{"id":666,"date":"2006-10-03T07:17:30","date_gmt":"2006-10-03T07:17:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/10\/03\/dynamite-money-for-cobe\/"},"modified":"2006-10-03T07:17:30","modified_gmt":"2006-10-03T07:17:30","slug":"dynamite-money-for-cobe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/10\/03\/dynamite-money-for-cobe\/","title":{"rendered":"Dynamite Money for COBE"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hot off the presses: The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John C. Mather and George Smoot<\/a> “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.” This is recent enough that they don’t even have much on the Nobel site, but happily for me, it’s something I know a tiny bit about.<\/p>\n

The prize here is for the COBE<\/a> (“Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer”) mission back in the early 1990’s, which made extremely precise measurements of the radiation left over from the Big Bang (the discovery of which led to a previous Nobel for Penzias and Wilson). Mather is described in the Nobel materials as the “driving force” behind the satellite, and the person in charge of the instrument that measured the general blackbody spectrum. Smoot is somewhat better known, as he was the head of the team working with the other instrument, which famously made measurements of the anisotropies in the background (leading to an earlier, cruder version of the map I posted a little while ago<\/a>).<\/p>\n

This isn’t my field (it is, however, Steinn’s, so I’m sure he’ll have something to say), so I can’t really judge the choice of people<\/strong> for the Prize– I’m a little surprised they didn’t put a third person in there, maybe somebody from WMAP. As far as the choice of project goes, though, I think it’s definitely Nobel worthy. The predictions I saw<\/a> were all wrong, though you might argue that this prize sets up a Nobel for inflation down the road, in the same way that the 1997 prize for laser cooling set up the 2001 prize for BEC.<\/p>\n

Quick COBE anecdote: When the first results came out, I was in college, and taking a Cosmology for Idiots sort of class. The day they announced their findings, the professor, a visiting Polish astrophysicist, scrapped his planned lecture, and spent the period talking about the COBE results. I’m not sure his feet touched the floor for that entire lecture– the guy was completely ecstatic about having data, even though the measured anisotropies were something like an order of magnitude smaller than had been predicted, and the signal-to-noise ratio was approximately one.<\/p>\n

So, yeah, I’d say that the project deserves a Nobel…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hot off the presses: The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John C. Mather and George Smoot “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.” This is recent enough that they don’t even have much on the Nobel site, but happily for me, it’s something I know a… Continue reading Dynamite Money for COBE<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,33,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-in_the_news","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}