George Smoot, Berkeley Nobel physicist who mapped the universe’s afterglow, dies at 80 - Local News Matters

George Smoot, Berkeley Nobel physicist who mapped the universe’s afterglow, dies at 80 - Local News Matters

GEORGE FITZGERALD SMOOT III, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose experiments about space provided some of the most convincing evidence that the universe began with a Big Bang, died on Sept. 18 in Paris. He was 80, according to a news release Tuesday from University of California, Berkeley. The cause was a heart attack, according to UC Berkeley, where he was a professor emeritus of physics. Smoot rose to international prominence in 1992 when he…