From the press release:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 jointly to
John C. Mather
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA,and
George F. Smoot
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA“for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation”.
COBE is the experiment that really blazed the trail for all the wonderful physics that was to come from WMAP, and various other experiments such as Boomerang. And Planck is about to fly as well, giving even more precise information about our universe.
I was an undergraduate when this was announced. [Update: Oops…not quite: I had just started graduate school. Thanks Chad!] It was a wonderful feeling that all of us students had, partly gleaned from the feelings of our lecturers, I suspect. The thing that struck us as most appealing (I think) was the idea that the black body radiation spectrum (click on the image on the right for larger) that we’d been learning about in the abstract, during lectures, was sort of “out there”, writ large…. as large as can be in fact, on the whole universe! It’s always good to learn that physics -or any field- is still alive, especially when you’re still on the cusp of making a career in it.
Some more imformative background information (forgive the pun) from the press release:
According to the Big Bang scenario, the cosmic microwave background radiation is a relic of the earliest phase of the Universe. Immediately after the big bang itself, the Universe can be compared to a glowing “body emitting radiation in which the distribution across different wavelengths depends solely on its temperature. The shape of the spectrum of this kind of radiation has a special form known as blackbody radiation. When it was emitted the temperature of the Universe was almost 3,000 degrees Centigrade. Since then, according to the Big Bang scenario, the radiation has gradually cooled as the Universe has expanded. The background radiation we can measure today corresponds to a temperature that is barely 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. The Laureates were able to calculate this temperature thanks to the blackbody spectrum revealed by the COBE measurements.
COBE also had the task of seeking small variations of temperature in different directions (which is what the term ‘anisotropy’ refers to). Extremely small differences of this kind in the temperature of the cosmic background radiation – in the range of a hundred-thousandth of a degree – offer an important clue to how the galaxies came into being. The variations in temperature show us how the matter in the Universe began to “aggregate”. This was necessary if the galaxies, stars and ultimately life like us were to be able to develop. Without this mechanism matter would have taken a completely different form, spread evenly throughout the Universe.
COBE was launched using its own rocket on 18 November 1989. The first results were received after nine minutes of observations: COBE had registered a perfect blackbody spectrum. When the curve was later shown at an astronomy conference the results received a standing ovation.
Lest you think that these guys did it all themselves, they included an important note:
The success of COBE was the outcome of prodigious team work involving more than 1,000 researchers, engineers and other participants. John Mather coordinated the entire process and also had primary responsibility for the experiment that revealed the blackbody form of the microwave background radiation measured by COBE. George Smoot had main responsibility for measuring the small variations in the temperature of the radiation.
-cvj
More on this on several blogs, for example Backreaction , Uncertain Principles, Leaves on the Line, and Galactic Interactions.
[Update: See this post for a report on some talks about all three science prizes.]
I don’t know. I am sure it is information easily found out using Google.
Best,
-cvj
cliff how much was each award in 2006 and 2007 for physics?
cvj….I know I am a much better theorist than an experimentalist. However being an amateur and the fact that the introductory textbooks says that the basic foundation of my theory was contraindicated by experiment, I realized that there was no hope of every finding anyone to test the basic premise of my theory. So I took all my money bought the cheapest house I could find on the market and spent 10 years and tearing up that house doing experiment after experiment. In all that time I only got a 2-3 % decrease in weight. Nevertheless, two or three years later in far less favorable experimental conditions, I got a 0.5 % INCREASE in weight with a copper test mass and then a 9% INCREASE with an aluminum test mass. To see the graphs of these experiments go to http://infraforce.googlepages.com/infraredlevertheory .
Peter…. As theorists, no matter what we are working on, no matter whether we are “sophisticated amateurs” or naive professionals, our output is all ultimately and fundamentally incomplete until someone designs and implements a way to test whether nature cares about it. Experimenters -those who connect us to nature in this way- deserve as much recognition for creativity (and other attributes) as any other thinker.
-cvj
Anonymous wrote:
Is it really a good idea to award somebody for simply testing Einstein’s theory? Shouldn’t somebody be awarded for being creative and inventive?
This is a great question. It is curious thing how poor theoreticians theoretical physicists are.
I am an amateur but a sophisticated amateur i.e. almost a PhD in another area so I can see more clearly the foundations upon which physics is built. There is a proud tradition of sophisticated amateurs doing pivotal work in scientific theory.
Email me and I might send my pdf paper where I can put the mass based gravity theories of Newton and Einstein up there with Ptolemaic astronomy.
Pingback: The 2006 Nobel Prizes: Who, What and Why! - Asymptotia
Pingback: New Colleagues - Asymptotia
sure,
no probs with the rest.
Yes… you correctly refined what I said rather clumsily in the particular sentence you quoted, but I believe I stated everything clearly in the rest of what I wrote immediately following. But yes, that sentence needs correcting… done.
Thanks.
-cvj
“but the deviations from the black body spectrum”
GIven a direction, the spectrum is v.close to a perfect black body. It is just that you get diff Ts from diff directions. And COBE was the first to pick up these anisotropies. And, the anisotropy is the lumpiness..
Thanks, Plato!
-cvj
As I said on Cosmic Variance, Smoot Group has a good web site in case you didn’t catch it.
There are discussions of these lumps all over the web, but see a nice quick post on this in the context of today’s news over on Galactic Interactions.
-cvj
Hi anonymous,
There are several factors to take into account in awarding a prize. Among them are:
(1) Whether or not the experiment is a “gateway” experiment…. telling us how to look and where to look….. setting the scene for the future of the field both experimentally and theoretically. COBE has checkmarks in all those boxes. Big ones.
(2) Was there cleverness in the design of the experiment itself? Yes. Big checkmarks again.
(3) Was something new discovered and measured? Yes! You’re forgetting that it is not just the black body spectrum of the radiation that COBE was up there to see, but the deviations from the black body spectrum.[Correction:- As Anon1 points out correctly below, I should have said “deviations from uniform temperature as you look at different points on the sky”… the rest of what I say said it properly… carry on:] It is this “lumpiness” in the radiation that tells us so much about the universe. If the radiation was perfectly smooth (exactly the same temperature in all directions) then we’d have absolutely no clue where the lumpiness that we see today (such as galaxies, clusters of galaxies… and ultimately you and I…sorry to call you a lump 🙂 ) came from. The lumpiness seen by COBE and later experiments (1 part in 10000 !!) is the key to understanding our origins. COBE was the first experiment to see and measure this lumpiness.
Cheers,
-cvj
By the way,
Aside from trying to be modest, maybe Feynman would have agreed with me on that, since he even said that what was going on on the Manhattan project was merely engineering. Now, we all know that it wasn’t that simple to build the bomb, neither was Oppie awarded the prize for that (since he was the main boss in the project, just like this year’s nobel winners are).
Please don’t tell me that COBE was more challenging than to make the atom bomb at those circumstances (it required everybody who was somebody in physics at the time but heisenberg and it took a while to get done).
Cheers,
anonymous.
Cliff,
I kind of know what you mean, and you are probably completely right since I’m only an undergrad. Though the creativity involved in this experiment is not solely due to one or two people (i.e. this year’s nobel winners), but isn’t there a much wider participation of other people who worked on this project differently from other experiments ?
The prize should definitely be awarded to experimentalists who prove OR disprove an important theory, for example I agree on giving it to the people who were able to make Bose-Einstein condensate; but notice that there is a huge difference between the two projects. Should you really get all the credit for building an apparatus (with the help of thousand others, (“nyt quote: 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”), and is that that difficult (i.e. does that require a lot of scientific creativity, not engineering) to do?
PS: what I mean by scientific creativity is: to be able to observe nature and describe (correctly) it in a way that nobody thought it before possible (which brings me back to the another issue, isn’t that science?? So are experimentallists not much more than sofisiticated engineers??) Or maybe, there should be an experimental physics prize aside from a theoretical one??
Please shine your thoughts on me; a simple, little knowledged ignorant (seriously).
Pingback: Life on the Lattice
Hi anonymous:-
Interesting point….. From where did the idea come that doing a good experiment (which you refer to as “engineering”) is orthogonal to being creative and inventive? I bet there was a huge amount of creativity and inventiveness required to get everything to work. And the idea of doing this sort of science to test one of the central predictions of basic cosmology is creative right on its own, I would say. And don’t forget that this laid the foundations for so much to come in Cosmology. We would not have been able to test inflation’s predictions (e.g., the flatness of the universe), get independent confirmation of Dark Energy and the nature of Dark Matter, and a host of other things, without building on this work. So even if it was “only engineering” (which I would say it was not)… there’s nothing wrong with being “only engineering”.
Cheers,
-cvj
Is it really a good idea to award somebody for simply testing Einstein’s theory? Shouldn’t somebody be awarded for being creative and inventive? Didn’t these guys do only engineering??
Chad:- Ha! Good Lord, do I come across as quite so old and crusty?! Actually, I made a mistake…. i was just starting graduate school… so I still had the mind of an undergraduate, as it were. Thanks for getting me to think about the date a bit more closely…..
Cheers,
-cvj
Weirdly, the most surprising bit of this post was:
I was an undergraduate when this was announced.
Somehow, I assumed you were older than I am…