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The Bang In The Big Bang

When a team of astronomers announced yesterday that they had been able to peer back 13.8 billion years to the first few moments of the Big Bang, they were confirming the work of Alan Guth in the 1970s.

The researchers say they say they saw some of what gave the bang to the Big Bang — what made the universe expand as quickly as it did. It’s being called one of the greatest discoveries in science.

“It feels great,” Guth tells Here & Now’s Robin Young. “We certainly did not know that this kind of confirmation would be available, but turns out that it is and these folks found it and it’s fantastic.”

Now a professor of physics at MIT, Guth explains his work and the evidence of what’s called inflation.

Guest

  • Alan Guth, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Alan Guth jotted this into his notebook in 1979.
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Alan Guth jotted this into his notebook in 1979.