Alan Guth

Alan H. Guth ( born February 27, 1947 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA) is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He was also outside the professional world known for his 1980 published model of the inflationary universe.

Career

Alan Guth comes from a simple family home, from which he could not win a lot of inspiration for his later career. His father ran several businesses in New Brunswick.

Guth skipped the last college class began in 1964 and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to study, where in 1969 he took a Master's degree and a doctorate in 1972 with Francis Low. He has lectured and conducted research at Princeton University, Columbia University, Cornell University and Stanford University, mainly in the field of particle physics. In 1980, he returned to MIT, where he holds a chair as Professor Victor Weisskopf today.

In Cornell and Stanford, he together with his fellow student Henry Tye developed under the influence of Robert Dicke and Steven Weinberg cosmological models with the assistance of findings from particle physics. The most important result of this work was the realization that the universe in the early phase after the Big Bang exponential growth, driven by a negative vacuum energy density must have.

Guth was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. By Alan Guth is reported that he is a very friendly, sociable person who is ready for a conversation forever, and that he drives on campus by bicycle.

His son Larry Guth is a mathematician.

Awards

Publications

• Alan Guth: The inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins. 1998th ISBN 0201328402 ( German edition: The birth of the cosmos out of nothing. Theory of the inflationary universe ISBN 3-426-77610-3 )