George Smoot dies at 80; Nobel laureate researched the universe’s origins at UC Berkeley

Associated Press

BERKELEY — Nobel laureate Dr. George Smoot, who conducted groundbreaking research into the origins of the universe during a long career at UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has died, the school said. He was 80.

Smoot died Sept. 18 in Paris of a heart attack, according to a statement last week by UC Berkeley.

Along with John Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics for finding the background radiation that finally pinned down the Big Bang theory, the idea that the universe was born in a rapid cosmic expansion some 14 billion years ago.

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The Florida native earned a PhD in particle physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. He soon joined the Berkeley Lab, “where