MOSCOW, October 27 (RIA Novosti) - The first of a series of lectures to be delivered by the world's topmost scientists, a new Internet project of Dmitry Zimin's Dynasty Foundation and RIA Novosti, was shown on Tuesday.
The lectures are part of the ongoing project, Science Without Borders, organized by the Dynasty Foundation and RIA Novosti's Knowledge Mosaics club. The first lecturer was Nobel Laureate Dr. John Mather.
Dr. Mather spoke on the Big Bang Theory, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the new Nobel prize awards.
Dr. John Mather is a senior astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He led the proposal efforts for the Cosmic Background Explorer (1974-1976). He and his team showed that the cosmic microwave background radiation has a blackbody spectrum within 50 ppm.
Dr. Mather shared the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics with George Smoot of the University of California for their collaborative work on understanding the Big Bang.
The term Big Bang generally refers to the idea that the universe expanded from a primordial hot and dense initial condition at some finite time in the past (currently estimated to have been approximately 15 billion years ago) and continues to expand and grow cooler to this day.
However, some opponents of this theory argue that the universe is stationary, which rules out any evolution and means that the universe has no beginning and no end.
The team that studied the cosmic microwave background radiation detected anisotropy, that is, hot and cold areas in the cosmic microwave background radiation that are currently considered the initial sources that led to the creation of the universe.
The Nobel Committee has decided that the project to study the cosmic microwave background radiation can also be regarded as the starting point of cosmology as an exact science.
John Mather is a winner of many other prizes and was put on the Time 100 list of The World's Most Influential People in 2007.
Mather, 60, is the senior scientist guiding the James Webb Space Telescope project, which should be launched in 2014 to supersede the Hubble Space Telescope.
