George Smoot
Nasa

For George Smoot and John Mather, their Nobel is the latest chapter in a story that began when they were young researchers in the early 70s. Smoot was working with Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Their field was cosmology, a study of the theory of the origins of the universe, then considered a fringe science. At the time they were looking for evidence supporting the Big Bang by probing microwave and radio background noise that first inspired the theory. Observable to most people as a portion of the static on their televisions, faint microwave radiation is all that’s left of the giant cosmic explosion that created the universe.

John Mather
Nasa

While at Berkeley, young Smoot proposed a satellite mission that would measure variations in the radiation, looking for slight changes that might show where objects such as galaxies formed. At the same time, Berkeley PhD candidate Mather was thinking along the same lines. After earning his degree, Mather went to work at NASA’s Goddard Space Center and began working with Smoot on a satellite mission, called Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), to take readings of ancient radiation from outside the Earth’s atmosphere.

In 1989, the satellite that launched sensitive detectors designed by Smoot sent images of spectacular strips of slightly cooler and warmer radiation that, on the computer screen, looked like wrinkles on the edges of the 13.7 billion-year-old universe. The radiation "ripples," Smoot and Mather posited, were like the holes left in a sheet of dough after a cookie-cutter removes the shapes. They were relics of places where gravity had pulled out all the matter in the known universe from the chaos of the Big Bang a mere 300,000 years after its beginning.

Michael Turner of Chicago’s Fermi­lab called the discovery "the Holy Grail of cosmology" and Stephen Hawking, physicist and author of A Brief History of Time, called it "the discovery of the century, if not of all time." The work not only went far toward confirming the Big Bang theory, it made cosmology a serious field of science, bringing up questions about mysterious forces called dark matter and dark energy that cannot be observed but that make up 95 percent of the universe.

"Our goal is to do ‘genetic’ mapping of the universe. What are the rules and what are the constituents that make up the universe?" says Smoot.

Andrew Fire
L. Cicero/Stanford

Also honored by this year’s Nobel Committee is Andrew Fire, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Mathematics Department in 1978 at age 19, after attending Cal for just three years. Unlike Smoot and Mather, Fire will receive the Nobel for relatively recent work. His prize will be for the 1998 discovery of RNA silencing. RNA is the genetic equivalent of carrier pigeons, bringing messages from the nucleus to the part of the cell that builds proteins. Fire’s work found that special double-strand RNA can actually interfere with a specific gene to "silence" it. Aside from answering a number of lingering mysteries in genetics, the ability to target specific genes and silence them may have valuable applications in treating viruses and genetic disorders.

Smoot, Mather, and Fire will receive their awards in Stockholm, Sweden on Dec. 10.

—Erik Vance is a fellow at California magazine.