His father got a job with the U.S. Geological Survey through his degree in engineering, and the family moved to Alaska as a result. Meat for the family was provided by Smoot’s father hunting whatever was in season, leaving Smoot with the conviction that one must “go anywhere and do anything necessary to get the data or the meat for meals.”

There, in the isolated but safe environment (except for, he recalls, the occasional moose in the playground), Smoot spent his days studying, building radio sets, exploring the outdoors and examining the night sky. He was impressed by “how big and far away the moon must be,” but even more so “that one could understand what they saw in the world.” This early fascination with space heightened when he saw Sputnik in the October sky in 1957.

Working to pay his way during high school and university, Smoot received dual degrees in Mathematics and Physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1966. As a student, he was involved in several pranks, ranging from filling a fridge with Jell-O to constructing a steam catapult for hard-boiled eggs. It was also at this time that he married Maxine.

In 1970, Smoot completed his PhD in particle physics and switched fields to study cosmology. He moved to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley to work with the Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez on the HAPPE (High-Altitude Particle Physics Experiment) project. Using radiation detectors attached to balloons, the project refuted theories that antimatter is abundant in cosmic rays, and part of Smoot’s findings was recognised as one of the world’s twelve outstanding physics experiments of 1973 by the American Institute of Physics.

Smoot then turned his attention to the CMB, in part because he knew that whatever he learned would be fundamental. The accidental discovery of the CMB by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1964 provided the first persuasive evidence for the Big Bang theory. The CMB had all the characteristics of being the faint afterglow that would exist if the universe was created in an explosive event, but how the stars and galaxies formed from this was far from clear.

In the mid 1970s, Smoot helped to develop a detector called a differential radiometer, which measured temperature differences in the CMB. This was mounted first onto a U-2 spy plane, and then later sent into space on board the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite, which was launched by NASA in 1989. After analyzing hundreds of millions of precision measurements from COBE, Smoot and his team produced maps of the entire sky, charting ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ regions corresponding to temperature differences of a hundred-thousandth of a degree. These tiny ripples in the temperature of the CMB, which were predicted by the Big Bang theory, indicate the presence of the primordial seeds of matter that eventually formed the galaxies and superclusters of galaxies that can be seen today. Smoot announced these results to a standing ovation at an American Physical Society meeting on 23 April 1992, and the results immediately made front-page news.

Smoot remains at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and he is currently involved in the Planck mission, which is trying to build a refined map of the CMB, and the SNAP mission, which is investigating dark energy in the universe. In 2003, Smoot was awarded the Einstein Medal.

Nobel Prize in Physics 2006
George Smoot’s Nobel Lecture
Smoot Group page
Wikipedia: George Smoot