George Fitzgerald Smoot III (born February 20, 1945) is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, Nobel laureate, and the second contestant to win the $1 million prize on Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?.

Apart from being elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Smoot has been honored by several universities worldwide with doctorates or professorships.

[10][11] George Smoot switched to cosmology and began work at Berkeley, collaborating with Luis Walter Alvarez on the High Altitude Particle Physics Experiment, a stratospheric weather balloon designed to detect antimatter in Earth's upper atmosphere, the presence of which was predicted by the now discredited steady state theory of cosmology.

He then took up an interest in cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), previously discovered by Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson in 1964.

With the help of Alvarez and Richard A. Muller, Smoot developed a differential radiometer which measured the difference in temperature of the CMB between two directions 60 degrees apart.

He then proposed to NASA a project involving a satellite equipped with a detector that was similar to the one mounted on the U-2 but was more sensitive and not influenced by air pollution.

After more than two years of observation and analysis, the COBE research team announced on 23 April 1992 that the satellite had detected tiny fluctuations in the CMB, a breakthrough in the study of the early universe.

John Mather coordinated the entire process and also had primary responsibility for the experiment that revealed the blackbody form of the CMB measured by COBE.

[citation needed] Smoot is credited by Mickey Hart for inspiring the album Mysterium Tremendum, which is based, in part on "sounds" that can be extracted from the background signature of the Big Bang.

[21] As of September 2019[update], Smoot is an artificial intelligence scientist for the GTA Foundation, whose business is storing genomic sequencing data and using it in scientific applications.

[22] In November 2020, he joined Dead Sea Premier as head of research for their NUNA advanced technology anti-aging medical device development.

[citation needed] In January 2023, George Fitzgerald Smoot III joined the National Council for Science and Technology under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan.