Mather and Smoot win 2006 physics Nobel
from AP: It took 15 years to get the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, satellite into space, said John C. Mather, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and one of the two Nobel winners. NASA budget cuts beset the program. And after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, the team had to scrap plans to launch the satellite on a shuttle.
But COBE eventually launched in 1989 atop a Delta rocket, and scientists used it to peer into the origins of the universe. Mather and fellow Nobel winner George Smoot, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, observed cosmic background radiation from the big bang, learning how today's universe formed.
Thomson Scientific had predicted:
Physics
15% - Guth, Linde, Steinhardt
22% - Fert, Gruenberg
63% - Desurvire, Nakazawa, Payne
Totally missed the boat!
But COBE eventually launched in 1989 atop a Delta rocket, and scientists used it to peer into the origins of the universe. Mather and fellow Nobel winner George Smoot, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, observed cosmic background radiation from the big bang, learning how today's universe formed.
Thomson Scientific had predicted:
Physics
15% - Guth, Linde, Steinhardt
22% - Fert, Gruenberg
63% - Desurvire, Nakazawa, Payne
Totally missed the boat!
posted by Lawrence B. Ebert at 6:45 PM
1 Comments:
A movie review (of "Nobelity") in 314 Science 928 makes Steven Weinberg sound almost like a lawyer:
"the burden of proof should be not to prove that it [global warming] is happening but that it isn't."
Separately, further to earlier discussions of bad (non-existent?) indexing by Google, the Mather/Smoot post, as well as others on the Nobel prize in the year 2006, didn't show up in a Google search. Probably went with Vai Sikahema and Rutgers is Wrong.
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