I am vaguely disappointed that brand-new Nobel Prize winner George F. Smoot is not, in fact, the Smoot for whom the Smoot measurement was named. Oliver Smoot definitely wins the predictive career accomplishment prize, though: after being used to measure the MIT bridge, he later went on to lead the American National Standards Institute and the International Organization for Standardization. Being a standard himself, I guess, made him aspire to study them?
