So why did the ripples at the beginning of the Universe make such an enormous splash in the world’s media? Was COBE’s discovery really as important as Stephen Hawking claimed it was?
‘We took a fair amount of heat from our colleagues in other fields after Hawking claimed it was the discovery of the century,’ says Jim Peebles. ‘It was a wonderful thing – but I’ll give you the discovery of the year at maximum!’
According to Peebles, COBE’s discovery of the seeds of galaxies certainly did not rank as highly as Hubble’s discovery that the Universe was expanding, nor Penzias and Wilson stumbling on the faint afterglow of creation.
But Hawking was not alone in making over-the-top comments. ‘Other scientists said clearly this is going to be a Nobel Prize,’ says Peebles. ‘I don’t know why they said all these things, except to speculate they were feeding on each other’s enthusiasm.’
The irony as far as most scientists were concerned was that the perfect black body spectrum measured by COBE was by far the most important result to come from the satellite. It showed the early Universe to be simpler than anyone had hoped. But the spectrum had received little publicity, despite the rapturous standing ovation the scientists had given it.
The spectrum was not only more important scientifically, it was more impressive technically as well. To find the hot spots in the cosmic background radiation, COBE’s Differential Microwave Radiometer had to be only twice as sensitive as any ground-based experiment. COBE’s measurement of the spectrum, on the other hand, was an astonishing 30 times as good as anything previously achieved.
But the greatest irony of all was that it would have been an even bigger story if COBE had not found hot spots in the fireball radiation. Then galaxy formation would have been a complete mystery and cosmologists would have had to rethink a lot of their ideas about the Big Bang theory.
One organisation that benefited enormously from all the publicity surrounding COBE was, of course, NASA. ‘After its problems with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Galileo space probe, the agency desperately needed a success,’ says Robert Wilson.
‘I’m sure NASA wasn’t sorry about all the COBE publicity,’ says Peebles. ‘But whether they were a part of generating it I don’t know.’
Peebles doubts that NASA could have created the media spectacle even if it had wanted to. ‘I don’t know whether anyone is competent enough to have got this thing going the way it went,’ he says. ‘Suppose you hear about some marvellous discovery and you want the whole world to catch fire – would you know how to go about it?’
So why did the whole world catch fire? Several things played a part. Probably the most important was the sheer excitement of the scientists. A lot of tension had been built up because COBE had been up in orbit quite a while and seen no sign of any variation in the microwave background.
‘It was two years between the launch of COBE and the smoothness result,’ says Peebles. ‘Ample time for tension to build up. That’s one reason there were a lot of people at that meeting where the announcement was made.’
There had been a lot of speculation within the scientific community. ‘For at least six months before the ripples were announced, there were rumours that they had been found,’ says Peebles. ‘Science journalists would call me up at Princeton and gently probe me for what I knew. Fortunately, it didn’t require any discretion on my part because I didn’t know any more than they did.’
When the announcement finally came, the tension among scientists had reached fever pitch. ‘There was a tremendous outpouring of relief,’ remembers Dave Wilkinson.
‘I think people simply fed on each other’s enthusiasm,’ says Peebles. ‘There was a sort of psychological reinforcement of excitement. It led to all this burst of publicity. That’s my theory.’
He says that between the launch of COBE and the unveiling of the spectrum – which he considers the more important result – there was only about a month and a half. ‘There wasn’t time for the reinforcement and excitement to build up,’ he says.
But it wasn’t all innocent excitement. Some scientists definitely took advantage of the sudden media interest. ‘They told the press that the COBE result confirmed the Big Bang,’ says Charles Bennett. ‘That wasn’t entirely true.’ In fact, the Big Bang theory was never seriously in doubt. The COBE result was just another brick in a pretty solid foundation.
However, in the previous year several groups of astronomers studying how galaxies cluster throughout the Universe had found that this clustering was difficult to explain in terms of the standard version of the theory of cold dark matter. For the purposes of this story, it is necessary only to know at this stage that the latter theory is something tagged onto the Big Bang theory.
‘The press misreported the problems with the cold dark matter theory as the Big Bang being wrong,’ says Bennett. ‘A lot of people in the scientific community then made a concerted effort to fix this impression by saying that the Big Bang theory was one thing and cold dark matter theory something else entirely.’ The trouble was, no one listened very hard. ‘But when our result was announced, a lot of scientists took advantage of the opportunity to correct the previously erroneous news reports and reaffirm that the Big Bang theory was still very much alive.’
This was why some scientists were keen to shout out that the Big Bang was okay. Not everyone was simply relieved or excited. Some scientists were setting the record straight.
But other things played a part in heating things up, and one of them was certainly the press release sent out by the University of California at Berkeley. ‘The COBE story was already on the wires the night before the NASA press conference,’ says Bennett. ‘So there was already this underflow of media attention, which we had no idea was going on.’
‘By the time of the NASA announcement, everyone was warmed up to why COBE’s discovery was a wonderful thing,’ says John Mather. ‘It certainly got us a lot of publicity.’
At NASA, the Berkeley press release caused consternation. ‘The agency had tried its best to be fair to everyone,’ says Bennett. ‘But it had journalists coming in and saying, “How come you gave him this picture and me this picture?”’
The NASA press office did not have any idea what was going on. It was not until later that it realised there were two press releases – the NASA press release and the one from Berkeley.
‘Some favoured newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal, were given a jump on the rest,’ says Dave Wilkinson.
‘NASA doesn’t usually do things this way,’ says Bennett. ‘It has a sense of fairness with the media and does not preferentially release things to favoured journalists. Berkeley does. I don’t fault them at all for their policy. But in this case it conflicted with NASA.’
‘Because some journalists got a jump on the others,’ says Wilkinson, ‘they wrote more detailed and more splashy stories than they would have done if they’d simply gone to the NASA press conference.’
‘In fact, many reporters wrote their articles without even knowing there was a NASA press release,’ says Bennett. ‘There was nothing wrong with Berkeley putting out a release. The mistake was not checking it with the rest of the team.’
‘The Berkeley PR machine is extremely good,’ says Bruce Partridge.
‘George [Smoot] had gone through a tremendously stressful period analysing the data,’ says Wilkinson. ‘I guess when the Berkeley press office told him they were going to release a little earlier, it didn’t register with him it was violating our agreement.’
According to Smoot, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory press release was sent out to only five places ahead of time, including the news agency Associated Press. He says it was embargoed for release on Thursday 23 April, the day of the NASA press conference. Associated Press then sent its own release around the night before, with a similar embargo stamped on it. ‘To the best of my knowledge, nobody broke that embargo,’ says Smoot.
But quite apart from its feeling of betrayal, the COBE team was deeply upset by the content of the Berkeley press release. ‘It focused undue attention on Berkeley,’ says Mather.
‘There was little mention of the people who did most of the work,’ says Bennett.
‘When I switched on my TV and heard that the Berkeley team did the experiment, it upset me,’ says Wilkinson. ‘It was a complete distortion. Most of the work on COBE had been done by the people at Goddard – John Mather and the rest – and the Berkeley press release did not give them due credit.’
‘John Mather had bent over backwards to give the team credit,’ says Bruce Partridge.
‘A lot of young people who worked very hard on this didn’t get mentioned,’ says Wilkinson. ‘They were pretty upset.’
‘John Mather is the guy,’ says Bennett. ‘He’s very self-effacing. There’s a big personality difference between Mather and Smoot.’
Smoot had gone to NASA headquarters a month before the NASA press conference to help write the official release and get it cleared. It was the second NASA announcement concerning the smoothness experiment. Back in Berkeley, he told his boss and the head of his lab about the NASA release. Smoot says there was a general feeling at Berkeley that in the first release NASA had given too much credit to Goddard and not enough to Berkeley. A Berkeley release was drawn up. ‘I insisted on a joint release,’ says Smoot. ‘NASA had to get first credit.’
The COBE team was completely unprepared for the bad feeling caused by the Berkeley press release. Until now, the members had worked together harmoniously. ‘We had to get this thing resolved – it was splitting the team,’ says Wilkinson.
‘Smoot admitted he’d made a mistake,’ says Bennett. ‘He apologised to the team.’
‘George has done everything he can to put things right,’ says Mather.
But, in the eyes of the public, George Smoot had become COBE. ‘It’s unfortunate but that’s what has happened,’ says Wilkinson.
Smoot says this sort of thing always happens when the press covers a story. Inevitably, one person ends up under the spotlight. ‘The first day, the press coverage was pretty even, with quotes from me and Ned Wright and the others who were on the platform at the NASA press conference,’ says Smoot. ‘But over the next few days, more and more Smoot quotes got used.’
But he believes positive things came out of the Berkeley press release. ‘It made the whole thing a bigger story,’ he says.
On this score, the COBE team was not entirely innocent. If the ‘Berkeley business’ muddied the waters, the team was guilty of doing the same thing by releasing the photo they did – the one with the mauve blotches for hot spots and blue blotches for cold spots. The photograph was reproduced in virtually every major newspaper and magazine the world over, and most people who saw it assumed they were really seeing clumps of matter in the Universe 13.7 billion years ago.
‘The picture caught everyone’s attention,’ says Wilkinson, ‘but it was misleading.’
‘It was real structure in the early Universe mixed in with instrumental noise,’ says Peebles. ‘It certainly wasn’t the face of God!’1
‘We saw this problem coming,’ says Wilkinson. ‘In fact, there was a lot of debate about the photograph on the team. Should we or shouldn’t we use one at all?’
‘We knew that most of what was in the picture was not real,’ says Bennett. ‘But the overall feeling was that we should show the picture but be careful to tell people that what they were seeing were the biggest things in the Universe plus a whole lot of noise from the instrument.’
According to Bennett, the team dreamed up an analogy to explain the picture, but they never used it. It involved interference, or ‘snow’, on a television screen. ‘If you’re a long way from a transmitter and you turn on a TV, you get all this snow on the screen,’ says Bennett. ‘But, amid all the snow, you can still see the vague outlines of a picture. Well, the picture we released of the early Universe had a lot of snow on it.’
One person on the team thought the problem of conveying what the picture showed was simply too great. ‘I advocated not using the picture at all,’ says Wilkinson. ‘I knew none of the media would take the time to explain that the picture was half noise and half pattern.’
‘But there was a feeling on the team that we should show people a picture to get over the idea we were looking at the whole sky,’ says Bennett. ‘Unfortunately, the noise part of the caution got dropped along the way.
‘Perhaps people on the team were a little naive about how such things get covered in the press,’ he admits. ‘You show the picture with the explanation, and you know it’s the picture that will run and the explanation that will be dropped.’
But, to many on the team, the misleading photograph paled into insignificance compared to George Smoot’s ‘face of God’ comment, made at the NASA press conference.
‘When George came out with that, it was a complete surprise to all of us!’ says Bennett.
In advance of the NASA press conference, the COBE team had discussed what should be said. ‘We didn’t exactly go over it word for word,’ says Bennett. ‘But we agreed on the general tone, removed scientific jargon, that sort of thing. Nobody mentioned the face of God.’
‘I made the comment on the spur of the moment,’ admits Smoot. He says he never intended to connect the COBE discovery directly to God but only to convey to non-scientists some idea of how important it was. He hit on: ‘If you’re religious, it’s like seeing God.’
‘I think that was going a bit far,’ says Bob Dicke.
‘George was trying to get over the enthusiasm and excitement we all felt, which was a very positive thing,’ says Bennett. ‘But bringing in the religious connection was a potentially dangerous mistake.’
Smoot never expected people to take his comment literally. But that is exactly the way some newspapers did take it, giving their readers the distinct impression that in the depths of space the COBE scientists had really found traces of God.
‘George has a rather extrovert-ish personality,’ says Bennett. ‘He says things to the press in a way he would not talk to a scientific audience.’
A debate ensued about what science could or could not say about God. It was all pretty irrelevant to COBE. It served only to muddy the scientific waters, making it harder for ordinary people to understand what it was the satellite had actually found.
In Britain, The Daily Telegraph asked cosmologists and clergymen to comment on the COBE discovery under the headline ‘Cosmology versus theology’. And the spurious religious connection was aired in television debates as well. In the US, Bennett was asked by NBC to do their morning phone-in show in order to discuss the religious aspects of the COBE result. ‘Not on your life!’ he told them.
What alarmed a lot of scientists was that claims were being made for science that were not justified. Most scientists agree that science illuminates the ‘how’ of the Universe but has nothing whatsoever to say about the ‘why’, which is the preserve of religion.
‘We’ve taken a lot of ribbing from fellow scientists for the things George said,’ says Mather.
Smoot says he is passionately interested in communicating science to the public, something he is actively doing at Berkeley. ‘If my comment got people interested in cosmology, then that’s good, that’s positive,’ he says. ‘Anyhow, it’s done now. I can’t take it back.’
The Berkeley press release and the ‘face of God’ comment helped to make George Smoot’s name synonymous with COBE.
Shortly after the ‘ripples’ announcement, Smoot received a phone call from John Brockman, one of the highest-profile literary agents in the publishing world.2 Brockman, who was on a business trip to Japan, was ringing from a payphone at Tokyo airport. On the way there, he had noticed a newspaper headline declaring that there had been a breakthrough in our understanding of the Universe. Smoot’s name was mentioned prominently.
When Brockman got through to Smoot in California, he reportedly said: ‘Hey, look, something big is happening in the Universe, what’s in it for me?’ Before Brockman’s money ran out, he had got Smoot to agree to write a proposal for a book and to fax it to Brockman’s New York office so that it would be there when Brockman arrived back in the US 13 hours later.
Brockman had struck a chord with Smoot. ‘Even before the COBE announcement, I was interested in writing a book about cosmology,’ says Smoot.
Brockman arrived back in New York to find the fax waiting for him. He worked on it for 24 hours. Within two days of seeing the newspaper headline in Japan, Brockman had the proposal in the offices of 60 publishers in 12 countries. Within a week, he had auctioned the book in New York, London, Munich, Milan, Barcelona and Paris for the largest deal in the history of science publishing – reportedly in the region of $2 million when all the individual national deals were added up.
Smoot had become a major celebrity. He appeared on chat shows and news programmes. Magazine articles were written about him. On 15 November 1992, he was featured on the cover of the Boston Globe Magazine. Inside, staff writer Mitchell Zuckoff called him ‘the planet’s most popular astrophysicist’ and portrayed him as a sort of cross between a scientist and a movie star. ‘If Indiana Jones were a physicist instead of an archaeologist,’ wrote Zuckoff, ‘he’d be George Smoot.’
There was loose talk about COBE’s achievements deserving the recognition of the Nobel Prize. And who could rule out that possibility? After all, the discovery of the cosmic background radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson had been deemed worth a Nobel Prize in 1978. The Nobel Committee was notorious for its caution and often waited years – decades even – before bestowing its accolade on those who had made an important scientific discovery.3 But, with COBE, there was no need for caution. Both the satellite’s major results had been confirmed by experiments from the ground, so there was little chance of the Nobel Committee getting egg on its face by backing a discovery that would next year vanish in a puff of smoke.
But if COBE’s achievements were deemed worthy of the ultimate accolade, who should get the prize? The satellite, after all, was very much a team effort – hundreds of people had been involved in the project over the past two decades. The obvious choice was John Mather – the man who, in 1974, conceived the idea of COBE. He not only pushed the project to its completion, but was largely responsible for the most successful instrument on the satellite. But if Mather were to get the Nobel Prize, who should share it with him?
There were many possibilities. But one man had separated himself from the pack. That man was George Smoot.
1. ‘Noise’ is just a technical name for the random jitterings of electrons inside any material.
2. The following information is based on an interview with John Brockman by Michael White in the UK’s Sunday Times on 13 December 1992.
3. Albert Einstein had to wait 16 years for recognition and, even when he got the prize, it was not for relativity but for his work on the ‘photoelectric effect’.