WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The discovery by John Mather and George Smoot of "cosmic ripples," which won them the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday, was lauded in 1992 by cosmologist Stephen Hawking as "the greatest discovery of the century, if not of all time."

While most physicists do not go that far, they are universal in their praise of the experiment, in which the pair and their team designed a satellite and used it to find proof of the Big Bang theory of the universe's origins.

They found faint variations in microwave radiation that dated back to just 300,000 years after the fiery birth of the universe.

These ripples in the microwave radiation, they said, were the primordial framework on which the galaxies, stars and other stuff of the universe took shape. It explained why the universe is lumpy and not a smooth sheet of matter and energy.

"The discovery changed everything," said Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Case Western University in Ohio.

"It produced a revolution in what we know about the universe -- we know it is expanding, we know it is flat ... and we can measure that to an incredible accuracy," Krauss said in a telephone interview.

"Cosmology now is a precision science."

Until then, theoretical physicists had cobbled together small pieces of evidence that the universe and everything in it had appeared suddenly about 15 billion years ago from an infinitesimally small point in a vacuum of nothingness.

When the 40-member research team announced some of their findings to a meeting of physicists in 1992, an "audible gasp was heard from the audience," according to the American Institute of Physics.

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