balance of ideas

an interview with physicist Georg Smoot: Cosmic Explorer

Why did you come to the Lindau meeting of Nobel laureates and young researchers?

When you're young, you think Nobel laureates are gods, that you're never going to be like them. But when I went to the University of California, Berkeley in the 1970s and met seven of them, I found that they were smart and worked hard but were not so different from anyone else. So part of coming to Lindau is to encourage students, to show that all you have done is to work hard and have good ideas. I get a lot out of it too. The students are idealistic and hopeful, which is refreshing. Decades of university life can make you a little cynical.

What advice can you offer on how to win a Nobel?

You've got to know how long to hold on to an idea before you should throw it away. Knowing that balance is the hardest thing. I once told the team working on COBE that I would give away two aeroplane tickets to anyone who could find a mistake in the data, to keep people focused on checking things.

(Copyright New Scientist 2008)