Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang’s Smoking Gun

 

Alan Guth was one of the first physicists to hypothesize the existence of inflation, which explains how the universe expanded so uniformly and so quickly in the instant after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.CreditRick Friedman for The New York Times

By DENNIS OVERBYE The New York Times, MARCH 17, 2014

 

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — One night late in 1979, an itinerant young physicist named Alan Guth, with a new son and a year’s appointment at Stanford, stayed up late with his notebook and equations, venturing far beyond the world of known physics.