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That changed a few years ago, after Guth received a chance phone call from an ABC News reporter. She was working on a story about global disasters and asked if a collision with another universe could destroy the planet. Guth’s response was apparently not dramatic enough—his interview did not turn into a TV spot—but the question inspired him.
Mar 17, 2014 · Dr. Guth, now 67, pronounced himself “bowled over,” saying he had not expected such a definite confirmation in his lifetime. “With nature, you have to be lucky,” he said. “Apparently we ...
Alan Harvey Guth (/ ɡuːθ /; born February 27, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist who is the Victor Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along with Alexei Starobinsky and Andrei Linde, he won the 2014 Kavli Prize "for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation." [ 1 ]
Physicist Alan Guth, the father of cosmic inflation theory, describes emerging ideas about where our universe comes from, what else is out there, and what caused it to exist in the first place.
- One For The Multiverse
- Measuring The Multiverse
- The Causal Diamond
- Making Predictions
The multiverse hypothesis gained considerable traction in 1987, when the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg(opens a new tab)used it to predict the infinitesimal amount of energy infusing the vacuum of empty space, a number known as the cosmological constant, denoted by the Greek letter Λ (lambda). Vacuum energy is gravitationally repulsive, meaning it ...
Guth and other scientists sought a measure to gauge the odds of observing different kinds of universes. This would allow them to make predictions about the assortment of fundamental constants in this universe, all of which should have reasonably high odds of being observed. The scientists’ early attempts involved constructing mathematical models of...
Bousso first encountered the measure problem in the 1990s as a graduate student working with Stephen Hawking, the doyen of black hole physics. Black holes prove there is no such thing as an omniscient measurer, because someone inside a black hole’s “event horizon,” beyond which no light can escape, has access to different information and events fro...
Bousso and his collaborators’ causal-diamond measure has now racked up a number of successes. It offers a solution to a mystery of cosmology called the “why now?” problem, which asks why we happen to live at a time when the effects of matter and vacuum energy are comparable, so that the expansion of the universe recently switched from slowing down ...
Mar 20, 2014 · Prof. Alan Guth speaks with Christina Couch of Science Friday about his career and the cosmos. Of what inspired him to pursue a career in science, Guth recalls conducting experiments with a friend and being “very excited about the idea that we can really calculate things, and they actually do reflect the way the real world works.”
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Like Guth, they concluded that such a model not only required fine tuning of the cosmological constant, but also would likely lead to a much too granular universe, i.e., to large density variations resulting from bubble wall collisions. Guth proposed that as the early universe cooled, it was trapped in a false vacuum with a high energy density ...
