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George Fitzgerald Smoot III (born February 20, 1945) is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, Nobel laureate, and one of two contestants to win the 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," making Smoot the only Nobel laureate born in Florida. This work helped further the Big Bang theory of the universe using the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite.〔Horgan, J. (1992) ''Profile: George F. Smoot – COBE's Cosmic Cartographer'', Scientific American 267(1), 34-41.〕 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, and since 2010, a professor of physics at the Paris Diderot University, France. In 2003, he was awarded the Einstein Medal and the Oersted Medal in 2009. ==Early life== Smoot was born in Yukon, Florida. He graduated from Upper Arlington High School in Upper Arlington, Ohio, in 1962. He studied mathematics before switching to 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. Although Smoot attended MIT, he is not the Smoot who was laid end to end to measure the Harvard Bridge between Cambridge and Boston, creating the humorous Smoot unit of measure in the process.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 title=The SMOOT as unit of Length )〕 This was in fact his cousin Oliver R. Smoot, an MIT alumnus who later served as the chairman of the American National Standards Institute.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「George Smoot」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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