'Beyoncé's assistant helped me star on The Big Bang Theory...'

George Smoot

Source: © Peter Strain / Debut Art Ltd

George Smoot on Queen, Queen B and winning $1 million on a gameshow

I bought Robert Oppenheimer’s house when I was a postdoc. I was trying to keep it in the physics department; when I moved, I sold it to another professor in the physics department. Then they sold it to another. Sadly she moved and sold it to someone else. It was this beautiful two-bedroom house with a yard, quite small with a view of the bay, on a quiet dead end street. When Oppenheimer first came, he and his wife had a child – and I think he moved because the war came, and afterwards he was attacked as a Communist sympathiser.