Well, I reported yesterday that two Americans won the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
It is starting to get boring, but here ya go: Nobel Prize in physics is won by two Americans as well.
Dr. Mather and Dr. Smoot led a team of more than 1,000 scientists, engineers and technicians that built and launched the Cosmic Background Explorer, or Cobe, satellite in 1989 to study a haze of microwave radiation that is believed to be a remnant of the explosion that, according to the Big Bang theory, started the universe.
Cobe’s measurements of the temperature and distribution of the microwaves, including the detection of tantalizingly faint irregularities from which things like galaxies could have grown, were a resounding confirmation of the theory of a universe that was born in a terrific explosion of space and time 14 billion years ago and in which the ordinary matter that makes up stars and people is overwhelmed by some mysterious “dark matter.�
“What we have found is evidence for the birth of the universe and its evolution,� Dr. Smoot said in a press conference about the results in 1992. About a map showing the splotchy seeds of galaxy formation, he famously said, “If you are religious, it is like looking at God.�
Today’s announcement delighted astronomers who had long anticipated a Nobel for the Cobe work. In the wake of that research wake came a wave of Big Bang theorizing and a series of balloon and satellite experiments to provide increasingly detailed data on the cosmic microwaves, including NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Project, or WMAP, which is still orbiting and beaming down data contributing to the emerging picture of a preposterous universe, full of dark energy pushing it apart, as well as dark matter.
James Peebles, a Princeton cosmologist, said, “Cobe was deeply important: those two measurements set cosmology on the track to our present well-based theory of the expanding universe.�
And once again, they seem to greatly deserve it.
My prediction: the US will win approximately 16 Nobel Prizes this year.
Okay, I admit, perhaps a little bit of an overreaction.
On a serious note: congrats to both and to those who worked with them on before mentioned project.
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