Nobel laureate John C. Mather will discuss his prize-winning work on the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE) at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 12 at James Madison University.
Mather also will discuss how Edwin Hubble discovered the expanding universe in 1929 and how the James Webb Space Telescope (the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope) will extend our knowledge even farther during the talk at Wilson Hall Auditorium.
Mather is a senior astrophysicist at the U.S. space agency’s (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 2007, Mather was listed among Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in The World. In October, 2012, he was listed again by Time magazine in a special issue on New Space Discoveries as one of 25 most influential people in space.
Mather’s work on COBE with George Smoot helped cement the big-bang theory of the universe. According to the Nobel Prize committee, “the COBE-project can also be regarded as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science.”
Plenty of free parking will be available in the Warsaw Avenue parking deck adjacent to the Forbes Center for the Performing Arts.
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