Alan Guth
Alan Guth | |
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Spouse |
Susan Tisch (m. 1971) |
Children | 2, including Larry Guth |
Awards | MIT School of Science Prize for Undergraduate Teaching Oskar Klein Medal (1991) Benjamin Franklin Medal for Physics of the Franklin Institute Institute of Physics Isaac Newton Medal (2009)Dirac Prize of the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2004) Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2012) Stanford Linear Accelerator MIT |
Doctoral advisor | Francis E. Low |
Part of a series on |
Physical cosmology |
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Alan Harvey Guth (
He graduated from MIT in 1968 in physics and stayed to receive a master's and a doctorate, also in physics.
As a junior particle physicist, Guth developed the idea of
Early life and education
Guth was born to a Jewish family[4] in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1947 and grew up across the Raritan River in Highland Park, where he attended the local public schools.[5] After his junior year at Highland Park High School,[6] he left school and enrolled in a five-year program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he could get his bachelor's and master's after two more years.[7] Guth obtained a bachelor's and master's degree in 1969 and a doctorate in 1972. In 1971, he married Susan Tisch, his high school sweetheart.[6] They have two children: Lawrence (born 1977) and Jennifer (born 1983).[8]
Guth was at
At the start of his career, Guth studied
Career
Inflationary theory
This section of a poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous. )Find sources: "Alan Guth" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2014) |
Guth's first step to developing his theory of inflation occurred at Cornell in 1978, when he attended a lecture by
The next part in Guth's path came when he heard a lecture by Steven Weinberg in early 1979.[11] Weinberg talked in two lectures about the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) that had been developed since 1974, and how it could explain the huge amount of matter in the universe compared to the amount of antimatter. The GUT explained all the fundamental forces known in science except for gravity. It established that in very hot conditions, such as those after the Big Bang, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force were united to form one force. Weinberg also was the one who emphasized the idea that the universe goes through phase transitions, similar to the phases of matter, when going from high energy to low energy. Weinberg's discussion of why matter is so dominant over anti-matter showed Guth how precise calculations about particles could be obtained by studying the first few seconds of the universe.
Guth decided to solve this problem by suggesting a
Guth realized from his theory that the reason the universe appears to be flat was that it had enlarged to such an overwhelming size in comparison to its original size. The perspective is analogous to the apparent flatness of the Earth, on a human scale, when seen from its surface. The observable universe was actually only a very small part of the actual universe. Traditional Big Bang theory found values of
Two weeks later, Guth heard colleagues discussing something called the
Guth first made public his ideas on inflation in a seminar at SLAC in January 1980. He ignored magnetic monopoles because they were based on assumptions of GUT, which was outside the scope of the speech. In August 1980, he submitted his paper, entitled "Inflationary universe: A possible solution to the horizon and flatness problems" to the journal Physical Review.[12] In this paper Guth postulated that the inflation of the universe could be explained if the universe were supercooled 28 orders of magnitude below the critical temperatures required for a phase change.
In December 1981, Guth read a paper from Moscow physicist
By 1983, Guth had published a paper describing how his supercooled universe scenario was not ideal, as the "triggering mechanism" to exit such a state would require "extreme fine tuning of parameters" and felt a more natural solution was required.[1][13][14] However, this did not deter him from the belief that the universe expanded exponentially in a vacuum in its early lifetime.[15]
Current interests
In the past, Guth has studied
He is the
Honors and awards
Guth has won many awards and medals, including the Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics,
In July 2012, he was an inaugural awardee of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the creation of physicist and internet entrepreneur, Yuri Milner.[16][17]
In 2014, he was a co-recipient of the Kavli Prize awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, together with Andrei Linde of Stanford University, and Alexei Starobinsky of the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, "for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation."[1][18][19] That same year, Guth received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.[20]
In 2005, Guth won the award for the messiest office in Boston, organised by The Boston Globe. He was entered by colleagues who hoped it would shame him into tidying up,[21] but Guth is quite proud of the award.[22]
Publications
- Guth, Alan (1997). ISBN 0201328402.
- Guth, Alan (Fall 2002). "Inflation and the New Era of High-Precision Cosmology" (PDF). physics@mit. MIT Department of Physics.
See also
- MIT Center for Theoretical Physics
- MIT Physics Department
References
- ^ a b c "2014 Astrophysics Citation". The Kavli Foundation. Archived from the original on July 14, 2014. Retrieved July 27, 2014.
- ISBN 0-201-14942-7
- SLACseminar, "10-35 seconds after the Big Bang", January 23, 1980. see Guth (1997), pg 186.
- ^ "Alan Guth: Waiting for the Big Bang". Archived from the original on July 2, 2014.
- ^ 1992 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize Recipient - Alan H. Guth, American Physical Society. Accessed January 23, 2018. "Professor Alan Guth was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1947. He grew up and attended the public schools in Highland Park, NJ, but skipped his senior year of high school to begin studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."
- ^ a b "Susan Tisch, Alan H Guth Plan to Wed". The Central New Jersey Home News. February 1, 1971. p. 7. Retrieved May 26, 2023.
- ^ Current Biography Yearbook, Volume 48, p. 219. H. W. Wilson Company, 1988. Accessed January 23, 2018. "At the end of his junior year he left Highland Park (New Jersey) High School to enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his extracurricular activities included, as they had in high school, debating, track, and the mathematics club."
- ^ da Silva, Wilson (March 2, 2015). "The physicist who inflated the Universe". Cosmos. Retrieved February 20, 2020.
When people said that gravitational waves would be the smoking gun for inflation, my response was that I thought the room was pretty filled with smoke already.
- ^ "Preserving a Lost Generation: Policies to Assure a Steady Flow of Young Scholars Until the Year 2000" (PDF). Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education. 1978. Retrieved July 9, 2011.
- ISBN 9780062006547– via Google Books.
- ^ Swidey, Neil (May 2, 2014). "Alan Guth: What made the Big Bang bang?". The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on February 27, 2019. Retrieved July 14, 2015.
- .
- ^ Linde, Andrei (1998). "The self-reproducing inflationary universe" (PDF). Scientific American. Vol. 9, no. 1. pp. 98–104.
- .
- S2CID 117856496.
- ^ New annual US$3 million Fundamental Physics Prize recognizes transformative advances in the field Archived August 3, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, FPP, accessed August 1, 2012.
- ^ Chang, Kenneth (July 31, 2012). "xx". NY Times. Retrieved February 20, 2020.
The nine are recipients of the Fundamental Physics Prize, established by Yuri Milner, a Russian physics student who dropped out of graduate school in 1989 and later earned billions investing in Internet companies like Facebook and Groupon.
- ^ "Nine Scientists Share Three Kavli Prizes".
- ^ Johnson, Carolyn Y (May 29, 2014). "Alan Guth shares $1 million Kavli astrophysics prize". Boston Globe. Retrieved February 20, 2020.
It isn't the first time Guth's work has been honored. Last year, he received a $3 million award from the Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation. At the time, he told The New York Times that his bank account balance ballooned from $200 to $3,000,200.
- American Academy of Achievement.
- ^ Boston Globe photos of winning entry
- ISBN 978-0-8090-9523-0, page 51 for photo'.
External links
- Alan H. Guth's webpage at MIT
- MIT Center for Theoretical Physics
- Alan Guth - "Eternal inflation: Successes and questions"
- The Growth of Inflation, Symmetry magazine, December 2004/January 2005
- Guth's Grand Guess, Discover magazine, April 2002
- Additional photo
- Inflationary spacetimes are not past-complete