Astrophysicist GEORGE SMOOT. Since 1974 he's worked on NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, leading the instrument team that detected cosmic "seeds." In 1992 he announced that he and a team of researchers had detected the biggest, oldest objects ever observed in the universe, the "cosmic seeds" that were the origin of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. He was quoted as saying then, "If you're religious, it's like seeing God." SMOOT has co-authored a new book about the development of the big bang theory, and the effort he's been involved in, looking for what he calls "wrinkles in time, those distant echoes of the early formation of the galaxies." It's called "Wrinkles in Time," (William Morrow) by Smoot and Keay Davidson.
Copyright 1994 Fresh Air