George F. Smoot, an American physicist and Nobel laureate who helped elucidate the story of cosmic creation, providing evidence of what he called the primordial seeds that grew into galaxies and galaxy clusters, died on Sept. 18 at his home in Paris. He was 80.
His death, from cardiac arrest, was confirmed by his sister, Sharon Bowie.
Dr. Smoot was a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, when he led a team that constructed a picture of the infant universe using an instrument he developed in the 1970s.
The instrument was launched into space in 1989 aboard a NASA satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, from which it detected tiny variations in the temperature of the light that was left over from what most scientists presumed was a Big Bang. The pattern of those temperature variations was a record of how unevenly cosmic matter was distributed billions of years ago — the seeds from which the current design of the universe, dense in some parts and empty in others, sprouted.
“If you’re religious, it’s like seeing God,” Dr. Smoot said when he announced the COBE findings in 1992 at an American Physical Society conference, making front-page news around the world. (The account in The New York Times — its lead story in the paper of April 24 — appeared under the headline “Scientists Report Profound Insight on How Time Began.”)
The theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking called it “the greatest discovery of the century, if not of all time.”
Dr. Smoot’s research built on that of the physicists Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson, who in 1964 discovered that the universe was bathed in a sea of ancient light, known as the cosmic microwave background. It was evidence that the universe had a beginning and had exploded into existence with a Big Bang.
Before that discovery, cosmology had been a theoretical playground, full of imaginative ideas virtually untethered to data. Measurements taken with the COBE satellite provided data by which scientists could test those various theories about how the universe began, what it was made of and how it had evolved. It helped transform cosmology from a field largely based in speculation to a science grounded in precise measurement.
Dr. Smoot shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with John C. Mather, a cosmologist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, for groundbreaking discoveries made by the COBE team. Each was a team leader in the project.
As a scientist, Dr. Smoot was revered for his brilliance but also resented by some colleagues, who felt he took undue credit for scientific results that others had achieved. Days before the physics conference announcement in 1992, Berkeley Lab published a news release that many viewed as unfairly attributing the discovery of light temperature variations solely to Dr. Smoot and the lab, overlooking other team leaders and NASA.
In his 1993 book, “Wrinkles in Time: Witness to the Birth of the Universe,” written with Keay Davidson, Dr. Smoot documented the process leading up to the discovery. Some of his collaborators disagreed with his version of events and encouraged Dr. Mather to write his own account. He did, publishing it three years later as “The Very First Light: The True Inside Story of the Scientific Journey Back to the Dawn of the Universe,” which differed from Dr. Smoot’s version in some details.
Dr. Smoot “was a lot of trouble,” Dr. Mather allowed in an interview, but also “ingenious and thoughtful and enthusiastic, as everybody knows.”
George Fitzgerald Smoot III was born on Feb. 20, 1945, in Yukon, Fla., to George Smoot II, who served as a fighter pilot during World War II, and Talicia (Crawford) Smoot, a science teacher and school principal.
The family moved to Alabama after the war. George’s father was a hydrologist with the United States Geological Survey, a job that also took the family to Alaska, Ohio and Virginia. By Dr. Smoot’s account, his mother instilled in him a love of science and education; from his father, who traveled the world measuring river flows, he learned to appreciate the value of invention and instrumentation.
Dr. Smoot attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned degrees in physics and mathematics in 1966 and his Ph.D. in particle physics in 1970, before moving to Berkeley to study under Luis Alvarez, a particle physicist who had won the Nobel Prize in 1968.
There, Dr. Smoot pivoted to cosmology. With the physicist Richard Muller, he developed an instrument that could measure temperature differences in the cosmic microwave background; he put it to use by mounting it on a U-2 spy plane operated by NASA. The experiment led to one of the first measurements indicating that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is hurtling through space at more than a million miles an hour, suggesting that it is being pulled by the gravitational force of an even more gigantic mass.
In 1974, Dr. Smoot approached NASA proposing a mission to send the instrument into space. NASA combined the proposal with two others, establishing the team behind COBE, which carried three instruments into orbit.
Weeks after the launch, data analyzed by the team overseen by Dr. Mather, the Goddard cosmologist, solidified the link between the cosmic microwave background and the Big Bang. It also measured the temperature of that background: a chilly 2.7 kelvin (about minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit), just a smidgen above absolute zero.
Dr. Smoot’s team measured minute variations in that temperature across the universe, at the level of about 10 millionths of a degree. He would describe this measurement in his book as similar to “listening for a whisper during a noisy beach party while radios blare, waves crash, people yell, dogs bark and dune buggies roar.”
The announcement of this discovery inspired countless creation analogies. “It really is like finding the driving mechanism for the universe,” Dr. Smoot told The Times in 1992. “And isn’t that what God is?”
In addition to confirming the Big Bang picture of the universe, the COBE discoveries strengthened evidence for the existence of dark matter and the theory of cosmic inflation, which posits that the universe went through a period of rapid expansion shortly after its birth.
Two more space missions refined COBE’s measurements of the cosmic microwave background; one, the Planck observatory, launched by the European Space Agency in 2009, had been proposed by a team that included Dr. Smoot.
Dr. Smoot, who became a professor at Berkeley in 1994, donated a large share of his Nobel Prize award money (he and Dr. Mather split a gift of about $1.37 million) to endow the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, where he was the founding director. He helped establish cosmology institutes around the world, including in France and South Korea, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors. In 2009, he joined the faculty of Paris Cité University and became an affiliate of the Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory.
He married Maxine Bixby in 1969; they divorced in 1979. In addition to his sister, Dr. Smoot is survived by his partner, Nóra Csiszár.
Toward the end of his career, Dr. Smoot grew more involved in public outreach and science education. He helped start programs to teach high school teachers and students about cosmology, and taught an online course about gravity that attracted an audience of more than 87,000.
He also made appearances on the CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” and, in 2009, competed on the Fox network game show “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” He went on the show, he said, to encourage his students to try new things; in doing so, he became the second person to win $1 million.
During his appearance, Dr. Smoot noted that he had donated his Nobel winnings to create scholarships and fellowships for young scientists. Pointing to the students on the stage as the crowd cheered, he said, “I’m hoping one of these guys gets one of them.”
Katrina Miller is a science reporter for The Times based in Chicago. She earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago.
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