Wednesday, January 30, 2013

LEAGUE OF THEMSELVES - DR. SMOOT


DR. GEORGE SMOOT

AS SEEN IN:
'The Big Bang Theory'
["The Terminator Decoupling"]

From Wikipedia:
George Fitzgerald Smoot III (born February 20, 1945) is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, Nobel laureate, and $1 million TV quiz show prize winner ('Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?'). He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer with John C. Mather that led to the measurement "of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation."

This work helped further the Big Bang theory of the universe using the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE). According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the COBE project can also be regarded as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science." Smoot donated his share of the Nobel Prize money, less travel costs, to a charitable foundation.

Smoot had a cameo appearance as himself in "The Terminator Decoupling" episode of The Big Bang Theory. He contacted the show as a fan of their often physics-based plots and was incorporated into an episode featuring him lecturing at a fictional physics symposium.

From the "Big Bang Theory" Wiki:
In "The Terminator Decoupling", George Smoot delivered the keynote address for a symposium that featured discussions on bioorganic cellular computer devices, the advancements in multi-threaded task completion, plus a roundtable on the nonequilibrium Green’s function approach to the photoionization process in atoms. Sheldon, Leonard, Raj and Howard took the Coast Starlight train to attend this "must-see" conference in San Francisco. In the interim, Leonard read Smoot's book, "Wrinkles in Time, and Sheldon fretted over a forgotten flashdrive as he wanted Smoot to light up as he read his brilliant paper on astrophysical "probes of M-theory effects in the early universe which was contained in the storage device. At the conference, Sheldon presumably showed George Smoot his paper, as Penny e-mailed it to him, and suggested a collaboration continuing Sheldon's research, Cooper-Smoot, to bring Smoot back on top with another Nobel Prize; Smoot surmised Sheldon was crazy and walked away, as Sheldon asserted he is a diva and that it could be Smoot-Cooper. Earlier, Sheldon had said Dr. Smoot is one of the great minds of our time and his work in black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation cemented our understanding of the origin of the universe.

BCnU!

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