‘Like looking at God'

Mather wins Nobel Prize for discovering secret of the universe, By Laurie Gordon From atop a hill in the heart of Sussex Country’s bucolic countryside, a young John Mather often gazed up at an infinite froth of stars, asking himself, as many do, “Where did they all come from?” Little could he have known that some day he would answer that question. It was the late 1950s and already he was entranced with space, and thanks to his parents, all science But he didn’t know how far his fascination would take him. Most recently, it took him to Stockholm, Sweden, where this farm boy from Sussex County accepted the Nobel Prize in Physics. 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 using data from a NASA satellite. Even Steven Hawking, the world’s best-known cosmologist and author of the best-seller, A Brief History of Time, called their 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.” After he finished ninth grade, the Mathers moved to the Experiment Stations’ Newbegin farm in Frankford Township. “So I could attend Newton High School instead of Sussex, which had fallen on hard times back then,” Mather said. He graduated from Newton in 1964. His background instilled an early interest in science. Additionally, his parents took the kids to the Museum of Natural History in New York, and “I got hooked pretty early on astronomy, electronics, fossils, volcanoes, earthquakes and such.” He also knew his mother’s father was a bacteriologist who helped develop the production process for penicillin. He added “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, build radios and model airplanes, make things with wood and play with lenses to make telescopes.” He remembered the bookmobile coming around every couple of weeks .“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 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, 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 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, Mather said there were a lot of students interested in science and math “so this was a lot of fun to do.” Mather was accepted at six colleges. “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 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.. 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 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, 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. . 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. “They’re now thinking of turning it into an agricultural and historical museum,” he said..