3 Questions: Alan Guth on new insights into the ‘Big Bang’
Earlier this week, scientists announced that a telescope observing faint echoes of the so-called “Big Bang” had found evidence of the universe’s nearly instantaneous expansion from a mere dot into a dense ball containing more than 1090 particles. This discovery, using the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole, provides the first strong evidence of “cosmic inflation” at the birth of our universe, when it expanded billions of times over. The theory of cosmic inflation was first proposed in 1980 by Alan Guth, now the Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics at MIT. Inflation has become a cornerstone of Big Bang cosmology, but until now it had remained a theory without experimental support. Guth discussed the significance of the new BICEP2 results with MIT News.Q: Can you explain the theory of cosmic inflation that you first put forth in 1980?A: I usually describe inflation as a theory of the “bang” of...