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Biography |
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Dr. John C. Mather is a Senior Astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where he specializes in infrared astronomy and cosmology. He received his Bachelor’s degree in physics at Swarthmore College and his PhD in physics at the University of California at Berkeley.
As an NRC postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (New York City), he led the proposal efforts for the Cosmic Background Explorer (74-76), and came to GSFC to be the Study Scientist (76-88), Project Scientist (88-98), and the Principal Investigator for the Far IR Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) on COBE. He and his team showed that the cosmic microwave background radiation has a blackbody spectrum within 50 parts per million, confirming the Big Bang theory to extraordinary accuracy.
The COBE team also discovered the cosmic anisotropy (hot and cold spots in the background radiation), now believed to be the primordial seeds that led to the structure of the universe today. It was these findings that led to Dr. Mather receiving the Nobel Prize in 2006.
Dr. Mather now serves as Senior Project Scientist (95-present) for the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the great Hubble Space Telescope.
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Abstract |
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Instability Everywhere, from the Big Bang to Now |
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Title: Instabilities Everywhere, from the Big Bang to Intelligent Life
How did the Big Bang produce humans capable of exploring the universe, and how far might we go? Physics tells the story of repeated instabilities, from the hypothetical inflation field to spontaneous symmetry breaking, the production of particles, etc. We have cataloged dozens of distinct states of matter, far beyond “earth, air, fire, and water”, and almost all the others were experimental surprises. We are living examples of a newly named state, self-organized criticality, with physical and logical structures on all possible scales from the atom to the size of the Earth. Life appears to have started on Earth soon after the surface cooled and liquid water arrived, but it took almost 4 billion more years for humans to walk out of Africa with stone tools in their hands. Now as astronomers search for signs of life elsewhere, what should we expect? Is anybody out there? Is Earth really special? Is life a thermodynamic imperative? What governs the time scale for evolution? The time scale for evolutionary growth and the impending phase transition? I will summarize the story of the expanding universe, the multiple phase transitions and catastrophes that led to our existence, show what astronomers are building now, speculate on how far we can go, and ask, how can we contribute to the survival of complex life and society here on Earth and elsewhere? |
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