WASHINGTON – Americans John Mather and George Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for work they did in developing a NASA satellite that produced dramatic evidence supporting the big-bang theory of the origins of the universe.
The Nobel committee said that their findings turned cosmology from a theoretical science into one where precise measurements and conclusions are possible.
Mather, 60, a senior astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, and Smoot, 61, an experimental astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., played key roles in developing the ground-breaking Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) experiment in the late 1980s.
The NASA satellite they helped design sent back measurements that confirmed an essential aspect of the big-bang scenario – that the cosmic microwave background radiation is a relic of the earliest phase of the universe.
“They have not proven the big-bang theory, but they give it very strong support,” said Per Carlson, chairman of the Nobel committee for physics
“It is one of the greatest discoveries of the century; I would call it the greatest,” he said. “It increases our knowledge of our place in the universe.”
Since 1986, Americans have either won or shared the physics prize with people from other nations 15 times.
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