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COBE Nobel Follow-Up

By drorzel on October 4, 2006.

The Paper of Record provides the Story of Record for yesterday's Nobel Prize in Physics for Mather and Smoot, including recent photographs of both. One of my favorite bits of the 1997 Nobel was seeing the media circus that went on around the Prize-- I'll put some amusing anecdotes into another post.

All the usual blogger suspects have weighed in with comments, including but not limited to Sean, Rob, Steinn, Clifford, and Jennifer Ouellette. Most of them took the time to find the appropriate COBE graphics to illustrate their posts, which I was too lazy to do.

Janet Stemwedel deserves special mention for providing personal anecdotes about the laureates. Her mother worked with Smoot and Mather, and says they're both good people.

I'm sure there's lots of other good stuff out there about COBE, Mather, and Smoot. If I left anything really great out, leave a link in the comments.

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One quick anecdote, albeit second-hand. The girlfriend of a grad school colleague of mine at Berkeley used to refer to Smoot as "Smootie-Patootie" all the time, in the hopes that her beau would slip up in Smoot's class and call him that. I don't think this ever worked, but maybe we should re-launch the effort.