(Credits photo: Peter Badge/Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings)
The APC Laboratory mourns the loss of George Smoot, who passed away at his home in Paris. George Smoot was one of the pioneers of observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos and placed cosmology on a firm experimental footing.
Born in Yukon, Florida in 1945, Smoot was passionate about science and technology. As an undergraduate, he studied mathematics and physics at MIT, graduating with a dual major. He stayed on at MIT for a PhD in experimental elementary particle physics under Henry Frisch. His thesis was titled “Charge exchange of K+ on platinum at three GeV/C.” After MIT, Smoot went to UC Berkeley as a postdoc in the group of Luis Alvarez. Alvarez, a participant in the Manhattan Project and 1968 Nobel Physics Laureate, had become interested in experiments relating to the cosmos. At Berkeley, Smoot initially worked on the HAPPE experiment, using balloons and even a U-2 aircraft to study high-energy cosmic ray events partially escaping the shield of the Earth’s atmosphere. In 1963 Smoot changed his focus to studying the CMB, working on a number of COBE precursors. As part of the NASA Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) team, Smoot led the Differential Microwave Radiometer (DMR) instrument, which announced the discovery of the CMB anisotropies in 1992. As a result of this work he was awarded numerous prizes and honors, including, together with John Mather, the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The 1992 DMR detection of the CMB anisotropies was a milestone, establishing the amplitude of the primordial cosmological perturbations, which ultimately grew into the large scale structure of the Universe we see today. The discovery of the CMB anisotropies started what might be described as the Golden Age of Cosmology. Before these measurements, cosmology had a reputation as a field where theoretical speculation abounded, little constrained by observations. Today cosmology is at the center stage of physics, due in no small part to this and subsequent measurements of the CMB. This discovery prompted many researchers to switch to cosmology. A host of experiments, from the ground, from stratospheric balloons, and from space have now followed the pioneering COBE measurements.
In 2009, George Smoot joined Université Paris-Cité (then Université Paris-Diderot VII) as Professor of Physics. He was affiliated with the Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie (APC). Smoot played an instrumental role in the founding of the Paris Center for Cosmological Physics and the opening of the endowment fund "Physics of the Universe", attracting top postdocs, establishing a conference center and forging ties with broader society. He was deeply committed to the idea that cosmology research should reach beyond the walls of the laboratory to promote the public understanding of science and connect science to major societal issues. For this reason, he took a keen interest in educating the younger generation. He founded the “Teaching the Universe” program for secondary school teachers, and the MOOC “Gravity!” with Pierre Binétruy and George Smoot was an international success. While at APC, Smoot initiated a programme to develop opticals KIDs and established new international partnerships. He mentored a large number of postdocs. He was also the president of the Scientific Council of the LabEx UnivEarthS bringing together geosciences and particle astrophysics.
We will remember him as a larger than life character, with a broad range of interests beyond the discoveries for which he is best known. He travelled the world, took a keen interest in societal issues such as climate change, was proud to have appeared in cameos on the celebrated sitcom “The Big Bang Theory”, and was one of only two people to win the $1 million prize on the game show “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?”
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