Last Tuesday, in the Daniel Family Commons, Dr. John C. Mather delivered the 20th annual Sturm Memorial Lecture. A senior astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Flight Center, Mather earned a Nobel Prize in 2006 for his work in detecting the cosmic microwave background, strong physical evidence in support of the Big Bang theory. During his well-attended lecture, Mather attempted to summarize the history of the universe.

“It’s quite a process to get people to come speak,” said Assistant Professor of Astronomy Seth Redfield, who introduced Mather. “We’re looking for the most renowned strivers in the field, but we’re a relatively small field, and so we know each other and interact with each other. So even the most notable figures aren’t too far out of reach.”

The Sturm Memorial Lecture, which was established in 1991, is named in memory of Kenneth E. Sturm ’40. It has played host to speakers such as Dr. Owen Gingrich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who lectured on the effects of censorship on scientific progress, and Dr. Jill Tarter of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), who lectured on the possibility of contacting extraterrestrial life.

Mather began the lecture by discussing the Big Bang, and he continued through the formation of stars and galaxies up to a very brief glimpse at the future of our solar system. According to Mather, the world will not end in 2012, as the Mayans predicted, but in about five billion years, when our sun becomes a red giant and swallows the Earth. He then discussed his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer, the NASA satellite that was instrumental in measuring the spectrum of the radiation throughout the universe left over from the Big Bang.

“What really struck me in both his lecture and just talking with him was how much and how deeply he thought about every question asked of him,” Redfield said. “He always had a very quick and interesting and thoughtful response, and there was quite a range of questions asked of him, from the logistics of putting a probe in orbit to the politics behind getting funding for a space mission.”

Mather also shed some light on his current project. The James Webb Space Telescope, a satellite that will travel around the Sun with an orbital radius one million miles longer than Earth’s, will scan the observable universe in the infrared range to detect some of the earliest visible stars and galaxies.

Mather’s PowerPoint slideshow featured a short animation detailing the probe’s planned deployment.  The probe will take thirty days to reach its orbit, and it will unfold from a relatively small rocket and unclude large components such asa  sunshield the size of a tennis court.

He then answered a few questions from students and faculty, which ranged from the prospect of searching for life on Jupiter’s moons to the trials Mather faced during the NASA projects in which he has been involved.

A short reception followed the lecture, and a few students and faculty members had the opportunity to speak with Mather one-on-one.

“Dr. Mathers was much more down to earth and funny than I expected,” said Kim Chu ’14, who is enrolled in one of Redfield’s astronomy courses. “A lot of the information he presented was stuff we’d covered in class, so it was really cool to see it from a totally different perspective.”