What had this obscure and abstracted man of science done to create such a stir around the world? Nothing much—except come up with a critical missing piece in the big bang theory, which accounts for the creation of the universe.
On April 23, Smoot, 47, told an excited American Physical Society in Washington that, using data gathered by a NASA satellite, he and his team of scientists had found "ripples in the fabric of space-time" that were made in the first trillionth of a second after the cataclysmic moment of creation. The discovery of the ripples was crucial to the big bang theory, which holds that the universe began when an unimaginably dense speck. smaller than an atom, exploded and began the process of expanding, thinning and cooling that continues even now. The theory explains why the universe did not remain uniformly smooth but became the "lumpy" universe of today, filled with planets and galaxies, even human beings named Smoot. Said renowned physicist Steven Hawking, author of the best-selling A Brief History of Time: "It is the discovery of the century, if not of all time."
Six years ago, in the wake of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, Smoot had reason to wonder if the NASA satellite—and his exploration itself—would ever gel off the ground. A bachelor who coast-hops between the Berkeley laboratory and a data analysis center in Greenbelt, Md., Smoot was so depressed he took a rare vacation to the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin made his historic observations on evolution. But by November 1989, scientists had launched the $150 million NASA satellite known as the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE).
A little cosmic background is necessary to explain that satellite's significance. In 1964 two Bell Telephone Laboratories scientists discovered a microwave whisper—the "fossil remains," big bangers postulated, of the primeval explosion some 15 billion years ago. Yet all attempts to measure this radiation—by means of microwave detectors, high-flying aircraft and balloons—produced results that indicated a universe as smooth as custard, rather than the lumpy tapioca we ended up with.
Fitted with highly sensitive instruments, COBE probed the microwave afterglow at that moment when it started to cool, maybe as little as 300,000 years after the big bang. By last summer, computer analysis of COBE's measurements began to sketch an astonishing pattern. Smoot's team discovered that an area 60 billion trillion miles across, representing a third of the known universe, has patches whose temperatures are up to 30 millionths of a degree warmer than the -454°F temperature of the glow. "The tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time were put there by the primeval explosion process," says Smoot. "Over billions of years, the smaller of these ripples [shaped by the force of gravity] have grown into galaxies and the great voids in space." The finding may also give credence to another big bang notion: the existence of "cold dark mailer." subatomic particles that don't interact with light but make up 90 percent or more of all matter in the universe. Many scientists hold that this strange invisible matter provides the gravity responsible for such things as galactic accumulations of stars.
Some of Smoot's colleagues pushed aggressively for publication. But Smoot and others were more cautious. They didn't want to be embarrassed by mistaking something like a space rocket's exhaust for a cosmic signal. Smoot offered a round-trip air ticket to anywhere in the world to teammates who could find a statistical error.
Finally, at the end of February, after a long night of computer calculations, graduate student Charles Lineweaver left his mentor a thick printout with a note that read simply, "Eureka?" The answer was: Yes!
In retrospect, Smoot's career choice seems as predictable as Newtonian physics. Born in Greencoast, Fla., he moved constantly with his father, who worked for the U.S. Geological Survey, and his mother, a science teacher. "Both my parents instilled an interest in science and mathematics," he says. "I played football and ran track in junior high, but by high school I was getting serious about my studies." He was 25 when he earned his Ph.D. at MIT.
An inveterate traveler who is at present dating a woman he won't identify, who joins him in skiing and philosophical discussions, Smoot says he is relieved that the hoopla surrounding his discovery hasn't changed his relationship with his colleagues. "I was a little concerned," he says, "because, among scientists, a lot of publicity is not usually considered a good thing. But I've found almost everybody congratulating me. Maybe the others were just diplomatic enough to keep their mouths shut."
As for the significance of his discovery, he initially couched it in religious terms. "It really is like finding the driving mechanism for the universe," he said, "and isn't that what God is?" He says now that "when people really understand the big bang and the whole sweep of the evolution of the universe, it will be clear that humans are fairly insignificant." Oh, one more thing: "Given the scale of everything," he says, "you have to believe there are other living things out there."
WILLIAM PLUMMER
IRVIN MUCHNICK in Berkeley
- Contributors:
- Irvin Muchnick.
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