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).
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