George Smoot, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his role in the "discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation” in 2006, has died at home at the age of 80. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Certain discoveries in science feel like they have been known about for a lot longer than they have. For instance, galaxies other than the Milky Way were only found for the first time in 1923, while the theory of plate tectonics only became widely accepted in the 1950s. Then there's the Big Bang, another area where concept and confirmation came much later than you might expect, being proposed by Belgian priest and cosmologist Georges Lemaître in 1927, and given a huge boost in eviden

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