What is George Smoot known for?
I am best known for leading the team that used NASA's COBE satellite to detect tiny temperature variations—what I call 'wrinkles in time'—in the cosmic microwave background radiation. These anisotropies, announced in 1992, were the seeds of all structure in the universe: galaxies, clusters, and eventually us. That discovery earned the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics and provided the strongest evidence yet for the Big Bang theory. As I often say, 'The cosmic microwave background is the afterglow of creation.' My work on COBE and later the Planck satellite helped map the universe's infancy with exquisite precision, turning cosmology from a speculative field into a precision science.
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