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ITN Source
USA: American Dr. John Mather wins the Nobel Prize in Physics
USA: American Dr. John Mather wins the Nobel Prize in Physics
American John Mather said he was "delighted and really pleased" to win the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday (October 3). Earlier Dr. Mather thanked the team of hundreds of scientists and engineers who helped him and compatriot George Smoot do the research that won them the 2006 Nobel prize for physics. Mather, 60, and Smoot, 61, won the prize for their work with a satellite that provided increased support for the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Mather, who works at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said he had no plans on how to spend his share of the 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.37 million) Nobel prize money. He told Reuters Television: "It gradually got to me that it was important, that this was more important than we ever dreamed." Mather said he enjoyed working with George Smoot. Smoot is an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a physics professor at University of California, Berkeley. Mather organised the first proposal for the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE) in 1974 and led the scientific effort through the completion of the mission after the satellite was launched in 1989. He and Smoot measured the cosmic microwave background radiation spectrum to the unprecedented precision of one part in 100,000, showing that it matches the spectrum of a perfect blackbody and must originate in the primordial Big Bang. Mather will return to his work as senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, an infrared telescope to be launched in 2013 that will be the largest in space and will explore the deep space frontier beyond what the Hubble Space Telescope can now observe.
ITN Source | October 3, 2006
