May 2008

About this talk



At Serious Play 2008, astrophysicist George Smoot shows stunning new images from deep-space surveys, and prods us to ponder how the cosmos -- with its giant webs of dark matter and mysterious gaping voids -- got built this way.



George Smoot: Astrophysicist



Astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize winner George Smoot studies the cosmic microwave background radiation -- the afterglow of the Big Bang. His pioneering research into deep space and time is uncovering the structure of the universe itself.

Why you should listen to him:



George Smoot looks into the farthest reaches of space to the oldest objects in the known universe: fluctuations in the remnants of creation. Using data collected from satellites such as COBE and WMAP, scanning the cosmic microwave background radiation (a relic of the heat unleashed after the Big Bang), he probes the shape of the universe. In 1992 he and his Berkeley team discovered that the universe, once thought to be smooth and uniform at the largest scale, is actually anisotropic -- or varied and lumpy.



Smoot continues to investigate of the structure of the universe at the University of California at Berkeley, mapping billions of galaxies and filaments of dark matter in hope of uncovering the secrets of the universe's origins.



"The very detailed observations that the Laureates have carried out from the COBE satellite have played a major role in the development of modern cosmology into a precise science."

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, on Smoot's Nobel Prize

1. Stephen Hawking: Asking big questions about the universe
2. Brian Greene: The universe on a string
3. Garrett Lisi: A beautiful new theory of everything
4. Brian Cox: What really goes on at the Large Hadron Collider
5. George Smoot: The design of the universe
6. Patricia Burchat: The search for dark energy and dark matter
7. Jill Tarter: Why the search for alien intelligence matters