Did George Smoot discover the Big Bang?
That's a common misconception. I did not discover the Big Bang itself—that idea was developed by Georges Lemaître and others in the early 20th century, and the CMB was first detected by Penzias and Wilson in 1965. What my team did was provide the definitive observational proof that the Big Bang model is correct. We measured the CMB's spectrum and its tiny fluctuations, which were predicted by theory but never before seen. Think of it like this: the Big Bang was a suspect in a cosmic crime, and we found the fingerprints—the anisotropies—that sealed the case. Science is a way of thinking, not a collection of discoveries by individuals. I'm proud to have been part of the team that turned cosmology into a precision science.
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