I am so excited for this interview,
I don't know what to do with myself.
Alan Guth is the Victor Weisskopf Professor
of Physics at MIT.
He recently won the 2014 Kavli Prize
for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation.
This is one of the greatest contributions to cosmology
from a living physicist.
I'll be following up with a video
about his theory of inflation.
But for now, I just wanted to sit down
and see what it was like to chat with a prominent physicist.
So I'm going to shut up and get to the important questions
of the interview.
Of course, it depends who's judging the battle.
But I guess I would probably, depending
on what they were arguing about, end up taking Einstein's side.
Learning something new to me is just an incredibly exciting
experience.
I think the excitement is maybe not quite equally strong,
but certainly almost as strong, whether it's
a fact that was known to lots of other people before
or whether it's something really new
as it's happened to me in a few cases with inflation.
After about a year working on cosmology,
I actually realized that this repulsive gravity
could lead to exponential expansion all in one night.
And in that same one night, I realized
that it would solve this flatness problem.
So I immediately became incredibly excited about it.
I was also initially very nervous about it,
because I've always thought that if something is too good to be
true, it probably isn't.
I don't think I have any actual rituals.
But one thing I will say about thinking about physics
is that one really has to devote concentrated time to allow
thoughts to percolate through one's mind enough
to get someplace.
So I find that I do most of my work
more or less in the middle of the night,
between midnight and 3:00 AM or something like that.
It's the only time I can work uninterrupted
for a long period of time.
I get distracted by phone calls and e-mail messages
arriving that I feel I have to look at and maybe answer.
No, I've so far decided that that can be dispensed with.
One is the excitement of explaining
things about cosmology, including inflation,
but not just only inflation, to people
who are kind of learning it for the first time.
And everybody is fascinated by cosmology.
The basic questions of cosmology are the same questions
that humans have been asking since the time Genesis was
written.
It's a lot of fun to basically show people
how simple it is to apply the laws of physics as we know them
and come up with real descriptions of how
the early universe behaved.
So in my case, it was my undergraduate thesis advisor,
a nuclear physics experimentalist here in MIT
named Aaron Bernstein.
He did a marvelous job of making me feel like I was now
part of his group.
He would make sure that I was invited to all the meetings
and sometimes even change the time of meetings
so that I could be there.
For the first time, I really felt
like I was becoming a physicist and not just a student.
And it makes a big difference to the way
one thinks about oneself and to the enthusiasm that one
can bring to the subject.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Galaxy?
Uh-oh.
Dark matter?
Things got messy.
Spiral galaxy?
An atom?
Close.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Close?
Orbitals?
That's not the word I had in mind,
but maybe it's equivalent.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Energy state?
That should be smoother.
Should look smoother and thin out.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Probability density?
Well, again, a synonym.
A very good synonym, so maybe we should just call it a victory.
FEMALE SPEAKER: What was it?
I had in mind wave function.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Wave function!
[MUSIC PLAYING]