George Smoot

George Fitzgerald Smoot III, a physicist whose landmark measurements of the cosmic microwave background made the Big Bang theory vivid and precise, died September 18, 2025, in Paris. He was 80. The cause was a heart attack, according to statements from UC Berkeley and subsequent news reports.

Born February 20, 1945, in Yukon, Florida, Dr. Smoot studied mathematics and physics at MIT, earning a dual bachelor's degree in 1966 and a Ph.D. in 1970. He later moved to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and joined the University of California Berkeley faculty, where he spent much of his career.

Dr. Smoot became a central figure in NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) mission, which mapped faint temperature variations in the universe's oldest light. His findings illuminated how primordial ripples grew into galaxies and large-scale structure. He shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with John C. Mather for this work.

After COBE, he continued to shape cosmology, collaborating on experiments that refined the cosmic background's "afterglow" and helped usher in precision cosmology. Stephen Hawking praised the 1992 results as "the discovery of the century, if not of all time."

In 2007, Dr. Smoot used $500,000 of his Nobel award to help endow the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics. In 2009, he joined Paris Cité University and the Astroparticule et Cosmologie (APC) laboratory, where colleagues later remembered him as "larger than life."

Beyond the lab, he became a recognizable public figure. He appeared on "The Big Bang Theory," having approached the show's producers as a fan. He played himself in an episode in which the young scientists traveled to attend a scientific conference. Smoot later won $1 million on "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" He embraced outreach as part of the scientist's role.

Survivors include his sister, Sharon Smoot Bowie; two nieces; and his partner, Nóra Csiszár.

By Legacy News Staff

(Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)