Lange named California Scientist of the Year

Goldberger Professor of Physics Andrew Lange and Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have been jointly honored as the 2003 California Scientist of the Year by the California Science Center.

Lange is the 14th Caltech researcher to receive the award. Established in recognition of the state’s prominent role in scientific and technological development, the California Scientist of the Year Award is given to a nominee whose work is current and advances the boundaries in any field of science. Of past recipients, 11 have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.

Perlmutter, a senior scientist and group leader at Lawrence Berkeley, and Lange have used very different techniques to confirm a theory of how the universe expanded and evolved after the Big Bang, the explosion that gave birth to the universe. The award panel concluded that the two discoveries complement each other so well that both scientists should be recognized. They received the award on May 8 at the California Science Center in Exposition Park, Los Angeles.

Lange studies fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, sometimes called the “afterglow” of the Big Bang. These signals, visible today at microwave frequencies, provide a clear snapshot of the embryonic universe at an epoch long before the first stars had formed. Using novel detectors developed at JPL and flown on a balloon-borne telescope above Antarctica, Lange’s group was able to make the first detailed images of very faint patterns of fluctuations in the CMB. These images demonstrate that the radiation fluctuates on an angular scale of one degree and are consistent with the current cosmological theory that we live in a mathematically flat universe—one in which, for example, parallel lines will never meet, and the angles of an astronomically sized triangle will add up to 180 degrees.

Perlmutter’s group has found that, contrary to the widely held belief that the universe’s rate of expansion is slowing, galaxies are actually moving away from each other at an increasing rate, as if pushed apart by a kind of negative gravitational pressure. This pressure may be what scientists call the cosmological constant, which Albert Einstein first hypothesized but later rejected. Perlmutter’s estimates of the cosmological constant’s magnitude are consistent with Lange’s observations of a flat universe.
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