When UC Berkeley astrophysicist George Smoot received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics a year ago, his dreams for spending his $700,000 share of the prize ran far beyond purchasing a sporty car or a new home. Instead, he wanted to create a lasting center where he and other scientists — in particular, young postdoctoral researchers — could tackle cosmic questions whose solutions would be worthy of future Nobel Prizes.
That dream, the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, has become reality, with a $500,000 endowment gift from Smoot and additional gifts totaling $8.1 million. These gifts include $1.5 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and $5.5 million in private gifts and other support for endowed chairs at the center and for postdoctoral and graduate student support. Physics professor Saul Perlmutter, who, like Smoot, is also a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), has also contributed to the center, using a portion of his 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize to seed a fund for future research that, with the addition of other funds, will total approximately $600,000.
“It’s an exciting time in cosmology when we are making breakthroughs that are tremendous intellectual achievements, and I really believe we have to prepare the next generation to follow in our shoes,” says Smoot, a professor of physics. These breakthroughs include the discovery of the seeds of today’s galaxies in the infant universe, for which Smoot won the Nobel Prize; the more recent discovery that a mysterious “dark energy” is accelerating the expansion of the universe; and the realization that an enigmatic “dark matter” determines the large-scale structure of the universe.
Smoot, the center’s director, and the University plan to raise at least $4 million to $5 million in endowment on top of the $8.1 million to ensure an ongoing center with resident postdoctoral fellows and scholars at UC Berkeley and LBNL, an active visitors program, educational outreach to K-12 science teachers, and several collaborative international workshops on cosmology each year.
PROGRESS UNDER WAY
The money has already allowed the center to hire two new postdoctoral fellows and to advertise for two more fellows for fall 2008. In July, the center hosted its first workshop for high school teachers and students, and the center’s first annual international winter cosmology workshop is planned for next January in Mexico.
Nearly 50 UC Berkeley, LBNL, and visiting scientists have joined the center, along with nearly 20 postdoctoral fellows and a dozen graduate students.
Nobel laureate George Smoot (center) discusses the new
Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, joined by Chancellor
Birgeneau (left) and fellow physics professor Saul Perlmutter.
“We really need to have an atmosphere where there’s always something brewing, where people come in and talk to each other — that is the way new ideas emerge and the way science moves forward,” says theoretical astrophysicist Hitoshi Murayama, professor of physics and one of the center’s three deputy directors.
Smoot hopes that the new center will become a place where observational cosmologists like himself, theorists like Murayama, and phenomenologists like Chung-Pei Ma, professor of astronomy and another deputy director of the new center, come together with observers to solve the big questions of 21st century cosmology. These questions include whether the fundamental constants of nature, such as the gravitational constant and the fine structure constant, vary over time; whether and how inflation happened a split-second after the Big Bang; and why the universe has more matter than antimatter. Then there is Smoot’s own search for cosmic strings, which are proposed relics of the Big Bang; and the search for extra dimensions beyond the spacetime four.
“Berkeley has a unique combination of people and projects that span from the earliest epochs to the present, both in theory and observations,” says Smoot. “Berkeley has been the pioneer and leader in this area, and could continue to be with the center in place.”
