Hot off the presses: The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John C. Mather and George Smoot “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.” This is recent enough that they don’t even have much on the Nobel site, but happily for me, it’s something I know a tiny bit about.
The prize here is for the COBE (“Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer”) mission back in the early 1990’s, which made extremely precise measurements of the radiation left over from the Big Bang (the discovery of which led to a previous Nobel for Penzias and Wilson). Mather is described in the Nobel materials as the “driving force” behind the satellite, and the person in charge of the instrument that measured the general blackbody spectrum. Smoot is somewhat better known, as he was the head of the team working with the other instrument, which famously made measurements of the anisotropies in the background (leading to an earlier, cruder version of the map I posted a little while ago).
This isn’t my field (it is, however, Steinn’s, so I’m sure he’ll have something to say), so I can’t really judge the choice of people for the Prize– I’m a little surprised they didn’t put a third person in there, maybe somebody from WMAP. As far as the choice of project goes, though, I think it’s definitely Nobel worthy. The predictions I saw were all wrong, though you might argue that this prize sets up a Nobel for inflation down the road, in the same way that the 1997 prize for laser cooling set up the 2001 prize for BEC.
Quick COBE anecdote: When the first results came out, I was in college, and taking a Cosmology for Idiots sort of class. The day they announced their findings, the professor, a visiting Polish astrophysicist, scrapped his planned lecture, and spent the period talking about the COBE results. I’m not sure his feet touched the floor for that entire lecture– the guy was completely ecstatic about having data, even though the measured anisotropies were something like an order of magnitude smaller than had been predicted, and the signal-to-noise ratio was approximately one.
So, yeah, I’d say that the project deserves a Nobel…
I was hoping for a condensed matter nobel this year, but this is a great choice.
I hadn’t looked over the list of Physics awardees recently, so in my mind I thought that the COBE results had won at some point. I guess that’s a good enough definition of Nobel-worthy, when you think one’s already been awarded!
Haha. I’ve a similar story for you: when the WMAP first-year results came out, I was an undergrad, taking a class nominally on black holes. The entire class quickly became an intro-cosmology class instead …
I remember being at the APS conference in DC when the COBE results were announced… I was just an undergrad, I think.
This should make the topic of CMBR anisotropy much more interesting to my astro students this semester, right??
Dumb non-physics question: any relation to the Smoot who was used to measure that bridge near MIT?
No, I believe the Harvard Bridge Smoot was Oliver Smoot
Well, Dave Wilkinson would have been an obvious (and very well deserved) third name for this prize, but he unfortunately did not live to see it. Another option would have been to add someone from a later, high precision experiment (e.g., WMAP).
There was never any real doubt this prize was coming. I was in the audience at the American Astronomical Society when the COBE spectral results were presented, and the extended standing ovation as the viewgraph was a testament to the community’s immediate recognition of its importance.
Inflation as a Nobel prize winner is going to be tricky for the same reason that Einstein won the Nobel for the photoelectric effect and not relativity. There’s a definite bias towards experimental results, and that was what led me towards the COBE principals instead of Guth/Steinhardt/etc. as my guess for the winners this year, and in years past.
The problem with adding someone from WMAP to the list is at least partly this: WMAP is too recent (they only just released the 3rd year of data, after all!). The Nobel committee has almost always preferred to wait until the dust settles and everyone agrees that the whole thing works and that there weren’t any hidden errors lurking within.
One could also argue that COBE gets points over WMAP for being the first — that is, a group (led by Mather) had the idea and the perserverence to push for — and design — a satellite devoted entirely to measuring and mapping the CMB. Once that worked, WMAP (and Planck and other future projects) are more obvious as follow-ups: “Hey, that worked really well! There really are anisotropies! Let’s do it again, only more precisely and thoroughly.”
One could also argue that COBE gets points over WMAP for being the first — that is, a group (led by Mather) had the idea and the perserverence to push for — and design — a satellite devoted entirely to measuring and mapping the CMB. Once that worked, WMAP (and Planck and other future projects) are more obvious as follow-ups: “Hey, that worked really well! There really are anisotropies! Let’s do it again, only more precisely and thoroughly.”
My thought on WMAP would be that it’s sort of analagous to putting Ketterle on the BEC Nobel. He wasn’t the first to achieve BEC, but he did so much useful science with it that leaving him off would be a travesty.
My outsider’s impression is that COBE showed that there were anisotropies, but it’s the WMAP data that let you do things like test models. And that, in turn, is the thing that makes me think that Guth et al. might have a shot– as I understand it, the spiffy fits to WMAP power spectra are generated by models that include some sort of inflation. Which is about as close as you’ll get to experimental evidence.
But, again, this really isn’t my field.