Nobel Prize Winners in Physics
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Big bang theorists scoop Nobel prize for physics
12:50 03 October 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Amarendra Swarup and AFP
The 2006 Nobel prize for physics has been awarded to John Mather and George Smoot for their contribution to the big bang theory of the origin of the universe.
The pair were honoured for "their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation", the jury said.
According to the big bang theory, the cosmos was formed from a cataclysmic explosion that happened about 13.7 billion years ago. The timescale and geometry are measurable by shockwaves called cosmic microwave background (CMB) that continues to wash over us.
Dubbed the “afterglow of creation", the CMB is the earliest light in the universe. It is a faint aura of primordial radiation that comes to us directly from the early universe, just 380,000 years after the big bang. While it is spread very uniformly in the sky, scientists have observed tiny variations in the temperature and polarisation of the radiation, which they believe will reveal vital details about the size, matter content, age, geometry and fate of our universe.
These variations are also believed to contain information about the earliest moments of the universe, when it was rapidly expanding faster than light in a dizzying process known as inflation.
Cosmological breakthrough
Mather, 60, is an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and Smoot, 61, is a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, both in the US.
The pair worked with the COBE satellite launched by NASA in 1989, and the results of their research added weight to the big bang scenario, since this is the only scenario that predicts the kind of cosmic microwave background radiation measured by COBE.
Smoot's announcement in 1992 that his team had observed the long-sought variations in the CMB — and therefore, in the early universe — shook the scientific community. Called "the discovery of the century, if not of all time", by Stephen Hawking, the discovery of these ripples and wrinkles in the very fabric of space-time are believed to be the primordial seeds of modern-day structures in our universe such as galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and so on.
"These measurements also marked the inception of cosmology as a precise science," the Nobel jury said.
Dark matters
Mather coordinated the entire process and had responsibility for the experiment that revealed the blackbody form of the microwave background radiation measured by COBE. Smoot meanwhile had the main responsibility for measuring the small variations in the temperature of the radiation.
Since then, NASA has launched another probe, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which is examining these minute variations in the CMB in even greater detail and has provided strong evidence for a universe dominated by mysterious dark matter and dark energy.
This is not the first time work in the field has been rewarded by the Nobel committee. The 1978 Nobel prize for physics was awarded to Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson for detecting the CMB, back in 1965.
The 2006 laureates will each receive a gold medal and a diploma and will share a cheque for 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.37 million dollars) at the formal prize ceremony held, as tradition dictates, on December 10. It is the anniversary of the death of the prize's creator Alfred Nobel, in 1896.
