Alan Guth
Alan Harvey Guth (born February 27, 1947 in New Brunswick , New Jersey , USA ) is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist . He also became known outside of the professional world for his model of the inflationary universe published in 1981 .
Career
Alan Guth comes from a simple family home, from which he could not gain many ideas for his later career. His father ran various businesses in New Brunswick.
Guth skipped the last college class and began studying physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1964 , where he received his master’s degree in 1969 and in 1972 with Francis Low with the thesis A Relativistic Quark Model for Mesons Based on Numerical Solutions of the Bethe- Salpeter Equation PhD . He has lectured and researched at Princeton University , Columbia University , Cornell University and Stanford University, mainly in the field of particle physics . In 1980 he came back to MIT, where he still holds the chair of Victor Weisskopf as professor . In 1981 he received a research grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ( Sloan Research Fellowship ).
In Cornell and Stanford, under the influence of Robert Dicke and Steven Weinberg, he and his fellow student Henry Tye developed cosmological models using knowledge from particle physics. The most important result of this work was the realization that the universe had to have an exponential growth in the early phase shortly after the Big Bang , driven by a negative vacuum energy density . He developed the model from 1979, presented it to a SLAC seminar in 1980 and published it in 1981. The first model was still flawed, as Guth recognized, and was further developed by Paul Steinhardt and Andreas Albrecht and independently by Andrei Linde in 1982 (New Inflation or slow roll inflation). Since then, other variants have emerged.
Guth was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He is also an external member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences . In 1985 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .
His son Larry Guth is a mathematician.
Awards
- 1992 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society , together with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
- 1996 Eddington Medal
- 2002 Dirac Medal (ICTP) from the International Institute for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste
- 2004 Gruber Prize for Cosmology
- 2012 Fundamental Physics Prize
- 2014 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics
Publications
- Inflationary universe: A possible solution to the horizon and flatness problems , Physical Review D, Volume 23, 1981, pp. 347-356, abstract (original article on inflation)
- The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins . 1998. ISBN 0-201-32840-2 (German edition: The birth of the cosmos out of nowhere: The theory of the inflationary universe. ISBN 3-426-77610-3 )
- Eternal inflation and its implications , J. Phys..A, Volume 40, 2007, pp. 6811-6826
Web links
- Literature by and about Alan Guth in the catalog of the German National Library
- Videos by and about Alan Guth in the AV portal of the Technical Information Library
- Alan H. Guth , MIT Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics webpage
- Alan H. Guth. In: Physics History Network. American Institute of Physics
- Alan Guth: Eternal inflation: Successes and questions. Archived from the original on September 28, 2012 ; accessed on January 17, 2018 (presentation slides).
- Publications of Alan Guth on INSPIRE-HEP
Individual evidence
- ↑ Alan Guth in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Good, Alan |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Guth, Alan H. |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 27, 1947 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | New Brunswick (New Jersey) , New Jersey , USA |