Why Smoot Funeral Home is Changing End-of-Life Care - Away State Journal
Smoot, a physicist at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting minute temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background, a prediction of the Big Bang theory.
After consultation with MIT administration, and Smoot himself, the Institute formed the Smoot Measurement and Length Recalibration (SMaLR) Task Force earlier this year. The smoot was created in October 1958 after seven MIT students calibrated the Mass. Ave. bridge using 5’7 Oliver Smoot '62.
Now retired and living in San Diego, Smoot took the time to talk to The Register about the prank that made him a unit of measurement and the lasting impact of standards. Looking back, he recalled how fraternity leaders assigned him the task, and he and his friends carried it out the next day.
George Smoot was an American physicist who was corecipient, with John C. Mather, of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2006 for discoveries supporting the big-bang theory.
A smoot is a nonstandard unit of length that originated at MIT in the 1950s. The year was 1958, and Oliver R. Smoot was pledging to the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity.
Along with John Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics for finding the background radiation that finally pinned down the Big Bang theory, the idea that the universe was born in a rapid cosmic expansion some 14 billion years ago.
