It was trying to solve the 'monopole problem' that led Alan Guth to postulate the inflationary Universe — one that had undergone a brief period of exponential expansion a fraction of a second ...

For decades, scientists assumed that the expansion of the universe was powered by a new entity, known as the inflaton, but ...

Physicist Alan Guth, the father of cosmic inflation theory, describes emerging ideas about where our universe comes from, what else is out there, and what caused it to exist in the first place.

But new research suggests that it may have been possible to inflate the universe without anything new powering that inflation. In the 1970s, physicist Alan Guth concocted a radical picture of the ...