COBE Nobel Follow-Up

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.

More like this

Since, as I mentioned, my mom worked with data from COBE, and thus, was in a position to cross paths with newly-minted Nobel Laureates John Mather and George Smoot, I shook her down for some information about the pair. Disclaimer: I suspect Mom exaggerates more in her anecdotes about her…
Hot off the presses: The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John C. Mather and George Smoot "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." This is recent enough that they don't even have much on the Nobel site, but happily for me, it's something…
Chad broke the story, at least in the ScienceBlogs galaxy, but I wanted to add my own "Woo-hoo!" for John C. Mather and George F. Smoot, who have won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics. I didn't want this one to go unnoted, as my mom worked to analyze piles of COBE data and, during this period of her…
I was scheduled for a deeply unpleasant medical test yesterday, which I thought was going to leave me lots of time for blogging. yesterday afternoon and this morning. The preliminary test turned out to be so unpleasant (if anybody ever offers to stick a tube through your nose into your stomach,…

The NYTimes has opened up its archives just a little bit to let us in on its report on the original announcement -- in 1992 -- of the COBE results. It has everything, except Smoot's now (in)famous comment: "... it's like looking at God"

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.