McMaster colleague describes Nobel winner as 'first-rate'

Friends of McMaster's Origins Institute cheered this week when they heard who had won the 2011 Nobel Prize for physics.

Among the three scientists who share the award, Brian Schmidt of Australian National University was familiar from his 2009 visit to campus to deliver an Origins Institute public lecture. Two years earlier, Schmidt had been a featured speaker at the Origins of Dark Energy conference, hosted on campus by the Origins Institute.

"Brian is a great team leader, a first-rate scientist, and an amazingly nice person as well," says Bill Harris, a professor in the astrophysics group of McMaster's Department of Physics and Astronomy who has been a colleague of Schmidt's on other projects.

Schmidt shares the prize with Saul Perlmutter of the University of California, and Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University for discovering that the cosmological expansion of the universe is accelerating.

The three astrophysicists were co-leaders of two separate teams of researchers who used the properties of exploding stars to carefully measure the distances to many extremely remote galaxies.

Their results, announced almost simultaneously in 1999, clearly showed that these galaxies were farther away than expected, and showed the universe has started to expand at an ever-faster rate.

The discovery is regarded as one of the most important and surprising in physics and astrophysics at the present day, and has generated a significant amount of follow-up observational and theoretical work all over the world.

"It's hugely important work and it was only a matter of time before it got this recognition by the Nobel committee," Harris says. "It's also a tribute to the teamwork that modern science relies on."

Provided by McMaster University