Another Nobel Prize for a Cal Professor

Berkeley Lab's Smoot wins Nobel Prize in physics
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory astrophysicist & Cal physics professor George Smoot won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on cosmic microwave background radiation. Smoot, 61, has been at Berkeley Lab since 1971, and worked with Luis Alvarez, the 1968 winner of the Nobel Prize. In 1992, Smoot announced that NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, known as COBE, had observed small ripples in the fabric of the early universe -- the first solid evidence that the Big Bang theory was correct.  Stephen Hawking called it "the discovery of the century, if not of all time." In his own book "Wrinkles in Time," Smoot said, "I chose to work on measuring cosmic background radiation partly because I knew this: Whatever we learned would be fundamental. Regardless of what we found, our observations would tell us about the early universe."  The work provided the first hard data that scientists could use to study the Big Bang theory.