John Mather, along with George Smoot, won the Nobel Prize for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), the probe that first caught glimpses of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) left over from the big bang. Those fluctuations are the product of the tiny, random, quantum fluctuations in the Universe immediately after the big bang, which are now visible in the large scale structures of the current Universe, as they produced clusters of galaxies and filaments of dark matter. For his talk at the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting, Mather took the audience on both a short history of the Universe, and a history of how we've come to understand it.
Mather started out with some background on the Big Bang—although he said he preferred the term used in a Calvin and Hobbes strip, the 'Horrendous Space Kablooie.' (We'll continue to use Big Bang for now.) He described how, in the early 1920s, Alexander Friedman applied Einstein's equations to the Universe, and figured it must be expanding. Einstein asked his friends, who told him the Universe couldn't be expanding, so he added the cosmological constant in order to preserve the static universe that everyone thought existed.
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