Best,

-cvj

-cvj

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.

Thanks.

-cvj

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..

-cvj

-cvj

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

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.

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).

The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John C. Mather and George F. Smoot “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation”. [...]…

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

Cheers,

-cvj

Somehow, I assumed you were older than I am…