QUESTION: Waaaait a minit. Is the Smoot who won the Nobel Prize for Physics yesterday the same Smoot whose body was used by fellow MIT students to measure the Mass. Ave bridge in Boston in 1962?
ANSWER: Nope. Different Smoot.
George Smoot won the Nobel Prize this year because he "measured the cosmic background radiation that, according to the Big Bang theory, was created in the earliest phase of the universe." Not the same as measuring the Mass Ave. bridge. Close, but not.
Oliver Smoot was the bridge measuring guy.
This is not how a Mensan would go about this. We'd better get our facts from the online edition of Scientific American, people!
George Smoot, an M.I.T. graduate, famous physicist and author of the popular cosmology book Wrinkles in Time. George Smoot has nothing to do with the smoot.
Well, almost nothing--in an attempt to literally clear his name, George Smoot has made the history of the smoot available on his Web site.
But see? Nobel Prize Smoot went to MIT too. MIT is fulla Smoots.
This ends Blue Gal's Mensa Minute. Save it to your hard drive.
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