"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. He used $500,000 of his Nobel money to launch the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics at UC Berkeley."
"Smoot died Sept. 18 in Paris of a heart attack, according to a statement last week by UC Berkeley. He traveled the world after retiring from the Berkeley Lab in 2014, and took a keen interest in climate change. Smoot also appeared as himself twice on the hit CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, including in an episode where he lectured at a fictional physics symposium."
George Smoot, a Nobel Prize–winning cosmologist, died Sept. 18 in Paris of a heart attack at age 80. He and John Mather won the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics for detecting the cosmic microwave background irregularities that confirmed the Big Bang and revealed early-universe temperature fluctuations. Smoot earned a PhD in particle physics at MIT in 1970 and spent his career at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley, where he led teams that mapped the infant universe. He used $500,000 of Nobel funds to establish the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, retired in 2014, taught in Paris, and engaged publicly on climate change and media appearances.
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