Talk:Alan Guth

Entry needs editing

Hello. My first Wikipedia comment. I enjoyed reading this entry on Alan Guth, but feel I should point out that there are quite a few grammatical errors, missing words, and questionable word choices which a careful reading will reveal. I won't wield the hammer and nails myself because it's past my bedtime, and I'm not sure I know how to go about it anyway. I leave it in your capable hands. All the best. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.116.131.81 (talk) 07:24, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

   11 years having passed without your bedtime nor motivation having become more amenable, mebbe it's time for a review at the moderately capable hands of a grown-up physicist and experienced editor.
--JerzyA (talk) 14:44, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

"Default initial inflating spatial homogeneity" Guth students proposal

Alan Guth claims that the universe was vastly smaller, Planck sized, thus we have a homogeneous universe nowadays. Some of his students claim that quantum fluctuations if enlarged wouldn't produce the homogeneous universe we observe! If the pro big-bang universe was behaving like a degenerate quark-gluon plasma, the more degenerate, more dense state is to have a single particle. The guts of a single particle due to chromodynamics, are way more random than asymptotic quark freedom. So the universal homogeneity has been proposed to be instead the result of a dying universe, where the rate of expansion shrinked from relativistic light-speed distancing of afar galaxies, to all points light-speed expansion, and due to the characteristics of the void itself, homogeneity was a result of the "default initial space", and that makes more sense than distorting the actual asymptotic chromodynamic visceral chaos inside a particle (the smaller the scale, the more jitters we have on the chromodynamic medium, and more extreme turbulence can never be the reason of homogeneity). By the way Alan Guth is open to that alternative. We should ask him to add more data. It is an extremely crucial issue that the main article doesn't mention. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:587:4104:3D00:781B:6484:AF81:A967 (talk) 23:50, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not the right place to write about Guth's students' proposals for the first time (see the Wikipedia:No original research policy). Once you have reliable sources to back up what you would like to add to the Wikipedia article, be bold and do so yourself (help is available). If you are affiliated with the topic, please see our conflict of interest guideline. --Dodi 8238 (talk) 08:21, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Trash

   No way am I going to read all of the trash like I just remedied in one small nbrhood of the accompanying article. I am only a BA/cum-laude math/physics major from the '60s, but the smells of bullshit and other forms of incompetence have been changing, since then, at rates incomparably lower than the speed of light! Perhaps professional physicists who deserve the respect of their peers will bring to bear their expertise here, lest the flaneurs who have fouled the nest with the few usages I replaced in my edits today continue to edit unchecked on matters where they lack any insight nor perspective. I can't claim professional competence, but the professionals would not be wasting their time by acting as the Man with Muckrake, or rather driving out the fan-boys and self-anointed dabblers from our modern physics articles.

precisely — Preceding unsigned comment added by JerzyA (talk • contribs) 16:25, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

Inflation Discovered at SLAC not Cornell

I propose that the location of the Guth's discovery of inflation be changed to SLAC from Cornell.

From Guth's book "The Inflationary Universe", Guth and Henry Tye were working on ways to suppress magnetic monopole production in the early universe. That work began at Cornell and continued when Guth moved to take another postdoc at SLAC in the fall of 1979. This is covered in Chapter 9, "Combatting the Magnetic Monopole Menace". Guth and Tye believed that a delayed phase transition would "ward off the glut of magnetic monopole production" in the early time of the Big Bang universe (page 167). Guth sat down on the evening of December 6, 1979, to check that "the expansion rate of the universe would be unaffected by the supercooling" (page 165). Then, "after a few of the most productive hours I had ever spent at my desk, I had learned something remarkable. Would the supercooled phase transition affect the expansion rate of the universe? By 1:00 am I knew the answer: Yes, more than I could have ever imagined." (page 176). Guth realized that inflation "would not only wipe out magnetic monopoles, but it would also solve the flatness problem that I had learned from Dicke's lecture the year before." (page 176). A few weeks later, the "horizon problem" was explained to Guth by Marvin Weinstein during lunch at SLAC. "Having learned about the horizon problem at lunch, I went home and thought about it. Eureka! The exponential expansion of inflation would obliterate this problem, too." (page 184). Then, ... "I view the official debut of inflation as the seminar that I gave at SLAC on January 23, 1980.... There was also the fear that I would reveal my status as a greenhorn cosmologist. To shore up my general background in cosmology, I had crammed from Steven Weinberg's excellent popular-level book, The First Three Minutes."

It seems clear that Guth believes he discovered his version of cosmological inflation while he was at SLAC, not Cornell. Strangely, or perhaps not, this same statement about Cornell is made in the wikipedia page on Cosmological Inflation. Guth and Tye were working on a particle physics problem, magnetic monopole overproduction, and as a happy byproduct Guth ended up "solving" two major cosmological problems while at SLAC. AFAIK Tye did not share in the major awards Guth has received for this work. Guth essentially changed his field of study from particle physics to cosmology on the night of December 6, 1979.

Therefore I propose that the location of the discovery be changed to SLAC from Cornell. --Bluepost22 (talk) 16:21, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

Changes by subject (Alan Guth), 08/02/2025, to section on Association with Jeffrey Epstein

I modified the entry because the section added on 07/27/2025 about "Association with Jeffrey Epstein" was inaccurate in several ways.

The 2004 dinner was definitely not hosted by Jeffrey Epstein, but was hosted by New York City literary agent John Brockman, as an activity of his Edge Foundation. It may very well be that the photographer was invited by Epstein, but the rest of us were not. I can paste here my original email invitation to this event:

    *****************************************************************
    > From John Brockman <[Email address suppressed]>
    > To: [Email address suppressed] (Alan Guth - MIT)
    > Thu 08/26/2004 18:58:07
    > Subject: EDGE Event in Cambridge, MA Sept 7-8
    --------------------
    Alan,

    I am pleased to invite you to attend this year's annual end-of-summer 
    event which is in Cambridge, MA September 7-8, and will highlight the 
    work of Robert Trivers.

    Here's the invitation:
    http://www.edge.org/documents/day04/invite04.html

    Please let me know asap if you can attend. Katinka and I hope you
    can make it. 

    Best,

    JB

    Eastover Farm (through August)
    203-266-5930

    rsvp: [Email address suppressed]

    -- 
    John Brockman
    ---------------------------------------------------------
    President			     [Email address suppressed]
    Edge Foundation, Inc.	             tel: 212.935.8900 x11
    5 East 59th Street 		     fax: 212.935.5535
    New York, NY 10022
    ---------------------------------------------------------
    Visit the EDGE Website at: http://www.edge.org
    ---------------------------------------------------------

The file with the full invitation, http://www.edge.org/documents/day04/invite04.html, is still available through the WayBack Machine, and I linked it to the article.

The 2006 conference was not on Jeffrey Epstein's island. The source that was already linked clearly stated that the conference was on St. Thomas, but mentioned "a trip to the nearby private island retreat of the science philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein, who funded the event." The trip was for a dinner on the beach of the island, as is correctly described in Ref. [20] (New York Times article, 07/13/2019).

I thought that the final quote, presented out of context, made it sound like I continued to associate with Epstein until his death, and always observed him to be followed by three or four young women. So I added information about the context, which can easily be verified in the reference [20].

After these corrections, the article is now correct. However, I would argue that the fact that I attended two Epstein-sponsored events --- before there had been any public accusations concerning his behavior --- is not a relevant fact about my life. So I would request that the entire paragraph be removed. Alan Guth (talk) 17:35, 2 August 2025 (UTC)