George Smoot facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
George Smoot
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Smoot at 2009 POVO conference in The Netherlands
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George Fitzgerald Smoot III
February 20, 1945 Yukon, Florida, U.S.
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| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Known for | Cosmic microwave background radiation |
| Awards | NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement (1992) Kilby Award (1993) American Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award (1994) E. O. Lawrence Award (1994) Albert Einstein Medal (2003) Nobel Prize in Physics (2006) Gruber Prize (2006) Daniel Chalonge Medal (2006) Oersted Medal (2009) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | UC Berkeley/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory/Paris Diderot University/Hong Kong University of Science and Technology |
| Thesis | Charge exchange of positive Kaon on platinum at three GeV/C (1971) |
| Doctoral advisor | David H. Frisch |
| Physical cosmology | ||||||||||||||
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| Universe · Big Bang Age of the universe Timeline of the Big Bang Ultimate fate of the universe
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George Fitzgerald Smoot III (born February 20, 1945) is an American astrophysicist and cosmologist. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006. He also became the second person to win the $1 million prize on the TV show Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?
Smoot received the Nobel Prize for his work with John C. Mather on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite. Their discovery involved the "black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation". This means they found tiny temperature differences in the leftover glow from the Big Bang, which is the theory of how our universe began.
Their work with the COBE satellite greatly helped the Big Bang theory. The Nobel Prize committee said the COBE project made cosmology (the study of the universe) a "precision science." George Smoot gave most of his Nobel Prize money to charity.
Since 1970, Smoot has worked at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is also involved with the Paris Center for Cosmological Physics. He has received many awards and honors from universities and scientific groups around the world.
In 2008, Smoot and other Nobel laureates signed a letter to President George W. Bush. They asked for more funding for important science research in the U.S.
Contents
Early Life and Education
George Smoot was born in Yukon, Florida. He went to Upper Arlington High School in Ohio, graduating in 1962. He first studied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Later, he switched to physics.
He earned two bachelor's degrees in mathematics and physics in 1966. In 1970, he received his Ph.D. in particle physics. A distant relative, Oliver R. Smoot, was the MIT student used to create the unit of measure called the smoot.
Exploring the Universe's Beginnings
After his Ph.D., George Smoot became interested in cosmology. He started working at Berkeley. He teamed up with Luis Walter Alvarez on an experiment using a weather balloon. This balloon was designed to look for antimatter high in Earth's atmosphere. At the time, some scientists thought antimatter might exist there, based on an older idea about the universe called the steady state theory. This theory is no longer accepted.
Smoot then focused on the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). This faint glow of radiation fills the universe. It was first discovered in 1964 by Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson. Scientists had many questions about the CMB, which could help them understand the universe's structure.
Some theories suggested the universe might be spinning. If it were, the CMB's temperature would look different depending on which direction you observed it. Smoot, with Alvarez and Richard A. Muller, created a special tool called a differential radiometer. This tool measured tiny temperature differences in the CMB from two directions. They put this instrument on a Lockheed U-2 plane. Their measurements showed that the universe is not spinning.
However, their instrument did find a different kind of temperature change. The CMB appeared slightly warmer on one side of the sky than the other. This is called a dipole pattern. Scientists explained this as a Doppler effect. It happens because our Sun and the entire Milky Way galaxy are moving very fast. We are moving at nearly 600 kilometers per second compared to where the CMB light was first released. This movement is likely due to the strong gravitational pull from a huge concentration of mass, like the Great Attractor.
The COBE Satellite Mission
At that time, the CMB seemed almost perfectly smooth, except for the Doppler effect caused by our galaxy's motion. This was a puzzle. The universe we see today has many structures, like galaxies and galaxy clusters. These structures formed slowly over time. So, if the universe has structures now, it must have had tiny differences when the CMB was first released. These tiny differences, called anisotropies, would show up as very small temperature variations in the CMB.
Smoot wanted to find these tiny variations. In the late 1970s, he suggested to NASA a project using a satellite. This satellite would carry a detector similar to the one on the U-2 plane, but much more sensitive. It would also be above Earth's air pollution. NASA accepted his idea. The detector became one of the instruments on the COBE satellite.
COBE cost $160 million and was launched on November 18, 1989. Its launch was delayed because of the Space Shuttle Challenger accident. After more than two years of observations and analysis, the COBE team made a huge announcement on April 23, 1992. The satellite had found tiny fluctuations in the CMB! This was a major breakthrough in understanding the early universe. Smoot famously said that this discovery was "evidence for the birth of the universe."
The success of COBE was a team effort involving over 1,000 researchers and engineers. John Mather led the whole project. He was also in charge of the experiment that showed the CMB had a "blackbody form." Smoot's main job was to measure the small temperature changes in the radiation.
Smoot worked with journalist Keay Davidson to write a book for everyone called Wrinkles in Time. This book told the story of his team's work. Another book, The Very First Light, by John Mather and John Boslough, also tells the COBE story. It mentioned that Smoot shared news of COBE's discoveries with the press before NASA's official announcement. Smoot later apologized for not following the team's plan for sharing information. Mather said that tensions eventually eased. He also recognized that Smoot helped COBE get a lot of worldwide attention.
Other Scientific Work
After COBE, Smoot participated in another experiment using a stratospheric balloon. This project, called Millimeter Anisotropy eXperiment IMaging Array, had better resolution than COBE. It helped refine the measurements of CMB anisotropies. Smoot continued to study the CMB and was part of the Planck satellite project, which was the third generation of CMB observatories.
He also helped design the Supernova/Acceleration Probe. This proposed satellite would study dark energy, a mysterious force making the universe expand faster. Smoot also helped analyze data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. This data was used to measure far infrared background radiation. In 2016, Smoot was a leader in a group that launched the Mikhailo Lomonosov satellite.
As of September 2019, Smoot works as an artificial intelligence scientist for the GTA Foundation. This company stores and uses genomic sequencing data for scientific purposes. In November 2020, he joined Dead Sea Premier to lead research for their anti-aging medical device development. In April 2021, he became chief scientist for Viomi, a company in the Xiaomi eco-system, focusing on AI development. In January 2023, George Smoot joined the National Council for Science and Technology under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
Media Appearances
George Smoot has made several appearances in popular media. He had a cameo appearance as himself in two episodes of The Big Bang Theory, a TV show about scientists. He contacted the show because he liked their physics-based stories. He appeared in an episode where he lectured at a fictional physics meeting. He also helped the show's producer with a joke told by the character Penny.
On September 18, 2009, Smoot was a contestant on the Fox TV show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? He answered the final question correctly, "What U.S. state is home to Acadia National Park?" The answer was "Maine". He became the second person to win the million-dollar prize on the show.
In December 2009, he was interviewed by the BBC with other Nobel laureates. They discussed how valuable science is to society. Smoot also gave a TEDx talk in 2014. In his talk, he suggested that some ideas in physics support the simulation hypothesis. This is the idea that our reality might be a computer-generated virtual reality. In 2016, Smoot appeared in a TV commercial for Intuit TurboTax.
Selected Publications
- Lubin, P. M. & G. F. Smoot. "Search for Linear Polarization of the Cosmic Background Radiation", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), United States Department of Energy, (Oct. 1978).
- Gorenstein, M. V.& G. F. Smoot. "Large-Angular-Scale Anisotropy in the Cosmic Background Radiation", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), United States Department of Energy, (May 1980).
- Smoot, G. F., De Amici, G., Friedman, S. D., Witebsky, C., Mandolesi, N., Partridge, R. B., Sironi, G., Danese, L. & G. De Zotti. "Low Frequency Measurement of the Spectrum of the Cosmic Background Radiation", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), United States Department of Energy, (June 1983).
- Smoot, G. F., De Amici, G., Levin, S. & C. Witebsky. "New Measurements of the Cosmic Background Radiation Spectrum", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), United States Department of Energy, (Dec. 1984).
- Smoot, G., Levin, S. M., Witebsky, C., De Amici, G., Y. Rephaeli. "An Analysis of Recent Measurements of the Temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), United States Department of Energy, (July 1987).
- Ade, P., Balbi, A., Bock, J., Borrill, J., Boscaleri, A., de Bernardis, P., Ferreira, P. G., Hanany, S., Hristov, V. V., Jaffe, A. H., Lange, A. E., Lee, A. T., Mauskopf, P. D., Netterfield, C. B., Oh, S., Pascale, E., Rabii, B., Richards, P. L., Smoot, G. F., Stompor, R., Winant, C. D. & J. H. P. Wu. "MAXIMA-1: A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy on Angular Scales of 10' to 5 degrees", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), United States Department of Energy, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Science Foundation (NSF), KDI Precision Products, Inc., Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council UK, (June 4, 2005).
See also
In Spanish: George Smoot para niños
