David Wilkinson
This year's Nobel Prize in physics was awarded today to John Mather
and George Smoot, two leaders of the Cosmic Microwave Background
Explorer (COBE) satellite science team. David Wilkinson
of Princeton's physics department, who died in 2002, was one of COBE's
originators and one of the key scientists who guided the project
through several scientific discoveries that are now cornerstones of
physical cosmology.
Mather, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and Smoot, of the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, were awarded the Nobel Prize in
physics for research that supports the "big bang" model of the
universe's formation. Their findings were based on measurements done
with the COBE satellite.
In 1974 Wilkinson was one of a group of scientists who conceived COBE
to study properties of the fossil radiation emanating from the edge of
the observable universe. The satellite was launched in 1989, and in
1990 the science team announced its observations on the temperature of
the afterglow of the big bang. Most view the measurement as
incontrovertible evidence for the big bang theory of the universe.
The team reported the discovery of the anisotropy, or spatial
variations, in this fossil radiation in 1992. These ripples offer a
picture of the early universe that shows how the galaxies came into
being.
In 2001, NASA launched a second satellite, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe,
which in 2003 confirmed with high precision the COBE anisotropy
measurements. The probe was posthumously named after Wilkinson, its
originator.
The COBE team also received the Peter Gruber Foundation's Cosmology
Prize this August. The Gruber prize, which recognizes contributions to
fundamental advances in the field of cosmology, was presented at the
International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague. Wilkinson's widow,
Eunice Wilkinson, represented him at the ceremony.
Wilkinson joined the Princeton faculty in 1963 and soon thereafter
began his work on the fossil radiation. He transferred to emeritus
status in 2002, shortly before dying of cancer at age 67.
"Dave was a pioneer in experimental cosmology and a dedicated teacher,"
said Dan Marlow, chair of Princeton's physics department. "The
techniques he developed for measuring both the absolute temperature and
anisotropy of the cosmic background radiation, and the students he
taught, have had an enormous impact on cosmology."