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Alan Harvey Guth is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist. Guth has researched elementary particle theory. Currently serving as Victor Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is the originator of the inflationary universe theory.
He graduated from MIT in 1968 in physics and stayed to receive a master's and a doctorate, also in physics.
As a junior particle physicist, Guth first developed the idea of cosmic inflation in 1979 at Cornell and gave his first seminar on the subject in January 1980. Moving on to Stanford University Guth formally proposed the idea of cosmic inflation in 1981, the idea that the nascent universe passed through a phase of exponential expansion that was driven by a positive vacuum energy density. The results of the WMAP mission in 2006 made the case for cosmic inflation very compelling. Measurements by the BICEP and Keck Array telescope give support to the idea of cosmic inflation, confirmation of which was given on March 17, 2014, with the findings of the B-mode polarization signature.
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