John Mather goes from from Sussex County farm boy to Nobel Laureate in Physics, By Laurie Gordon Wantage From atop a hill in the heart of Sussex Countrys undeveloped, bucolic countryside, a young John Mather often gazed up at an infinite froth of stars, asking himself, as all of us do, Where did they all come from? Little could he have known that some day he would answer that question. It was the late 1950s and already he was entranced with space, and thanks to his parents, science of any sort. The lessons he learned then would take him far. Most recently, it took him to Stockholm, Sweden, where this farm boy from Sussex County accepted the Nobel Prize in Physics. Mather was honored along with George Smoot of Laurence Berkeley National Laboratory for uncovering evidence that helped prove the Big Bang theory of the universe. The two American scientists uncovered evidence on the origin of the universe and how it grew into galaxies. Their findings were based on datea from a NASA satellite. None other than Steven Hawking, the worlds best-known cosmologist and author of the best-seller, A Brief History of Time, called Mathers and Smoots work one of the most important discoveries in history, maybe the most important. Bedtime stories about cells and chromosomes Mather grew up at the Rutgers Experiment Station at Lusscroft, in Wantage, and attended Wantage Consolidated Elementary School. He wasnt an ordinary farm boy, though. His father was a researcher of dairy cattle genetics and an employee of the university. He used to tell me bedtime stories when I was five about cells and chromosomes, Mather said of growing up as the son of a scientist. Later on, my parents read to my sister and me from biographies of Darwin and Galileo. These things instilled an early interest in science in Mather. Additionally, his parents took the kids to the Museum of Natural History in New York, and I got hooked pretty early on astronomy and electronics and fossils and volcanoes and earthquakes and such. Mather said he also knew his mothers father was a bacteriologist who helped develop the production process for penicillin. He added that another thing back then was Sputnik went up, and the International Geophysical Year started. The country was petrified of the Soviet Union, so there was a lot of interest in science that would save us from the Communists. Looking back to his childhood, Mather said it was very quiet and isolated since we lived pretty far from town. He said, (I had) little to do where I lived except read books and build radios and model airplanes and make things with wood and play with lenses to make telescopes. Books, science fairs and inspirational teachers He remembered the bookmobile from the county library coming around to the experiment station every couple of weeks and I latched onto everything I could find about science. He credits his teachers in elementary school for letting him follow his interests and read books during class. I remember entering a lot of science fairs with various projects. There was also a 4H club in electronics that was run by an engineer who worked on the communications towers and had a small factory somewhere north of Sussex. He graduated from the eighth grade in 1960, and the family moved to the Newbegin farm of the Rutgers Experiment Station in Frankford Township. Thats so I could attend Newton High School instead of Sussex, which had fallen on hard times back then, Mather said. He graduated from Newton High in 1964. In high school, Mather said he had some outstanding teachers in math and English and science who encouraged him and gave him opportunities. In his senior year, Mather was accepted at six different schools. I chose Swarthmore for its warm feeling and the sense of personal attention that I might get, as well as their declaration that I would get a complete preparation in physics taught by professors and not graduate students, he said. After college, he continued his education and though he could have worked at many places, but ended up at NASA, where he and Smoot began planning the experiment that would lead to the Nobel Prize in the early 1970s. Mather and Smoot were the key leaders of a team of more than 1,000 scientists, engineers and technicians that built and launched the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, satellite in 1989 to study a haze of microwave radiation that is believed to be a remnant of the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe. What we have found is evidence for the birth of the universe and its evolution, Smoot said at a news conference about the results in 1992. About a map showing the splotchy seeds of galaxy formation, he famously said, If you are religious, it is like looking at God.