1. George Smoot won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer with John C Mather that led to the "discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation".
24 Facts About George Smoot
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George Smoot has been at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1970.
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George Smoot is Chair of the Endowment Fund "Physics of the Universe" of Paris Center for Cosmological Physics.
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Apart from being elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, George Smoot has been honored by several universities worldwide with doctorates or professorships.
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George Smoot was the recipient of the Gruber Prize in Cosmology, the Daniel Chalonge Medal from the International School of Astrophysics, the Einstein Medal from the Albert Einstein Society, the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award from the US Department of Energy, and the Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal from NASA.
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George Smoot is a member of the advisory board of the journal Universe.
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George Smoot graduated from Upper Arlington High School in Upper Arlington, Ohio, in 1962.
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George Smoot studied mathematics before switching to physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he obtained dual bachelor's degrees in mathematics and physics in 1966 and a Ph.
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George Smoot switched to cosmology and began work at Berkeley, collaborating with Luis Walter Alvarez on the High Altitude Particle Physics Experiment, a stratospheric weather balloon designed to detect antimatter in Earth's upper atmosphere, the presence of which was predicted by the now discredited steady state theory of cosmology.
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George Smoot then took up an interest in cosmic microwave background radiation, previously discovered by Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson in 1964.
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George Smoot then proposed to NASA a project involving a satellite equipped with a detector that was similar to the one mounted on the U-2 but was more sensitive and not influenced by air pollution.
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George Smoot had the main responsibility of measuring the small variations in the temperature of the radiation.
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George Smoot collaborated with San Francisco Chronicle journalist Keay Davidson to write the general-audience book Wrinkles in Time, that chronicled his team's efforts.
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George Smoot eventually apologized for not following the agreed publicity plan and Mather said tensions eventually eased.
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Mather acknowledged that George Smoot had "brought COBE worldwide publicity" the project might not normally have received.
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George Smoot has continued CMB observations and analysis and was a collaborator on the third generation CMB anisotropy observatory Planck satellite.
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George Smoot has assisted in analyzing data from the Spitzer Space Telescope in connection with measuring far infrared background radiation.
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George Smoot was a leader in a group that launched the Mikhailo Lomonosov April 28,2016.
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George Smoot is credited by Mickey Hart for inspiring the album Mysterium Tremendum, which is based, in part on "sounds" that can be extracted from the background signature of the Big Bang.
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George Smoot had a cameo appearance as himself in "The Terminator Decoupling" episode of The Big Bang Theory.
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George Smoot contacted the show as a fan of their often physics-based plots and was incorporated into an episode featuring him lecturing at a fictional physics symposium.
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George Smoot is credited by the producer of the show with providing a joke told by Penny in the episode "The Dead Hooker Juxtaposition".
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George Smoot gave a 2014 TEDx lecture in which he suggested that certain aspects of physics support the simulation hypothesis, the idea that our reality is a computer-generated virtual reality.
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In 2016, George Smoot appeared in a TV commercial for Intuit TurboTax, advising a user of the software on what to do.