Here is a picture
that is worth a Nobel prize. The 2006 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to George Smoot and John Mather for their work on the Cosmic Background Explorer and its verification of many of the details of the big bang cosmology. George Smoot is currently at Berkeley/LBNL and was an undergrad and grad at MIT. John Mather is currently at the Goddard Space Flight Center and was an undergrad at Swarthmore College and a grad at Berkeley. When I first showed up at Berkeley I was planning on going into cosmology. I can still remember learning how the angular spectrum of the cosmic background radiation could be used to rule out certain cosmological theories. If there’s a bump here that is bigger than that bump there, then you’ve just ruled out Joe Schmoes pet cosmological model. Very cool!
O brave new quantum world!
So I have a very, very, very tenuous connection to this year’s prize (probably considerably less than a lot of other people, but hey, it’s my brush with fame). I worked for awhile at Goddard on the SeaWiFS project (which I’d link to but I think is now defunct). The data analysis “crew” for SeaWiFS was the data analysis “crew” for COBE and some of them were still working on some COBE stuff so I jumped in on some interstellar dust analysis that was being done to wrap up the COBE work (this was ’98 and ’99 so the project was just about complete). So I worked, albeit very briefly at the very end, on the COBE project (or at least its entrails). I suppose that doesn’t entitle me to any of that prize money… 🙂
I could’ve told them Swedes that COBE was worth a Nobel Prize. 🙂 Congrats to the winners! I took Smoot’s relativity course at Berkeley — at least until he started on the actual physics, at which point I dropped it.