Alan Guth

Background

Alan Guth (b. 1947) is an American theoretical physicist at MIT and the originator of inflationary cosmology (1981), the theory that the early universe underwent a brief epoch of exponential expansion. Inflation both solved standing problems in Big-Bang cosmology (horizon, flatness) and, in its "eternal" variants, supplied a physical mechanism by which a multiverse of pocket universes might be continually generated — making Guth's work central to the naturalistic multiverse response to cosmic fine-tuning.

Guth is also a co-author of the Borde–Guth–Vilenkin theorem (2003), which shows that any universe expanding on average throughout its history cannot be past-eternal and must have a past boundary — a result frequently deployed by theists (notably in kalām arguments) even though Guth's own reading is naturalistic. His works are not in the corpus; the position is represented via the Stanford Encyclopedia.

Positions held in this wiki

• Origin of the Universe — inflationary cosmology as the physical basis for a multiverse / inflating ensemble (SEP 'Cosmology: Theology' §4). The BGV theorem also figures in the Origin of the Universe view, where standard cosmology "together with the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, makes some form of a beginning the most strongly supported cosmological picture."

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: The Inflationary Universe (1997) is not ingested. Inflationary cosmology and the BGV result are represented via SEP 'Cosmology: Theology' §4. See meta/ingestion-queue.md.

Principal critics / interlocutors

• William Lane Craig — appropriates Guth's own BGV theorem as empirical support for the kalām's finite-past premise, against the past-eternal reading.
• Basil of Caesarea — the patristic voice for whom "the beginning" is "indivisible and instantaneous," the theological counterpart to a cosmological past boundary.

See also

• Martin Rees — multiverse anthropics, drawing on inflationary generation.
• Bernard Carr — anthropic cosmology and the fine-tuning of the constants.