The Nobel Prize in Physics 2006 has been awarded to John C. Mather andGeorge F. Smoot "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation". I read Smoot's Wrinkles in Time when I was doing undergraduation in Physics in Vivekananda college, Chennai. That's when I learnt that the Big Bang had an afterglow and there were people actually trying to measure it. I thought it was the coolest thing to do. I still think it is the coolest thing to do. The afterglow has many Nobel prizes to its credit. Arno Penzias who co-discovered the afterglow with Wilson was awarded the nobel in 1978. If you are following Shaastra, you may have noticed that Arno Penzias is giving a talk tomorrow.
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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…
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Thanks for the links, esp the Shaastra one. Its nice to see a meme that I helped initially with, becoming so successfull.