Lusscroft Native Wins Nobel Prize
(Continued)
Mather was honored along
with George Smoot of Laurence Berkeley National Laboratory for uncovering
evidence that helped seal the Big Bang theory of the universe. The two
American scientists uncovered evidence on the origin of the universe and how
it grew into galaxies based on data from a NASA satellite.
None other than Steven Hawking, the world’s best-known cosmologist and
author of the best-seller, A Brief History of Time, called Mather’s and
Smoot’s work “one of the most important discoveries in history, maybe
the most important.”
Mather grew up at the Rutgers Experiment Station at Lusscroft, in Wantage,
and attended Wantage Consolidated Elementary School. He wasn’t an ordinary
farm boy, though. His father was a researcher of dairy cattle genetics and
an employee of the university.
“He used to tell me bedtime stories when I was five about cells and
chromosomes,” Mather says of his father. “Later on, my parents read to
my sister and me from biographies of Darwin and Galileo.”
Later on, after finishing the ninth grade, the Mathers moved to the Newbegin
farm of the Experiment Station in Frankford Township. “That’s so I could
attend Newton High School instead of Sussex, which had fallen on hard times
back then,” Mather said. He graduated from Newton High in 1964.
Mather’s interest in science started at a young age. His father was a
researcher on dairy cattle genetics, Mather said, and passed on his love of
science to his son.
Additionally, his parents took the kids to the Museum of Natural History in
New York, and, he said, “I got hooked pretty early on astronomy and
electronics and fossils and volcanoes and earthquakes and such.” Mather
said he also knew his mother’s father was a bacteriologist who helped
develop the production process for penicillin. He added that “another
thing back then was Sputnik went up, and the International Geophysical Year
started. The country was petrified of the Soviet Union, so there was a lot
of interest in science that would save us from the Communists.”
Looking back to his childhood, Mather said it was “very quiet and isolated
since we lived pretty far from town.” He said, “[I had] little to do
where I lived except read books and build radios and model airplanes and
make things with wood and play with lenses to make telescopes.” He
remembered the bookmobile from the county library coming around to the
experiment station every couple of weeks and, “I latched onto everything I
could find about science.” He credits his teachers in elementary school
for letting him follow his interests and read books during class. “I
remember entering a lot of science fairs with various projects. There was
also a 4H club in electronics that was run by an engineer who worked on the
communications towers and had a small factory somewhere north of Sussex”
In high school, Mather said he had some “outstanding” teachers in math
and English and science who encouraged him and gave him opportunities. “My
physics teacher was Bill Labance, biology teacher was Bill Cummings and
chemistry was Mr. Weaver I think. I had English from Mrs. Bedell and Warren
Cummings, and math from Miss Robbins and Mrs. Howe. They helped me do
science fair projects and learn a lot, and in math I got a chance to jump
ahead and take senior math in junior year, and then did AP calculus by
myself in study hall in senior year.“ In his class of 1964, Mather said
there were a lot of students interested in science and math “so this was a
lot of fun to do.”
In his senior year at Newton High, Mather was accepted at six different
schools. “I chose Swarthmore for its warm feeling and the sense of
personal attention that I might get, as well as their declaration that I
would get a complete preparation in physics taught by professors and not
graduate students.”
After college, he continued his education and though he could have worked at
many places, to NASA’s delight, that’s where he headed.
Mather and Smoot were the key leaders of a team of more than 1,000
scientists, engineers and technicians that built and launched the Cosmic
Background Explorer, or COBE, satellite in 1989 to study a haze of microwave
radiation that is believed to be a remnant of the Big Bang that allegedly
started the universe.
In its citation, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences wrote, “The COBE
results provided increased support for the Big Bang scenario for the origin
of the universe, as this is the only scenario that predicts the kind of
cosmic microwave background radiation measured by COBE.”
COBE’s measurements of the temperature and distribution of the microwaves,
including the detection of tantalizingly faint irregularities, the seeds
from which things like galaxies could have grown, were a resounding
confirmation of a universe that was born in a terrific explosion of space
and time 14 billion years ago and in which the ordinary matter that makes up
stars and people is overwhelmed by some mysterious “dark matter.”
“What we have found is evidence for the birth of the universe and its
evolution,” Smoot said at a news conference about the results in 1992.
About a map showing the splotchy seeds of galaxy formation, he famously
said, “If you are religious, it is like looking at God.”
Astronomers who had long anticipated a Nobel for the COBE work were thrilled
with the announcement. The satellite’s results unleashed a wave of
theorizing and experiments to provide increasingly detailed data on the
cosmic microwaves, including NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy
Project, or WMAP, which is still orbiting and beaming down data contributing
to the emerging picture of a preposterous universe, full of dark energy
pushing it apart, as well as dark matter.
“I was thrilled and amazed when I found out we won the Nobel Prize,”
Mather said. “The dedicated and talented women and men of the COBE team
collaborated to produce the science results being recognized. This is truly
such a rare and special honor.” Mather will split the prize of 10 million
Swedish krona with Smoot. This equates out to about $1.37 million.
Though he’s light years from his days growing up at the farm on the hill
in Wantage, it still holds a special place in his heart. “It’s now
something they’re now thinking of turning into an agricultural and
historical museum,” he said.
James Turner had spent $500,000 between 1914 and 1930 to establish Lusscroft
as a model dairy farm, based upon up-to-date principles of scientific
agriculture.
