NASA Nobel Laureate to Give Speaker Series Address
John C. Mather, co-winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, will give the next Speaker Series presentation at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.
Mather’s free public talk, titled “From the Big Bang to the Nobel Prize and on to the James Webb Space Telescope,” will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 18, in the McGarvey Commons of the Reed Union Building. The event is co-sponsored by the college’s School of Science as part of its popular Open House Nights in Astronomy series.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences jointly awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize to Mather, a senior project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and George F. Smoot of the University of California for their collaborative work on measuring the pattern of cosmic microwave radiation that is left over from the Big Bang.
In 1992, NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite team, headed by Mather and Smoot, announced that they had mapped the primordial hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background radiation. These spots are related to the gravitational field of the early universe created only instants after the Big Bang, and were seeds for the giant clusters of galaxies that stretch hundreds of millions of light years across the universe. In announcing the Nobel, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted that “the success of COBE was the outcome of prodigious team work involving more than 1,000 researchers, engineers and other participants. John Mather coordinated the entire process and also had primary responsibility for the experiment that revealed the blackbody form of the microwave background radiation measured by COBE.”
Mather has been a Goddard Fellow since 1994 and currently serves as senior project scientist and chair of the Science Working Group of the James Webb Space Telescope Mission. This infrared-optimized space telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013, will search for the first galaxies formed in the early universe to determine how they connect the Big Bang to creation of our own Milky Way.
Mather holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Swarthmore College in eastern Pennsylvania, and a doctoral degree in physics from University of California, Berkeley. His numerous awards include the John C. Lindsay Memorial Award, the National Air and Space Museum Trophy, the AIAA Space Science Award, Aviation Week and Space Technology Laurels for Space/Missiles, the Dannie Heinemann Prize for Astrophysics, the Rumford Prize, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences. He has been elected to the American Astronomical Society Council.
Mather’s appearance in Erie is made possible in part by a grant from Dr. Robert Mehalso ’64 and his wife, Elizabeth. Penn State Behrend’s annual Speaker Series is supported by the Student Activity Fee, the Division of Student Affairs, and the Harriet Behrend Ninow Memorial Lecture Series Fund. For more information about Mather’s lecture, contact the Penn State Behrend School of Science, or phone 814-898-6105.