Physicist Alan Guth to Explore Mysteries of Universe in Embry-Riddle Talk

The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held at 8 p.m. in the L. Gale Lemerand Auditorium of the Capt. Willie Miller Instructional Center.

First proposed by Guth and the other winners of the 2002 Dirac Medal, Andre Linde of Stanford University and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, inflation theory is a modification of standard cosmology's Big Bang theory. It contends that 15 billion years ago a supercharged expansion occurred in the very earliest fractions of a second after the Big Bang, creating all matter that we see today. The theory, which is strongly supported by astronomical observations and is increasingly seen as a cornerstone of modern cosmology, solves some of the mysteries of the universe and how it evolved.

As the presenter of the second Fred Elston Memorial Lecture on Gravitation, titled "Cosmic Inflation and the Acceleration of the Universe," Guth will discuss Einstein's theory of warped space and time, which is the physics of the very large, and the theory of quantum mechanics, which is the physics of the very small. He will relate these divergent concepts to cosmological inflation and show how inflation works and why it is needed. Inflation theory explains, for example, why the universe is so similar on a grand scale in all directions and why certain exotic particles, such as magnetic monopoles, thought to have been created in the early universe, have never been observed.

Guth is the V.F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an internationally known expert on cosmology who won the 2001 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, often a precursor to the Nobel Prize. He is the author of the 1997 book The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins as well as numerous research articles.

Elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of many distinguished academic awards, Guth was also named one of the "Top 25 American Innovators" by Newsweek and was listed among Science Digest's "100 Brightest Scientists Under 40."

The Physical Sciences Dept. at Embry-Riddle presents the lecture as a special feature of its Elston Relativity and Gravitation Symposium, named in honor of the late Fred Elston, a longtime Embry-Riddle professor. The symposium will be held the afternoon of March 29 at Embry-Riddle.

For more information, contact Chris Vuille at (386) 226-6724 or vuille@erau.edu .

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