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The cosmic explorer (Smoot)
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926672.000&print=true
8.8.5
Matthew Chalmers

In 1992 George Smoot announced the discovery of something "which, if
you're religious, is like looking at God": spots in the radiation
from the big bang that were the seeds of galaxies. This won him the
2006 Nobel prize for physics. Matthew Chalmers met him at last
month's meeting of Nobel laureates to discuss life after the big
prize

Has winning a Nobel prize changed your life?

My life has changed incredibly. Before 2006 I had two jobs -
teaching and research - then suddenly I got the job of being a Nobel
laureate, which has an unusual job spec because you're expected to
turn up at events, to be an icon and an expert on everything. I used
to have opinions on everything, but these days I'm more careful
about what I say because now people listen.

Do you regret implicating God in the discovery?

A lot was said in that press conference when I announced the
discovery, but that was the bit that got picked out. I got grief
from some of my colleagues, one of whom said he wished "to hell"
that I hadn't said it. That just shows how we use language
unconsciously. But it helped generate a lot of good press, and some
people got to hear about the big bang when they might not have done
otherwise.

Do you feel personally attached to COBE - the Cosmic Background
Explorer satellite that produced the Nobel-winning discovery?

Definitely. We proposed COBE in the mid-1970s and worked on it until
1996. When one of the engineering prototypes was being thrown away I
put it in my garage and parked my car outside - for five years! When
I look at the photos of COBE I can see how pioneering it was. It's
still up there. The Taiwanese were once going to take over operating
it, which I thought was great because it meant we'd get more data.
Then the lawyers got involved and eventually everybody said to hell
with it. I'd like to be around when it crashes into the atmosphere,
probably in 30 to 40 years' time.

Did you know that the discoveries made by COBE would turn cosmology
from a theoretical backwater into a precision science?

I knew it would be our best chance at understanding the early
universe, and that if we discovered something it would be very
exciting. COBE was the first trickle in what I view as a big river.
It took a while, but in 1992 we struck gold. Now it's like a gold
rush. Many people have flocked to study the cosmic microwave
radiation because it provides one of the toughest tests for
theoretical models of the universe.

Why did you come to the Lindau meeting of Nobel laureates and young
researchers?

When you're young, you think Nobel laureates are gods, that you're
never going to be like them. But when I went to the University of
California, Berkeley in the 1970s and met seven of them, I found
that they were smart and worked hard but were not so different from
anyone else. So part of coming to Lindau is to encourage students,
to show that all you have done is to work hard and have good ideas.
I get a lot out of it too. The students are idealistic and hopeful,
which is refreshing. Decades of university life can make you a
little cynical.

What advice can you offer on how to win a Nobel?

You've got to know how long to hold on to an idea before you should
throw it away. Knowing that balance is the hardest thing. I once
told the team working on COBE that I would give away two aeroplane
tickets to anyone who could find a mistake in the data, to keep
people focused on checking things.

What are you working on now?

I'm one of the co-investigators on the Planck probe, which builds on
the work of COBE and its successor, WMAP, to make even more detailed
measurements of the cosmic background radiation. It will launch
early in 2009 - being optimistic. I'm also working on a mission
called SNAP that is competing with other projects to study dark
energy. As a side project I'm looking at ways to broaden our
theoretical perspective - to attempt to do for the standard model of
cosmology what Einstein did for Newtonian physics.

We still don't know what 95 per cent of the universe is made of.
Doesn't this hint that cosmologists have got something seriously
wrong?

To me it looks like an opportunity. When I started working on the
cosmic microwave background in the 60s, soon after it was
discovered, my colleagues said that people were making it all up -
that effectively it wasn't yet science. Now, I can take the simplest
models and reproduce the universe I observe to better accuracy than
the way your suits fits.

Dark energy, dark matter and inflation are three pieces of new
science waiting to be discovered, each of which would be deserving
of a Nobel prize. But perhaps something even more spectacular is
waiting to be discovered that shows these things are connected at a
more fundamental level.

Will we ever totally understand the universe?

To be a scientist you have to be an optimist. We've tied down a huge
portion of the universe, from today and the near future right back
to a fraction of a second after the big bang 13.7 billion years ago.
Of course, people want to go back further - past God if you like. My
extreme optimism is that the universe can ultimately be reduced to
something simple. It has been a powerful business model so far.

Are you as optimistic about humanity as you are about science?

Somehow we're going to fumble our way out of global warming, and
society will continue stumbling along and improving. During the last
century, life expectancy increased by one year per decade. We've
mapped the human genome and are beginning to master genetic
engineering. You soon realise that humans will easily live to 1000
once we've fixed the errors in DNA replication. But we have to guard
against dark ages. The difference between what we call a growing and
a recessing society is just a few per cent, and things like
intelligent design aren't helping.

But won't the universe end, in the long run?

Cosmologists are pessimists at the end of the day. We know that
eventually the stars will run out of fuel and that the universe will
end. So ultimately there's no hope because the entire human race is
almost certainly going to die out. We have to live for a kind of
performance art, to get civilisation as far and high as we can
before it disappears - unless we discover some kind of Douglas
Adams-esque escape hatch such as a portal to extra dimensions.

Will the proposed crewed Mars mission inspire people to go into
cosmology, just as Sputnik's launch in 1957 fired your imagination?

Sputnik focused the US on the fact that that you need math and
science. It had a huge influence, not least in opening up
opportunities such as scholarships. Going to Mars doesn't inspire me
in the same way, plus it's eating into NASA's budget for space
telescopes. But that could just be me being a cynical old man!

Cosmology - Keep up with the latest ideas in our special report.

Profile

George Smoot, 63, is professor of physics at the University of
California, Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Center for
Cosmological Physics. He got his PhD in particle physics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970, then moved into the
smaller field of cosmology because it offered better chances to make
significant discoveries. He researches the radiation left over from
the big bang, and was awarded the 2006 Nobel prize for physics.

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http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn14200
25 June 2008
Lithium: The hole in the big bang theory
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926631.300
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Precision cosmology with Planck
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=http://www.newscientis
t.com/blog/space/2007/02/precision-cosmology-with-planck.html
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Fold testament: what shape is the universe?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19225811.300
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Weblinks

George Smoot's Nobel lecture
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2006/smoot-
lecture.html
COBE - the Cosmic Background Explorer
http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/cobe/
George Smoot's university webpage
http://www.physics.berkeley.edu/research/faculty/smoot.html
The Nobel Laureate Meetings at Lindau
http://www.lindau-nobel.de/WebHome.AxCMS?ActiveID=1012

E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles.