Dr. B's Astrophysics Nerd Credentials
Dr. B. is a former rocket scientist.
In his previous life, Dr. B. contributed to the work that won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics!
Two of Dr. B's NASA bosses and colleagues, John Mather & George Smoot, won the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics for their work on the Big Bang and the early evolution of our universe! Dr. B. is very proud to have worked for the Science Team of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) project back in the late 80s through mid 90s! Dr. B. was co-author of several papers on the calibration and analysis of COBE data. He received a NASA achievement award for his COBE work, and footnote citations in both Mather's and Smoot's popular books on COBE.
Here is my (very old) ID badge from my days at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Dr. B. recalls a specific prophetic conversation from back in 1990. While down at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland on an all-night data analysis shift, he was chatting with a few fellow "worker-bees" -- the dozen or so bright young PhD physicists doing the grunt work of slowly and meticulously calibrating and analyzing the torrential stream of COBE data. We were all very impressed and amazed by what this revolutionary data was clearly showing. We knew that we were doing fundamentally important work in cosmology. One of us (not Dr. B.) said something like: "These results are just so amazing! This work will turn out to be so important that the Principal Scientists will most likely win the Nobel prize in 15 or 20 years!" We all agreed that this statement exactly captured our heady mood. Now skip ahead 16 years and .... we were exactly right!
Dr. B. always enjoys pointing out "his" COBE infra-red image of our Milky Way galaxy on page 1001 of the AP physics textbook, page 22 in the middle school astronomy textbook, and pages 54 & 341 in the astronomy elective college-level textbook.
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| 360 degree "wraparound" COBE/DIRBE 3-Band IR falsecolor image of our Milky Way galaxy that Dr. B. helped calibrate and construct, pixel by pixel, from over six months of data. |
Visit the 2006 Physics Nobel Prize website http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2006/
Visit the NASA CoBE website http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/cobe/
See some of Dr. B's contributions to the CoBE program here , here & here
If you care, you may look at my relatively updated resume.
See an interesting and funny but sad take on science's view of the origin and evolution of the universe vs. that of a particular creation mythology from www.thepaincomics.com here
Here are the opening lyrics from the hilarious, interesting, and appropriately nerdy TV show "the big bang theory". The lyrics demonstrate the evolution of the physical universe, the evolution of life on Earth, and our scientific understanding of it all:
Although the series ran out of steam in its last couple seasons, the first few seasons were delightful to those of us who identify as physics nerds. I was excited to see my colleague George Smoot guest star in season 2 episode 17 -- "The Terminator Decoupling". In that episode, while on the train traveling to the physics conference, Leonard is reading George Smoot's book "Wrinkles in Time" in which I am mentioned as a single tiny reference. I am not part of the main pageant of history, but at least I made the footnotes.
The funniest thing about the TV show is that through college, grad school and then working as a professional physicist, I've known many folks not all that different from the caricatures portrayed. Actually, I'm not all that different -- you don't want to know how many thousands of comic books I own, even after selling over two thousand particularly valuable ones back in 1992 to help me finance the down payment on my first house. I can recite far too much dialog from shows such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Buffy, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, Firefly and Monty Python ...
Here is an artist's rendering of the COBE satellite, and some of the top level COBE data & images:
That we humans can fathom the structure and dynamics of the universe (multiverse?) fills me wonder, awe and a deep satisfaction!
Here is Calvin & Hobbes' take on the Big Bang:
October 2017 update: Another COBE colleague Ray Weiss won the 2017 Nobel prize in Physics (jointly with Kip Thorne and Barry Barish) for their work on Gravitational wave detection with LIGO. I now know and have worked with three Nobel prize winners. Pretty cool! I may not be that smart, but I used to hang out with smart people! Kip Thorne is probably most familiar to folks as the relativity expert who was a major physics consultant for the 2014 movie "Interstellar".
November 2018 update: While watching the 2018 movie "Bohemian Rhapsody" about the rock band Queen, I learned that lead guitarist Brian May studied astrophysics and finally earned his PhD in 2007. I was curious to see his research topic. It turns out his topic was the Zodiacal Dust in our solar system. One of my specialties! I did a lot of work on Zodiacal Light in the late 80s and early 90s. When I read Brian May's dissertation, I discovered he cited several papers I co-authored. I am listed by name in Brian May's dissertation. Kind of fun!
