THIS LECTURE IS SOLD OUT Relics of Creation: The Big Bang, The COBE Satellite & Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Dr. George Smoot, 2006 Nobel Prize Winner in Physics, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory WEDNESDAY, June 6, 2007 $5

Designed by NASA and launched in 1989, COBE was NASA's first satellite mission to observe the early universe with instruments to measure the frequency spectrum of the Cosmic Background Radiation, to map its smoothness and variations, and to look for the light from the first generation of stars and galaxies. Last year Dr. George Smoot, along with Dr. John Mather, received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." Join us as Dr. Smoot visits Fermilab on WEDNESDAY, June 6, as part of the Fermilab Users’ Organization Annual Meeting. He will discuss the primary ideas of cosmology and how he became involved in the quest to answer these questions which turned into an adventure detective story. The consequences are that we have a coherent story of the creation and evolution of the Universe with abundant evidence to back our case.

With degrees from MIT, Dr. George Smoot has been at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California since 1970. In 1992 George Smoot made the announcement that the team he led had detected the long sought variations in the early Universe that had been observed by the COBE DMR. NASA's COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite mapped the intensity of the radiation from the early Big Bang and found variations so small they had to be the seeds on which gravity worked to grow the galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and clusters of clusters that are observed in the universe today. These variations are also relics of creation. Professor Smoot is an author of more than 200 science papers and is also co-author (with Keay Davidson) of the popularized scientific book Wrinkles in Time (Harper, 1994) that elucidates cosmology and the COBE discovery. Another essay entitled “My Einstein Suspenders” appears in My Einstein: Essays by Twenty-four of the World's Leading Thinkers on the Man, His Work, and His Legacy (Ed. John Brockman, Pantheon, 2006). He continues to teach and conduct research at the University of California.

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