.7 billion years ago filled the universe with heat that has since cooled to a mere 2.7 degrees above absolute zero.

They announced in 1992 the discovery of residual heat from the explosion, as well as minute variations in temperature across the sky that indicated the beginnings of structure in the early universe that evolved into galaxies and clusters of galaxies.

“Those measurements really confirmed our picture of the Big Bang,” Smoot said. “By studying the fluctuations in the microwave background, we found a tool that allowed us to explore the early universe, to see how it evolved and what it’s made of.”

Smoot said the COBE maps depicted the universe as it looked when it was about one-ten-thousandth of its current age, or about 300,000 years after its birth.

During the last 34 years, Smoot has led a succession of projects that have helped change the nature of the quest to understand the origin and evolution of the universe.

“Although cosmology has been around since the time of the ancients, historically it has been dominated by theory and speculation,” Smoot said. “Very recently, the era of speculation has given way to a time of science. The advance of knowledge and of scientific ingenuity means that, at long last, we can actually test our theories.”

The day after Smoot’s Nobel win he was back in the classroom, teaching undergraduates in Physics 7B. After a brief recap of the cosmic research that garnered him the Nobel — and an ovation from the students — it was back to studying electrical fields and Gauss’s law.

Marjorie Shapiro, chair of Berkeley’s physics department, noted, “All department chairs think their faculty are exceptional. It’s wonderful when the rest of the world tells you that you’re right.”