George Smoot

George Fitzgerald Smoot III spent his career at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory starting in 1970, building instruments precise enough to test cosmology's biggest claim. The Cosmic Background Explorer satellite he worked on mapped the universe's oldest light and found it wasn't perfectly smooth: tiny anisotropies, seeds of galaxies. For that discovery he and John C. Mather won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the Nobel committee called COBE "the starting point for cosmology as a precision science." Smoot gave $500,000 of the prize to establish Berkeley's Center for Cosmological Physics and donated the rest, minus travel, to an East Bay charity. He collected the Gruber Prize, the Einstein Medal, and honors from NASA and the Department of Energy, and in 2008 joined 19 other American physics laureates in a public letter asking President Bush to restore cuts to basic science funding. He died September 18, 2025.