John Mather
Academy of Achievement
The Big Bang theory proposes that the universe we know emerged from a uniformly hot and impenetrable mass of protons, electrons and radiation. But until recently, we knew very little of the first stages of the 13 billion year process in which our cosmos took shape. In 1974, a young astrophysicist, fresh from graduate school at Berkeley, set out to fill in this gap in human knowledge. Leading a small team of researchers at Columbia University's Goddard Center for Space Studies, John Mather devised a proposal for a satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), to measure the microwave background radiation in space. From temperature variations in the radiation emanating from different points in the universe, he hoped to trace the paths of the infant galaxies from their starting point. The scheme seemed far-fetched, and more experienced researchers doubted it would find anything significant, but Mather persuaded NASA to undertake the mission, and was hired by NASA's Goddard Space Fligh