💥🌌📡🎈 Inflationary Cosmology -- Alan Guth (SSOMIT Sagan Day 2023)

Our deepest apologies for the sound quality issues, a period where the projection was washed out in the middle, and the cutting of the feed towards the end of the Q&A.
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Inflationary cosmology gives a plausible explanation for many observed features of the universe, including its uniformity, its mass density, and the patterns of the ripples that are observed in the cosmic microwave background. Beyond what we can observe, most versions of inflation imply that our universe is not unique, but is part of a possibly infinite multiverse. For our Sagan Day 2023 talk, co-sponsored by the Greater Boston Humanists, renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist Alan Guth described the workings of inflation, the evidence for inflation, and why he believes that the possibility of a multiverse should be taken seriously.

WHEN: Thursday, 2023/NOV/16, 6pm ET

About our speaker:
ALAN GUTH is the Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics and a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT. He was an MIT undergrad, class of 1968, and received his Ph.D. from MIT, in Physics, in 1972. He then held postdoc positions at Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, and SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) before returning to MIT as a faculty member in 1980. His work in cosmology began at Cornell, when fellow postdoc Henry Tye (also an MIT Ph.D.) persuaded him to study the production of magnetic monopoles in the early universe. Using standard assumptions, they (and others) found that far too many would be produced. Continuing this work at SLAC, Guth discovered that the magnetic monopole glut could be avoided by a new proposal which he called the inflationary universe, which would also solve several other cosmological puzzles.
Guth has been given a number of awards for this work, including the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2012, and the 2014 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, which he shared with Andrei Linde and Alexei Starobinsky. In 1971, Guth married his high school classmate, Susan Tisch, and they have two children, Larry and Jenny. Larry is in the MIT Math Department, and since high school has been solving all of Alan's math problems. Larry and his wife Amy are responsible for two wonderful grandsons, Elan and Bennett, both of whom have been in the MIT daycare system. Coincidentally, for several years Elan was a classmate of a grandson of Henry Tye.
Guth is still busy exploring the consequences of inflation. He has also written a popular-level book called "The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins" (Addison-Wesley/Perseus Books, 1997).

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[chikkipop]

1920s sound quality in the 21st century, and at MIT!? No one will endure listening to this. Surely the school will provide equipment for these events, no?