The Inflationary Universe

"Alan Guth is one of the leading theoretical cosmologists today, and I was actually a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where Alan was when he was writing the book, so I was there on the ground floor. He is one of the most meticulous and careful thinkers that we have in cosmology. His great contribution, when he was quite young, was the idea of the inflationary universe – a way that you could take an incredibly tiny smooth patch, as small as you can imagine it being, and it can expand at a tremendous rate, create energy, and grow into something like the Big Bang. Almost every discussion of early universe cosmology today starts from inflation – trying to make inflation work or trying to improve on it with something better. His theory has set the agenda for theoretical cosmology for the last 30 years and here is the man himself explaining it to you. We were working together, writing papers, but they weren’t about inflation so I didn’t influence the book. Alan is someone who takes incredible care in trying to make things clear. So even though he discusses some of the deepest issues that we have in early universe cosmology, you are rarely going to find such a careful explanation of what we know and what we don’t."