Alan Guth

Also known as Alan Harvey Guth, Alan H. Guth

American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Top works

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Research areas

PhysicsUniverseTheoretical physicsMathematicsQuantum mechanics

Most cited works

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5 total works indexed

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“The Big Bang theory says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged.”
“It is said that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But the universe is the ultimate free lunch.”
“The recent developments in cosmology strongly suggest that the universe may be the ultimate free lunch.”
“It becomes very tempting to ask whether, in principle, it's possible to create a universe in the laboratory—or a universe in your backyard—by man-made processes.”
“We should not act like we know that the universe began with the Big Bang... we'll see that there are strong suggestions that the Big Bang was perhaps not really the beginning of existence, but really just the beginning of our local universe, often called a pocket universe.”
“The conventional Big Bang theory does not say anything about what caused the expansion. It really is only a theory about the aftermath of a bang. In the scientific version of the Big Bang, the universe starts with everything already expanding, with no explanation of how that expansion started... So the Scientific version of the Big Bang theory is not really a theory of a bang, it's really a theory of the aftermath of a bang.”

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Born: Alan Harvey Guth , ( 1947-02-27 ) February 27, 1947 (age 79) , New Brunswick, New Jersey , U.S.
Education: Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( BS , MS , PhD )
Known for: Cosmic inflation , Borde–Guth–Vilenkin theorem , Inflaton
Spouse: Susan Tisch ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1971 )
Children: 2, including Larry Guth
Fields: Cosmology , theoretical physics , particle physics
Institutions: Princeton , Columbia , Cornell , Stanford Linear Accelerator , MIT
Doctoral advisor: Francis E. Low