1. Alan Harvey Guth is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist who is the Victor Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
20 Facts About Alan Guth
1. 2.
Alan Guth graduated from MIT in 1968 in physics and stayed to receive a master's and a doctorate, in physics.
3.
Alan Guth was born to a Jewish family in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1947 and grew up across the Raritan River in Highland Park, where he attended the local public schools.
4.
Alan Guth obtained a bachelor's and master's degree in 1969 and a doctorate in 1972.
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Alan Guth was at Princeton 1971 to 1974, Columbia 1974 to 1977, Cornell 1977 to 1979, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center 1979 to 1980.
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At the start of his career, Alan Guth studied particle physics, not physical cosmology.
7.
At Columbia, Alan Guth studied grand unification theories, focusing on the cosmological phase transitions generated by spontaneous symmetry breaking.
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The next part in Alan Guth's path came when he heard a lecture by Steven Weinberg in early 1979.
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Alan Guth decided to solve this problem by suggesting a supercooling during a delayed phase transition.
10.
False vacuums decay, and Alan Guth found that the decay of the false vacuum at the beginning of the universe would produce an exponential expansion of space.
11.
Alan 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.
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Two weeks later, Alan Guth heard colleagues discussing something called the horizon problem.
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The paradox was resolved, as Alan Guth soon realized, by the inflation theory.
14.
Alan Guth ignored magnetic monopoles because they were based on assumptions of GUT, which was outside the scope of the speech.
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Alan Guth discussed this with Linde, who had independently been working on bubble inflation, but without considering the flatness problem.
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Alan Guth is the Victor F Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Alan Guth has written more than 60 technical papers related to the effects of inflation and its interactions with particle physics.
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Alan Guth has won many awards and medals, including the Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy, with Andrei Linde and Paul Steinhardt and the Eddington Medal in 1996, and the 2009 Isaac Newton Medal, awarded by the British Institute of Physics.
19.
In 2005, Alan Guth won the award for the messiest office in Boston, organised by The Boston Globe.
20.
Alan Guth was entered by colleagues who hoped it would shame him into tidying up, but Guth is quite proud of the award.