December 3, 2017

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Inflating the Universe with Prize-Winning Cosmologist David Spergel

This year’s Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to the team behind NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, a space telescope that launched in 2001 to map the cosmic microwave background—the earliest, oldest light we can detect from the universe’s infancy. The WMAP team will split the $3 million award, with its leaders receiving the largest shares. One of those leaders, WMAP’s chief theorist David Spergel, sat down to speak with Scientific American about WMAP’s science and its legacy. 

By Lydia Chain, Michael D. Lemonick & Lee Billings

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Lydia Chain is a freelance science journalist, podcaster, and videographer. She hosts Undark's podcast, and also writes about nature, the environment, and evolution, especially when it involves the intersection of humans and wild spaces or animals behaving strangely.

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Michael D. Lemonick is a freelance writer, as well as former chief opinion editor at Scientific American and a former senior science writer at Time. His most recent book is The Perpetual Now: A Story of Amnesia, Memory and Love (Doubleday, 2017). Lemonick also teaches science journalism at Princeton University.

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Lee Billings is a science journalist specializing in astronomy, physics, planetary science, and spaceflight and is senior desk editor for physical science at Scientific American. He is author of a critically acclaimed book, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars, which in 2014 won a Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics. In addition to his work for Scientific American, Billings’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Wired, New Scientist, Popular Science and many other publications. Billings joined Scientific American in 2014 and previously worked as a staff editor at SEED magazine. He holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota.

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