NOT the Majority Opinion

Cosmologist George F. Smoot, who led a team that obtained the first images of the infant universe — findings that confirmed the predictions of the Big Bang theory — won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics today (Tuesday, Oct. 3). Smoot, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), shares the prize with John C. Mather of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. This is UC Berkeley's 20th Nobel Prize since Ernest O. Lawrence won in 1939, and its eighth physics Nobel.

Smoot, a resident of Berkeley, said the early morning call today from Sweden announcing the prize caught him off guard — the Nobel Committee for Physics had obtained his unlisted cell phone number by waking his neighbor. "There were no rumors," said Smoot, 61. "I figured they only give the prize when you're close to death, and I still have enough life left in me."

During the last 34 years, Smoot, who has been a UC Berkeley physics professor since 1994 and an astrophysicist at LBNL since 1974, has led a succession of projects that have helped change the nature of the quest to understand the origin and evolution of the universe. "Although cosmology has been around since the time of the ancients, historically it has been dominated by theory and speculation," Smoot said. "Very recently, the era of speculation has given way to a time of science. The advance of knowledge and of scientific ingenuity means that at long last, we can actually test our theories."
Mather earned his Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley in 1974.