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George Smoot Lecture

George Smoot began his talk with the early events of his life story including details of his family, where he lived, and his inspiration for research in cosmology. His inspiration included Albert Einstein, Robert Millikan, Edwin Hubble, and George Gamov. The talk included historic milestones in the field such as the idea of an expanding universe and General Relativity. Wilhelm de Sitter, Alexander Friedmann, and Georges Lemaitre's solutions to the General Relativity equations were also very significant contributions to astrophysics. Early models of expansion gave evidence for the Big Bang, which was asserted with the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background in 1965.

The talk then shifted to how temperature fluctuations in a relic of the Big Bang could evolve into galaxy formation. The search for temperature anisotropies and a blackbody form of the CMB began. The techniques and apparatus necessary for such precise observations were explained. These began with instrumentation being placed on specialized NASA aircraft, then on to balloons, and eventually evolved into the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite. This satellite was launched in 1989 and designed to do three things: search for an infrared cosmic background; create a detailed map of the cosmic microwave background radiation; and compare the spectrum of the CMB with a perfect blackbody. The experiments were successful in forming the current cosmological model of the Universe and have been expanded upon to a higher accuracy with the WMAP satellite and will continue into even higher accuracy with the PLANCK satellite to be launched in 2008.

The results of these experiments gave evidence that the Universe is geometrically flat to a high accuracy and is composed of 74% dark energy, 22% dark matter, and 4% ordinary matter. The CMB was found to be a perfect blackbody spectrum of 3 degrees Kelvin with temperature variations that arose from primordial perturbations. The timeline of our universe unfolded from these experiments starting with primordial quantum fluctuations during the Big Bang and extending into dark matter and galaxy distributions in the large-scale structure of the Universe. It was for these contributions to science that George Smoot and John Mather were awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics.

George ended the talk with focus on how these results reveal many compelling questions about the exotic nature of the Universe and should inspire future scientists to address them. He explained that it was simple observations and questions that inspired his work and encouraged the next generations of scientists to do the same.