Hot damn, another year has gone by
Remember that special time of year? That's right, at 11:45 CET they will announce the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics (that 4:45 AM our time). I'll update then.
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(Yes, hours later. I slept, worked, had dinner with a friend, and watched some anime. Life goes on.)
So, the prize was awarded to John C Mather of NASA Goddard and George Smoot of Berkeley. As soon as I heard this, well of course I had to go see if this is the Smoot of MIT fame (it is not). The press release summarizes the accomplishments being honored thusly: John Mather coordinated the entire process and also had primary responsibility for the experiment that revealed the blackbody form of the microwave background radiation measured by COBE. George Smoot had main responsibility for measuring the small variations in the temperature of the radiation.
Reading through the press release, two things are clear. I love that I had to learn the point of blackbodies in thermodynamics, it makes it so much easier as a mental template to understand all sorts of other things in the universe (or, in this, case, the universe). The work that led to Mather's share of the prize was shepherding the COBE satellite, and in particular FIRAS, which is the project that determined that the CMB was a blackbody at 2.725 +/- 0.002 K. The bio at the Goddard website says that he led COBE from start to finish, and "[as] FIRAS PI he measured the cosmic microwave background radiation spectrum to the unprecedented precision of a part in 100,000, showing that it matches the spectrum of a perfect blackbody and must originate in the primordial Big Bang of the universe". Smoot's group does lots of CMB work as well, but not so much the blockbody characteristics as studying the anisotropies in the CMB, which tell us about the mass distribution that lead to the current shape of the universe on a very large scale indeed.
**********************************************************
(Yes, hours later. I slept, worked, had dinner with a friend, and watched some anime. Life goes on.)
So, the prize was awarded to John C Mather of NASA Goddard and George Smoot of Berkeley. As soon as I heard this, well of course I had to go see if this is the Smoot of MIT fame (it is not). The press release summarizes the accomplishments being honored thusly: John Mather coordinated the entire process and also had primary responsibility for the experiment that revealed the blackbody form of the microwave background radiation measured by COBE. George Smoot had main responsibility for measuring the small variations in the temperature of the radiation.
Reading through the press release, two things are clear. I love that I had to learn the point of blackbodies in thermodynamics, it makes it so much easier as a mental template to understand all sorts of other things in the universe (or, in this, case, the universe). The work that led to Mather's share of the prize was shepherding the COBE satellite, and in particular FIRAS, which is the project that determined that the CMB was a blackbody at 2.725 +/- 0.002 K. The bio at the Goddard website says that he led COBE from start to finish, and "[as] FIRAS PI he measured the cosmic microwave background radiation spectrum to the unprecedented precision of a part in 100,000, showing that it matches the spectrum of a perfect blackbody and must originate in the primordial Big Bang of the universe". Smoot's group does lots of CMB work as well, but not so much the blockbody characteristics as studying the anisotropies in the CMB, which tell us about the mass distribution that lead to the current shape of the universe on a very large scale indeed.