Alan Guth on The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss (audio)

In 1979 Alan Guth, then a postdoc at Cornell, made what is perhaps the most important contribution to our theoretical understanding of the evolution of the Universe in the past half century. His realization that the early universe could have undergone a brief period of what he dubbed as “Inflation” provided the first and to date the only explanation of the large scale properties of the Universe compatible with observations, and based on well-defined, calculable, microphysical physics principles. Since that time, Inflation has become the paradigm of modern cosmology, and it made fundamental predictions about other observables in cosmology that have since been validated by observations of the Cosmo Microwave Background Radiation.