OSLEP logo link to home page link to OK Higher Education Oklahoma Scholar-Leadership Enrichment Program Classes.. OSLEP Home Page Classes Home Page photo of George Smoot George Smoot, is an astrophysicist and a cosmologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and in the physics department of the University of California, Berkeley. He earned B.S. degrees in mathematics and in physics, and continued to study the decay of subatomic particles for his doctoral thesis and received his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1970. As team leader for the group that designed and studied information from one of the three instruments on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, Smoot is responsible for the best picture of the early universe available to science. Using instruments carried by balloon, on U-2 spy planes, and finally by satellite, Smoot examines the faint but ever present microwave radiation remnants from the time when light first became visible in the universe, 300,000 years after the big bang and 15 billion years ago. He detailed the history of cosmology and his own experiences in studying the universe in Wrinkles in Time (1993). Probing the Creation & Evolution of the Universe Wednesday-Sunday November 1-5, 2000 University of Oklahoma campus This seminar discussed our current understanding of the cosmos as a large scale evolving system. There was an overview of the salient observations about the Universe that set the stage for our current model. Then a discussion on how relatively recent and ongoing work has both sharpened and deepened our understanding and added previously unsuspected features to our models. The Class Reading List: (These books and articles supplied by OSLEP) The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg. The Big Bang, Joe Silk Wrinkles in Time, George Smoot and Keay Davidson back to 2000-2001 seminar schedule