Excellence Cluster 'Universe' Hosts Talk of Nobel Prize Winner George Smoot

The Excellence Cluster ‚Universe’ is pleased to welcome Nobel Prize Winner Professor George F. Smoot for an extraordinary talk in the lecture series "Physics Colloquium". On Friday, 27 June 2008 George Smoot will review the current status of observations of the cosmic microwave background and prospects for the next few years. The event takes place at 2 pm at the lecture hall 2 at the Physics Department of the Technische Universität München, James-Franck-Straße on the Garching Campus.

George F. Smoot (Berkeley Lab) is an astrophysicist and a cosmologist. He led the COBE team, a satellite mission dedicated to explore the cosmic microwave background. In 1992, he announced the detection of long sought variation in the radiation pattern which was imprinted in the early universe. For this discovery, G. Smoot and John Mather have been awarded the Noble Prize in Physics in 2006. G. Smoot received his PhD at MIT in 1970 and then went to the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He is involved in observational cosmology research including the missions SNAP and PLANCK. G. Smoot earned other awards such as NASA’s medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement (1991), the Einstein medal (2003), the Gruber Prize together with John Mather (2006). Furthermore, he authored popular science books and achieved the Popular Science Award in 1992.

by B. Wankerl