George Smoot Biography
George Smoot (birth name: George Fitzgerald Smoot III) is an American cosmologist, astrophysicist, Nobel laureate, and one of two contestants to win the US$1 million prize on Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?. He is a professor of physics at the UC, Berkeley, senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a professor of physics at the Paris Diderot University since 2010, the Helmut and Anna Pao Sohmen Professor at Large at the IAS Hong Kong University of Science and Technology since 2016.
Smoot became a Nobel Prize winner in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer with John C. Mather. Their work led to the “discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation”. It also enabled to further the universe’s Big Bang theory using the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite.
George Smoot Age
George Fitzgerald Smoot III is 74 years old as of 2019. He was born in Yukon, Florida, United States on February 20, 1945.
George Smoot Education
Smoot attended Upper Arlington High School in Ohio and graduated in 1962. He then enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study mathematics but switched to physics. In 1966, he received dual bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and physics and in 1970, he obtained a Ph.D. in particle physics.
George Smoot Wife
George is married to a lady by the name Maxine Smoot. He has managed to keep his marriage away from the public hence not much is known about the couple.
George Smoot Cosmology Research
Upon his graduation, Smoot took an interest in cosmology and began working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with Luis Walter Alvarez. The two worked 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.
George Smoot Flat Earth
Smoot became interested in a discovery by Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). At that time, there were open questions on the topic in regards to the structure of the universe. Certain models predicted the universe as a whole was rotating, which would have an effect on the CMB: its temperature would depend on the direction of observation.
For this, Smoot came up with a differential radiometer with the help of Alvarez and Richard A. Muller. Mounted on a Lockheed U-2 plane, the differential radiometer measured the difference in temperature of the CMB between two directions 60 degrees apart. It also led to the determination that the overall rotation of the universe was zero, which was within the limits of accuracy of the instrument.
The differential radiometer, however, did detect a variation in the temperature of the CMB of a different sort. That the CMB appears to be at a higher temperature on one side of the sky than on the opposite side, referred to as a dipole pattern, has been explained as a Doppler effect of the Earth’s motion relative to the area of CMB emission, which is called the last scattering surface. Such a Doppler effect arises because the Sun, and in fact, the Milky Way as a whole is not stationary, but rather is moving at nearly 600 km/s with respect to the last scattering surface. This is probably due to the gravitational attraction between our galaxy and a concentration of mass like the Great Attractor.
Apart from his cosmology studies, Smoot has made appearances in television shows like The Big Bang Theory in the episode “The Terminator Decoupling”, the Fox television show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, on September 18, 2009. In the latter, Smoot got to the final question, “What U.S. state is home to Acadia National Park?”, to which he gave the correct answer “Maine”, and became the second person to win the one-million-dollar prize.
He appeared in an interview with Nobel laureates by BBC on 10th December 2009, as they discussed the value science has to offer society. He also 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. In April 2019 he also appeared in the episode The Laureate Accumulation.
George Smoot Books
♦ 2002 – Unity of Knowledge
♦ 1994 – Wrinkles in Time (with Keay Davidson)
♦ 1987 – An Analysis of Recent Measurements of the Temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (with Levin, S. M., Witebsky, C., De Amici, G., and Y. Rephaeli)
♦ 1984 – New Measurements of the Cosmic Background Radiation Spectrum(with De Amici, G., Levin, S. & C. Witebsky)
♦ 1983 – Low Frequency Measurement of the Spectrum of the Cosmic Background Radiation (with De Amici, G., Friedman, S. D., Witebsky, C., Mandolesi, N., Partridge, R. B., Sironi, G., Danese, L. & G. De Zotti)
♦ 1980 – Large-Angular-Scale Anisotropy in the Cosmic Background Radiation (with Gorenstein, M. V.)
♦ 1978 – Search for Linear Polarization of the Cosmic Background Radiation (with Lubin, P. M.)