Go Bears!!

UC Berkeley professor George F. Smoot was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics today (Tuesday, Oct. 3). Smoot, a professor of physics and an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), led a team that obtained the first images of the infant universe - findings that confirmed the predictions of the Big Bang theory.

Prof. Smoot is UC Berkeley's 20th faculty Nobel laureate; 24 Nobelists over the years have been Berkeley alumni, including today's co-recipient, John C. Mather of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Andrew Z. Fire, who yesterday won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.