Earlier this year, I attended a talk by physicist John Mather which had the wonderfully ambitious title of From the Big Bang to Quantum Energy to Life. Mather, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006, did yeoman's work in keeping his remarks accessible to an audience of the interested, but not necessarily scientifically literate. Given the breadth of the charge he'd set for himself, the work for which he won the Nobel Prize was just part of his sweeping survey. With regard to that prize-winning endeavor, he was, as The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences characterized it, a "driving force in the project" that conceptualized, designed, built, and put into orbit the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite. Launched in 1989, COBE gathered data that provided striking evidence for the Big Bang origin of the cosmos. After COBE, Mather went on to lead the science team for the James Webb Space Telescope, a project he had proposed.
Given that this was to be my first encounter with a Nobel Laureate, I wanted to make it memorable. I went in search of Mather's book about COBE titled The Very First Light: The True Inside Story of the Scientific Journey Back to the Dawn of the Universe, co-written with author and reporter John Boslough (1996), thinking it might be fun to approach Mather and ask him to inscribe it. Unfortunately I ran out of time and had to content myself with simply sitting in the audience, listening to his genial, though rapid-fire, talk.
Subsequently I bought a second hand copy of Mather's book from Thrift Books. It turned out to be a great find in two remarkable ways.
The first significant reveal was that the book is quite engaging, offering an inside view of what it takes to do "big science" and explaining, in layman's terms, some of the cosmology involved. After reading it, I decided to write the review which follows here.
Written in the first person, the book tells the COBE story from Mather's perspective. It moves easily back and forth between explanations of the cosmological science which undergirded and prompted COBE, and the challenges that Mather and his colleagues faced and largely overcame in marshaling this big science project from conception to fruition.
As Mather tells it, central to COBE is what flowed from the accidental discovery in 1964 by Bell Labs scientists Robert W. Wilson and Arno A. Penzias of the cosmic microwave background radiation which, it appeared, fills the universe. Proponents of the Big Bang believed that during the first 300,000 years of the universe, radiation from densely packed photons "dominated everything." At that point, as the universe continued expanding and energy levels fell, radiation and matter separated, with gravity assuming a central role affecting matter. This is the so-called "decoupling." Meanwhile, the microwave radiation, the "afterglow" of the Big Bang, remained, steadily cooling. (Discussions of these phenomena appear spread throughout the book, including p. 113-114.)
As I understand it (and I possibly don't) from Mather's account, the uniformity of the background microwave radiation was expected, given that it was hypothesized to have originated in what was in essence the "blackbody" of the universe in the early moments of the Big Bang when thermal equilibrium prevailed. One of COBE's instruments (the one for which Mather was principal investigator) was designed and constructed to answer the question: did the background radiation, indeed, have the telltale signals of having originated in a blackbody? If it did, then here would be proof of the reality of the Big Bang origins of the cosmos.
But the uniformity of the background radiation was troubling, given the present structure of the universe. This raised another key question for COBE, for which a second instrument was constructed: is there evidence of "anistropy" in the uniform background radiation (that is, minute differences in temperature in different directions in the universe)? If such perturbations were found, it might help show that the seeds for the non-uniformity that the universe now exhibits (galaxies, stars, planets, us, etc.) was present shortly after the Big Bang. This would be, according to Mather, "the mysterious missing link in the story of the universe's evolution." (p. 269.)
COBE was a resounding success, answering both of those questions dramatically in the affirmative. As John Mather said in his Nobel Lecture, From the Big Bang to the Nobel Prize and Beyond (December 8, 2006):
The COBE mission, started in an era when slide rules were common and aerospace designers used pencils and large sheets of paper, led to a revolution in our understanding of the universe. It confirmed the Big Bang theory, and discovered the primordial density fluctuations that formed the large-scale structure of the universe.
The book offers an insider's look at how science is done. It describes the interplay of theoretical physics and experimental physics, with the former creating theory and the latter generating evidence proving or disproving theory. It makes clear that science moves forward in fits and starts, with misses and near misses, with accidental discoveries and overlooked discoveries that are re-discovered.
As already noted, the story told here is one of big science. The effort to gather the evidence for which the COBE project was designed required a huge investment in people, money, and time. In the end, COBE demanded the contributions of an estimated 1,600 individuals, the expenditure of between $350 and $400 million (including the cost of the rocket), and about 15 years of time. It necessitated selecting, organizing, and directing this staff; securing, managing, and defending the large budget; navigating the labyrinth of government and private contracting; and playing politics through the recruitment and nurturing of advocates in high places.
Nothing small about it and, from Mather's perspective, some of it wasn't enjoyable and was particularly challenging for a young scientist. He notes that he was accused of being too young and immature to shoulder his responsibilities. (p. 126.) He endures the bureaucratic or the corporate side of all of it, commenting at one point that "soon I would be getting my feet wet in what was to me the slick-bottomed pond of the business world." (p. 140.)
The project was often one step away from being cancelled. One of the events that nearly undid COBE was the Challenger disaster. The satellite, initially designed to be carried into orbit by rocket, was then constructed to be deployed from a shuttle. With the grounding of the shuttle program, it was unclear whether COBE was dead or not. In time, NASA came to view COBE as an important part of the agency's rehabilitation. As a consequence, a rocket launch was approved, but the satellite had to be rebuilt, requiring a dramatic reduction in its allowable weight, a nearly impossible task.
The issues surrounding physicist George Smoot, co-winner of the Nobel Prize with Mather, are revealing about the difficulties that arise with this kind of project. Mather and most of the management team were concerned about ensuring that proper credit would be given for the work done by members of the large team of scientists and technicians. Too often, in the long history of the theorizing about, and the discovery of, the background cosmic microwave radiation, prior work had gone unacknowledged and credit was claimed and credit was disputed. As a result, COBE had a publication protocol designed to avoid "the corrosive effects of a public fight over scientific credit." (p. 254.)
Smoot was the principal investigator for Differential Microwave Radiometer (DMR), the instrument measuring the differences in temperature across the background radiation which generated some of the most dramatic data from the project. Mather describes how, before the agreed upon time and place for release of the COBE findings, Smoot violated the publication policy by going public with the DMR results, scooping the team and capturing the public's attention. He became the central focus of newspaper and magazine articles about COBE, seemingly claiming credit for its work. In the midst of the furor within the COBE team over this violation, it was discovered that Smoot had already secured a lucrative contract for a book about the findings. Though he was ultimately forced to pen a quasi apology to the team, his act of ill faith appears to have gone unpunished and, even, in light of the Nobel Prize, possibly rewarded.
Smoot died earlier this year and his obituary in The New York Times reveals, in a genteel fashion, what appears to have motivated Mather to write his book (this helps explain his book's subtitle):
In his 1993 book, "Wrinkles in Time: Witness to the Birth of the Universe," written with Keay Davidson, Dr. Smoot documented the process leading up to the discovery. Some of his collaborators disagreed with his version of events and encouraged Dr. Mather to write his own account. He did, publishing it three years later as "The Very First Light: The True Inside Story of the Scientific Journey Back to the Dawn of the Universe," which differed from Dr. Smoot's version in some details. (Katrina Miller, George F. Smoot, Who Showed How the Cosmos Began, Is Dead at 80, The New York Times, October 20, 2025.)
So, that's the book's first reward: Mather wrote a very readable, informative, and often exciting account of the COBE project.
The second big reward? As I noted earlier, a copy of Mather's book got into my hands too late to get it inscribed. But, in a dramatic stroke of serendipity, here's what I saw when I first opened my used copy to its title page:
Call me Peter.
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