Alan Harvey Guth

2026-01-21 09:30:43

Alan Harvey Guth (born February 27, 1947, in New Brunswick, New Brunswick, USA) is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist, the creator of the inflationary model of the expanding Universe. Together with Henry Tye, he discovered that standard assumptions in particle physics and cosmology lead to a fantastically large number of magnetic monopoles. This result had been obtained somewhat earlier by the Soviet scientists Ya. B. Zeldovich and M. Yu. Khlopov, then working at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics in Moscow, and by the American scientist John Preskill, then working at Harvard. Guth and Tye began searching for alternative assumptions that could avoid the problem of "overproduction" of magnetic monopoles. As a result of these searches, Guth modified the Big Bang theory, creating an inflationary model of the Universe. He was awarded the Prize in Fundamental Physics (2012) and the Kavli Prize (2014).