On the afternoon of March 21, Professor George Smoot from the University of California, Berkeley, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, visited the Southeast University. Southeast University President, academician Zhang Guangjun, and Vice President Huang Dawei met with Professor Smoot. Relevant officers of the President Office, the Research Institute and the International Cooperative Department, and teachers of the School of Physics also participated in the meeting.
In the meeting, Mr. Zhang Guangjun extended warm welcome to Professor Smoot,and briefly introduced the history, school scale, subject layout, personnel training and major scientific research achievements. Mr. Zhang said that he was very much looking forward to cooperation between the research team of Professor Smoot and Southeast University. He wished that the research team could carry out academic exchanges and scientific research cooperation with the university, with the support of “Noble Prize Town” of Jiangsu Province. He also proposed Professor Smoot to establish a research center in SEU, and SEU would do a good job in institutional design, team organization and afford all-round support to this center. He sincerely hoped that heading toward the international academic frontier and coping with China’s major strategic needs to produce, through cooperation, both sides could gain more academic ad technological achievements and promote the industrialization of research results, contributing to China’s or even the whole mankind’s science and technology progress and development.
Professor Smoot thanked President Zhang Guangjun for his welcome and highly recognized the proposal of cooperation proposed by Mr. Zhang, hoping to have further discussion and exploring the multi-level cooperation form. Professor of the School of Physics exchanged in-depth views on the specific direction of cooperation and possible ways with Professor Smoot.
After the talk, Professor George Smoot gave a lecture entitled “Mapping the Universe and Its History” for teachers and students, and Vice President Huang Dawei delivered a speech on behalf of the school. In the speech, Professor Smoot reviewed the billions of years’ development of the universe and outlined a picture of the evolution of the universe in a simple way by pictures, animation and other forms. He mentioned that he created the “time and distance from the cosmic sphere” model to track the changes in the universe, supporting the Big Bang and the law of the universe evolution. He compared the universe system to nested spheres. The profile of the nested spherical structure is like the tree ring. The outermost circle is its new look, and other layers moved gradually to the core, which is the evolution of development.The core of the innermost position is the latest appearance of the universe, which have new galaxies. Looking from the core to the outer layers, the existence of galaxies layered and their shapes and sizes are different. “Space and time is the product of space, and galaxies and stars are like bubbles on the sea, ” Professor Smoot said.
Professor Smoot’s vivid speech attracted a large number of students, and the venue was packed. After the end of the speech, Professor Smoot also had a talk with students of the School of Physics,SEU.
George Fitzgerald Smoot III, born in February 20, 1945, is professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, astrophysicist and cosmologist. In 1966, he received a double bachelor degree of mathematics and physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a doctorate in particle physics in MIT in 1970. In 2006, George Smoot and John Mather won the Noble Prize in Physics for the discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
