John Mather
Astrophysicist and Nobel Prize
Biography
John Cromwell Mather (USA) is an American astrophysicist and cosmologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE) with George Smoot, measuring the cosmic microwave background radiation, showing it came from the early universe, and discovering that it has hot and cold spots that are responsible for the existence of galaxies, stars, planets, and therefore people. This work 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.” Mather is a senior astrophysicist at the U.S. space agency’s (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Maryland and 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 is also the project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) telescope, a space telescope to be launched to L2 no earlier than 2018. Hi, I’m John Mather, Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. I also won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for measuring the cosmic microwave background radiation, showing it came from the early universe, and discovering that it has hot and cold spots that are responsible for the existence of galaxies, stars, planets, and therefore people