George F. Smoot, an American physicist and Nobel laureate who helped elucidate the history of cosmic creation, providing evidence of what he called primordial seeds that developed into galaxies and galaxy clusters, died September 18 at his home in Paris. He was 80 years old.
His death, following a cardiac arrest, was confirmed by his sister, Sharon Bowie.
Dr. Smoot was a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, when he led a team that built a picture of the infant universe using an instrument he developed in the 1970s.
The instrument was launched into space in 1989 aboard a NASA satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, from which it detected tiny temperature variations in the afterglow of what most scientists assumed was a Big Bang. The pattern of these temperature variations speaks to the uneven distribution of cosmic matter billions of years ago – the seeds from which germinated today’s conception of the universe, dense in some parts and empty in others.
“If you’re religious, it’s like seeing God,” Dr. Smoot said when he announced COBE’s findings in 1992 at an American Physical Society conference, making headlines around the world. (The New York Times story – its lead article in the paper on April 24 – appeared under the headline “Scientists report profound insight into how time began.”)
Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking called it “the greatest discovery of the century, if not of all time.”
Dr. Smoot’s research builds on that of physicists Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson, who discovered in 1964 that the universe was bathed in a sea of ancient light, known as the cosmic microwave background. It was proof that the universe had a beginning and exploded with a Big Bang.
Before this discovery, cosmology was a theoretical playground, filled with imaginative ideas virtually unconnected to data. Measurements taken with the COBE satellite provided data with which scientists could test these different theories about how the universe began, what it was made of, and how it evolved. This helped transform cosmology from a field based largely on speculation to a science based on precise measurements.
Dr. Smoot shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with John C. Mather, a cosmologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, for the groundbreaking discoveries made by the COBE team. Everyone was a team leader in the project.
As a scientist, Dr. Smoot was revered for his genius, but also angered by some colleagues, who felt that he took undue credit for scientific results achieved by others. Days before the physics conference announcement in 1992, Berkeley Lab issued a press release that many saw as unfairly attributing the discovery of variations in the temperature of light to Dr. Smoot and the lab alone, neglecting other team leaders and NASA.
In his 1993 book, “Wrinkles in Time: Witness to the Birth of the Universe,” written with Keay Davidson, Dr. Smoot documented the process that led to the discovery. Some of his colleagues disagreed with his version of events and encouraged Dr. Mather to write his own account. He did so, publishing it three years later under the title “The Very First Light: The True Inside Story of the Scientific Journey to the Dawn of the Universe”, which differed from Dr. Smoot’s version in some details.
Dr. Smoot “has been a lot of trouble,” Dr. Mather admitted in an interview, but he is also “resourceful, thoughtful and enthusiastic, as everyone knows.”
George Fitzgerald Smoot III was born on February 20, 1945, in Yukon, Florida, to George Smoot II, who served as a fighter pilot during World War II, and Talicia (Crawford) Smoot, a science teacher and school principal.
The family moved to Alabama after the war. George’s father was a hydrologist with the United States Geological Survey, a job that also took the family to Alaska, Ohio, and Virginia. According to Dr. Smoot’s account, his mother instilled in him a love of science and education; From his father, who traveled the world measuring river flow, he learned to appreciate the value of invention and instrumentation.
Dr. Smoot attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving degrees in physics and mathematics in 1966 and his Ph.D. in particle physics in 1970, before moving to Berkeley to study under Luis Alvarez, a particle physicist who had won the Nobel Prize in 1968.
There, Dr. Smoot turned to cosmology. With the physicist Richard Muller, he developed an instrument capable of measuring temperature differences in the cosmic microwave background; he used it by mounting it on a U-2 spy plane operated by NASA. The experiment led to one of the first measurements indicating that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is moving through space at more than a million kilometers per hour, suggesting that it is being pulled by the gravitational force of an even more gigantic mass.
In 1974, Dr. Smoot contacted NASA with a proposal to send the instrument into space. NASA combined this proposal with two others, creating the team behind COBE, which put three instruments into orbit.
Within weeks of launch, data analyzed by the team supervised by Dr. Mather, the Goddard cosmologist, solidified the link between the cosmic microwave background and the Big Bang. He also measured the temperature of this bottom: a cold 2.7 kelvins (about minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit), just a little above absolute zero.
Dr. Smoot’s team measured tiny variations in this temperature across the universe, on a scale of about 10 millionths of a degree. He would describe this measurement in his book as being similar to “listening to a whisper at a noisy beach party while radios blare, waves crash, people scream, dogs bark, and strollers roar.”
The announcement of this discovery inspired countless analogies with creation. “It’s really like finding the driving mechanism of the universe,” Dr. Smoot told The Times in 1992. “And isn’t that what God is?”
In addition to confirming the Big Bang picture of the universe, the COBE findings strengthened evidence for the existence of dark matter and the theory of cosmic inflation, which posits that the universe went through a period of rapid expansion shortly after its birth.
Two other space missions have refined the measurements of the cosmic microwave background by COBE; One of them, the Planck Observatory, launched by the European Space Agency in 2009, was proposed by a team including Dr. Smoot.
Dr. Smoot, who became a professor at Berkeley in 1994, donated much of his Nobel Prize money (he and Dr. Mather shared a gift of about $1.37 million) to endow Berkeley’s Center for Cosmological Physics, of which he was the founding director. He helped establish cosmology institutes around the world, including in France and South Korea, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors. In 2009, he joined the faculty of Paris Cité University and became affiliated with the Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory.
He married Maxine Bixby in 1969; they divorced in 1979. In addition to his sister, Dr. Smoot is survived by his partner, Nóra Csiszár.
Toward the end of his career, Dr. Smoot became more involved in public outreach and science education. He helped launch programs to teach cosmology to high school teachers and students and taught an online course on gravity that attracted an audience of more than 87,000 people.
He also made guest appearances on the CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” and, in 2009, appeared on the Fox network game show “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” He went on the show, he said, to encourage his students to try new things; in doing so, he became the second person to win $1 million.
During his appearance, Dr. Smoot noted that he donated his Nobel Prizes to create scholarships for young scientists. Pointing to the students on stage as the crowd applauded, he said, “I hope one of these guys gets one.” »
