The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 goes to: John C. Mather, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and George F. Smoot, University of California at Berkeley. More information, the Nobel Prize does an excellent job of providing additional details to the public. Other award programs, grant providers, museums, science societies… should learn from them, this is the right way to promote science and engineering in an internet age.
The experiment for which George Smoot was responsible was designed to look for small variations of the microwave background in different directions. Minuscule variations in the temperature of the microwave background in different parts of the universe could provide new clues about how galaxies and stars once appeared; why matter in this way had been concentrated to specific localities in the Universe rather than spreading out as a uniform sludge. Tiny variations in temperature could show where matter had started aggregating. Once this process had started, gravitation would take care of the rest: Matter attracts matter, which leads to stars and galaxies forming. Without a starting mechanism however, neither the Milky Way nor the Sun or the Earth would exist.
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