Alan Harvey Guth

Vocation

Traits

Family

American physicist, a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped revolutionize cosmology with his inflationary universe theory which indicated that matter is likely to have come literally out of nothing. With an early interest in science, he was using Newton’s laws in the 4th grade to estimate how high the rocket ships that he drafted would fly. He earned his Ph.D. with the thesis, "A Model for Mesons." Guth was the second of three children born to a dry cleaner and his wife. Scientifically inspired early on from watching TV’s "Mr. Wizard" show, and from reading "Scientific American" magazine, he was drafting plans for rocket ships by the time he reached the fourth grade, using Newton’s laws to estimate how high they would fly. He left Highland Park High School his junior year to enter MIT where he received both his B.S. and M.S. degrees in 1969. He remained at MIT to pursue his doctorate on a fellowship, which he received in 1972 upon completing his thesis, "A Model for Mesons Based on Numerical Solutions to the Bethe-Salpeter Equation." He continued to concentrate on abstract problems of particle theory in his postdoctoral teaching and research at Princeton from 1971-1974, Columbia from 1974-1977, and Cornell, 1977-1979. He moved to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in the fall of 1979, and continued to collaborate on the magnetic monopole overproduction by telephone with other scientists. On 12/06/1979 he had a "eureka" moment, realizing that in its first fraction of a second of existence, the universe grew exponentially, inflating like a balloon. His theory came to be known as the exponential inflation of the universe. In 1980, Guth returned to MIT as a visiting associate professor of Physics. In 1981, he became an associate professor, and a full professor in 1986. Guth received the Alfred P. Sloan foundation Fellowship in 1981 and was made a fellow of the American Physical Society Fellowship in 1986. Boyish, shy, with a ready laugh, he showed himself to be a happy person. He married Susan Tisch on 3/28/1971, and they have two children, Lawrence, born in 1977 and Jennifer, born in 1984. Link to Wikipedia biography