George Fitzgerald Smoot III is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, Nobel laureate, and one of two contestants to win the US$1 million prize on 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 "discovery 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. 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.
Currently Smoot is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, since 2010, a professor of physics at the Paris Diderot University, France and since 2016 the Helmut and Anna Pao Sohmen Professor at Large at the IAS Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In 2003, he was awarded the Einstein Medal and the Oersted Medal in 2009.
as quoted by Joel Achenbachin The God Particle, At the Heart of All Matter http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/03/god-particle/achenbach-text, National Geographic, March 2008.
