October 3, 2006

scientists react to the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Physics, 2006

The Nobel Prize for Physics 2006 has gone to John C Mather and George F Smoot for their discovery of the blackbody form and fluctuations of cosmic microwave background radiation.

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What is Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation? The Cosmic Microwave Background is the remnant radiation left over from the Big Bang. Its detection (accidentally) by Penzias and Wilson in 1965 was probably the final piece of evidence that blew away the ideas of a steady state Universe and confirmed the Big Bang theory of the expanding Universe. The radiation is the signature of the “fireball” emerging soon after the Big Bang at the point in time where the matter in the Universe became transparent and the radiation was able to spread out into the Universe. It has cooled to its current low temperature pf 3K due to the expansion of the Universe since. One of the key problems in Cosmology has been understanding why the Universe is clumpy, with islands of matter in the form of stars and galaxies. Something must have caused this and the signature of the initial trigger was predicted to be seen as fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. The NASA Satellite COBE, led by George Smoot, provided the first detection of these fluctuations and published the results in 1992. This was the first science result to make it onto the front page of the New York Times (and many other papers). John C. Mather was Primary Investigator on the Far-InfraRed Absolute Spectrophotometer instrument on COBE. Smoot did the Differential Microwave Radiometers, which measured the fluctuations. Mather’s instrument measured the blackbody temperature.

Prof Michael Rowan-Robinson, President, Royal Astronomical Society, said:

“The demonstration of the perfect blackbody form of the cosmic microwave background spectrum by John Mather and his team, and the detection of fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation by George Smoot and his team, are among the most significant discoveries in astronomy of the past century. The blackbody form demonstrates the correctness of the Hot Big Bang model, in which matter and radiation were locked together in thermal equilibrium for the first 150,000 years after the initial singularity.

“The fluctuations show that galaxies and clusters of galaxies grew from very small seed fluctuations in the early universe through gravitational aggregation.”

Prof Martin Barstow, Professor of Astrophysics and Space Science, University of Leicester, said:

“The detection of fluctuations in the microwave background and the measurement of its temperature by the COBE teams led by the Nobel Prize winners has been crucial to understanding why the Universe looks the way it does today, one of the key questions of Cosmology.”