nobel-laureate-george-smoot-big-bang-theory-researcher-dies

Nobel laureate Dr. George Smoot, who is famous for his research into the origins of the universe and for finding the background radiation that finally unraveled the Big Bang theory, has died at the age of 80.

According to a statement by the University of California, Berkeley, where Smoot held a long career, the physicist died on September 18 in Paris of a heart attack.

Smoot was the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics along with John Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He is credited for finally pinning down the idea that the universe was born in a rapid cosmic expansion some 14 billion years ago.

Smoot, a Florida native, had earned a PhD in particle physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. He then joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, “where he spent a distinguished career uncovering the secrets of the universe,” lab director Mike Witherell wrote in a tribute.

 

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At the lab, Smoot led a research team that produced detailed maps of the infant universe, a revelation that led him and Mather to win the Nobel Prize.

“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. 

Smoot used USD 500,000 of his Nobel money to launch the Berkeley Centre for Cosmological Physics at UC Berkeley.  

He also taught at the Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory in Paris.

“We will remember him as a larger than life character, with a broad range of interests beyond the discoveries for which he is best known,” the APC Lab said in an online tribute.

The scientist-researcher travelled the world after retiring from the Berkeley Lab in 2014, and took a keen interest in climate change.

He also twice appeared as himself on the hit CBS sitcom, ‘The Big Bang Theory’, including in an episode where he lectured at a fictional physics symposium. In 2009 he won the top prize on the Fox TV game show, ‘Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?’ 

Smoot is survived by a sister, Sharon Smoot Bowie, of New London, New Hampshire, two nieces, and his partner, Nóra Csiszár of Paris, the university statement said.