John C. Mather

John Cromwell Mather (born August 7, 1946) is an American astrophysicist and cosmologist. From 1995 to 2023 he served as the senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). In 2006 Mather and George Smoot shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE).

Quotes

• The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, under study by NASA since 1976, will map the spectrum and the angular distribution of diffuse radiation from the universe over the entire wavelength range from 1 micron to 1.3 cm. It carries three instruments: a set of differential microwave radiometers (DMR) at 23.5, 31.4, 53, and 90 GHz, a far infrared absolute spectrophotometer (FIRAS) covering 1 to 100 cm^-1, and a diffuse infrared background experiment (DIRBE) covering 1 to 300 microns. They will use the ideal space environment, a one year lifetime, and standard instrument techniques to achieve orders of magnitude improvements in sensitivity and accuracy, providing a fundamental data base for cosmology. The instruments are united by common purpose as well as similar environmental and orbital requirements. The data from all three experiments will be analyzed together, to distinguish nearby sources of radiation from the cosmologically interesting diffuse background radiations.
  • (1 August 1982)"The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE)". Optical Engineering 21 (4).

• NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite mission, the COBE, laid the foundations for modern cosmology by measuring the spectrum and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation and discovering the cosmic infrared background radiation. ... The COBE observed the universe on the largest scales possible by mapping the cosmic microwave and infrared background radiation fields and determining their spectra. It produced conclusive evidence that the hot Big Bang theory of the early universe is correct, showed that the early universe was very uniform but not perfectly so, and that the total luminosity of post–Big Bang objects is twice as great as previously believed.
  • From the Big Bang to the Nobel Prize and Beyond (John C. Mather — Nobel Prize Lecture) 64–95. nobelprize.org (December 8, 2006). (quote from p. 64)

• … the technical question was, “Is the Big Bang the right story? Is the expanding universe the right story?” And there are a lot of sub-questions in that. If it is the right story, then how did the galaxies come? Where did they come from? Because it seemed quite mysterious. People were just beginning to realize that there was a structure that had been seen in the maps of where the galaxies are located, and that we had no clue what made that happen. So what is there to measure? Well, there’s not very many things to measure. You can measure the galaxies or you can look for this cosmic background radiation. And if you could measure it, it would tell you something that you never knew before.
  • Interview of John C. Mather by David Zierler. Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, Maryland, USA (May 26, 2020).

External links

Encyclopedic article on John C. Mather on Wikipedia