The Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory in Paris mourns the loss of George Fitzgerald Smoot, III, an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, and Nobel laureate, who passed away in late September at his home in Paris.
Smoot was one of the pioneers of observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos and placed cosmology on a firm experimental footing. He studied mathematics before switching to physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he obtained dual bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and physics in 1966 and a Ph.D. in particle physics in 1970. After MIT, as a postdoc, Smoot went to UC Berkeley, and in 2009, joined Université Paris-Cité (then Université Paris-Diderot VII) as a professor of physics. He was affiliated with the APC Laboratory early on, and played an instrumental role in the founding of the Paris Center for Cosmological Physics and the opening of the endowment fund “Physics of the Universe”, attracting top postdocs, establishing a conference center and forging ties with broader society.
In 2006, as a result of his work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with John Mather. Interestingly, to the public’s surprise, he donated his financial portion of the prize. As he himself stated at the time, the sum would not have changed his life drastically, and since he grew up in poor conditions, he decided to donate the money to facilitate scholarships for young students. In addition to his many awards and accolades, he was also one of only two people to win the $1 million prize on the game show ”Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”.
Smoot visited Rijeka in 2008 as a guest of the Science Festival. On that occasion, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of the University of Rijeka for his discovery of the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background radiation, as well as for popularizing fundamental scientific achievements, thereby bringing science closer to the wider public and making a lasting contribution to humanity. Smoot is the first – and still the only – Nobel laureate among the honorary doctors of the University of Rijeka.
Smoot will be remembered as a larger-than-life character, with a broad range of interests beyond the discoveries for which he is best known. He travelled the world, took a keen interest in societal issues such as climate change, and was proud to have appeared in cameos on the celebrated sitcom “The Big Bang Theory”.
Professor Smoot’s death leaves a great void in the global scientific community, but his legacy will live on through his work, groundbreaking discoveries, collaborators, and students.