Alan Guth, Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics, MIT
Cambridge, Massachusetts
ArXiv Blog Homepage inSpire PNAS-Inflation Twitter Wikipedia YouTube
Key Article: Time Since The Beginning, 2003 (ArXiv)
Key Book: The Inflationary Universe, 1998
Discussions within a homepage: https://81018.com/s4a/
Email: The very first email, July 6, 2016
Also, see: Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, Frank Wilczek, and Freeman Dyson.
Our homepages with Hawking and Guth, 2016, Inflaton, 2023
Ninth and Tenth emails: 3 February 2023 (lightly updated)
This page: https://81018.com/2016/10/11/guth/
These two footnotes can be found here: https://81018.com/pi-π/#3z and https://81018.com/pi-π/#11z
[3] Lemaître, Hawking, Guth were the most pivotal thinkers to promulgate the big bang. Of course, Lemaître is long dead, and the very few who knew him are now close to the end of life. Hawking died on Pi Day, March 14, 2018. I can well-imagine he had had enough. Photo-op after photo-op, it is hard to be a celebrity and even consider doing serious science. Our infinitesimal sphere just may be a very good definition of Guth’s inflaton. It is creating the laws of physics as it populates the universe which based on either Planck‘s or Stoney’s base units could be anywhere from 539-to-4605 tredecillion infinitesimal spheres per second…
[11] Penultimate grid. The first infinitesimal sphere has been likened to Lemaître’s primeval atom and Guth’s inflaton. Both are hypothetical. Our very first infinitesimal sphere is a little less hypothetical. The universe has to start with something to create space-time. Of course, our postulation that our universe is totally populated by such infinitesimal spheres is also hypothetical. Notwithstanding, this hypothetical penultimate grid warrants inspection. Although the finite-infinite transformations between the faces of continuity-symmetry-harmony (CSH) are assumed, our focus is on the finite. The finite is first defined by CSH, then defined by the Fourier transform, and the Poincaré sphere, and then the Poincaré homology sphere. Any and all types of spheres are included as potential spheres waiting for their mathematics to evolve (be possible, come out). This, of course, would include Smale and Milnor’s spheres and attractors and repellers.
Eighth email: Tuesday, December 13, 2022
Dear Prof. Dr. Alan Guth:
This is our eighth email. Our first email on July 6, 2016 (below) appealed to you for help to interpret our simple base-2 progression from the Planck units. Over the past six years, we’ve been inching along, studying articles by you and other scholars like you. Much of it is over our heads so we have to go over it many times and dig back further and further within each conceptual framework. We’re learning!
Most recently, this is what I concluded about our work:
“Our chart with its 202 base-2 notations is slowly becoming a model and our hope is that you will help us to understand it. In this world of Planck’s base units, infinitesimal spheres, and pi, it appears to use less extralogic and seems less idiosyncratic than Alan Guth’s inflation and his hypothetical inflaton.[25]”
I know our nascent model is a possible model for the following reasons:
1. In over ten years, nobody has said, “This is where you are going wrong and these are the reasons why.”
2. Most people readily admit that they had never seen a base-2 progression from the Planck units to the current time. It is a new conceptual frame of reference.
3. People readily admit to not regarding the Planck base units. They have not considered how these natural units are defined in terms of four universal physical constants (each physical constant can take on a numerical value of 1 when expressed in terms of the other three units) and thus define a fundamental reference point that is still not readily understood or embraced.
4. This model introduces infinitesimal spheres consistent with the “primeval atom” proposed in 1931 by Lemaître. Our counter to the atom is an infinitesimal sphere which instantiates the primacy of pi (π) and a deep-seated order-relations-dynamics, conditions of spherical continuities, symmetries, and harmonies. A causal efficacy emerges through cubic-close packing for the generation of spheres.
There are as many as 30 additional reasons, among them, a redefinition of space-and-time, and the finite-infinite, and quantitative-qualitative relations.
I remember well my time with Vicki Weisskopf. For all the above reasons, I will continue to analyze your beloved theory and, to the best of my abilities, counter all the arguments that surround it until one day you say, “Okay, I surrender. Your logic is tighter than mine.”
With a smile,
Bruce
Seventh email: Friday, March 12, 2021
Sixth email: Thursday, April 2, 2020 (updated)
Dear Prof. Dr. Alan Guth:
Of course our high school work is idiosyncratic, typical sweet poppycock, and we shouldn’t be bothering you — yet I still feel it is only right that you know when, where and how your name is being used. You’ve show up in a footnote (below) about the 1999 Structure Formation conference within our homepage today: https://81018.com/uni-verse/#2f
Best wishes,
Bruce
***********
PS. Albert Einstein. Some of the best of Einstein’s students (and his students’ students) gathered in 1999 for a conference, Structure Formation in the Universe. Held at the Isaac Newton Institute (INI) of Cambridge University, it involved Alan Guth, Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, Joseph Silk, Paul Steinhardt, Neil Turok, and others; it was a highly-select group of leading living scholars. A result of that effort was the emergence of models of the multiverse (i.e. Lisa Randall). Yet, at no time did a commonsense redefinition of space-and-time truly emerge. More… The permanent URL for this page is: https://81018.com/uni-verse/#2f
Fifth email: Sunday, January 5, 2020
Dear Prof. Dr. Alan Guth:
Yes, even the idiosyncratic ones like me have tarried on into 2020.
You may remember the 202 base-2 notations from the Planck scale to the current size and age of the universe. It’s a sweet little model with a natural inflation and a simple logic that has been readily ignored by the academy for the past eight years.
I have updated our working page about your scholarship (this page) because it is currently linked from today’s homepage. I have also updated the primary page that prompted my first email and those that followed. https://81018.com/s4a/
Let me wish you a bright and prosperous 2020. We all have work to do!
Getting somebody with your history and of your caliber to test the assumptions, logic, and mathematics of base-2 model of the universe is very high among my short term goals. So obviously, I would so appreciate any help to understand why our simple logic and simple mathematics fails.
With warm regards,
Bruce
References: https://81018.com/chart/
https://81018.com/planck_universe/#0
https://81018.com/ni/
https://81018.com/2016/10/11/guth/
https://81018.com/consciousness/
https://81018.com/s4a/
Tweet: Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Happy Birthday indeed!
16 candles! (plus 55)
71 YEARS OLD. You look great.
If we all could be so lucky… It has been just a little over 38 years since that 1979 lecture.
We now have some rough numbers, a natural inflation from the Planck units, using base-2 exponentiation to the Age of the Universe, and the logic flow just might be defensible with a Guth or Linde or Steinhardt depth of knowledge about cosmology.
Third email: Tuesday, October 18, 2016 email
https://81018.com/2016/10/11/guth/
https://81018.com/2016/09/30/bang/
Is there any possibility that “natural inflation” is the grounding for base-2 expansion within cells, bifurcation theory, and quantum fluctuations?
-Bruce
Second email: Monday, 10 October 2016 email
Dear Prof. Dr. Guth:
Might we create a new model of the universe by using the Planck base units and base-2 exponential notation to carry those units out to the Age of the Universe? We are a high school geometry class; our math and logic are all quite simple. There are a total of just over 200 notations. By the 144th notation, just over a second from the first moment, there is more than enough inflation (mass-energy-length-and-temperature) to produce a very compelling, exquisitely dense, quark-gluon universe without so much as a bang. It is a wonderland, and it seems that this Alice redefines the very nature of space and time.
Just silliness? I don’t think so. And given the gravity of the inherent nihilism within the big bang model, it is most important that the two leading theorists for it, be intellectually honest, even after a lifetime of devotion to it. Everyone must be prepared to challenge their most cherished concepts.
We all need to reconsider the necessity of a big bang. Thank you.
Most sincerely,
Bruce
* * * * *
Bruce Camber
http://81018.com
This note is a result of a posting about the so-called Inflationary Epoch. In 1978 and 1979 Alan Guth of MIT wrote groundbreaking works whereby his concept of The Inflationary Universe became part of the core anatomy of the big bang theory. This note was sent to Prof Dr. Guth via email and it was titled, Inflationary processes.
The First Email: July 6, 2016
TO: Prof. Dr. Alan Guth, Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics, MIT
Dear Prof. Dr. Alan Guth:
I was born in July 1947, so you are my senior; and, I write with admiration and respect for what you have accomplished. There is a special confidence that one gets from affirmations especially from being published. It seems so very eternal.
My question comes out of work done in a high school geometry class when we ducked inside a tetrahedron, found half-sized tetrahedrons in the four corners and an octahedron in the middle.
We then went inside that octahedron, divided each edge by 2, and found half-sized octahedrons in each of the six corners and a tetrahedron in each of the eight faces. A perfect tessellation, it was easy to continue. In about 45 jumps within, we were down among the protons. In another 67 we were in some kind of exquisitely-busy “singularity” with the Planck base units.
Feeling a little uncomfortably tight, we quickly multiplied those base units by 2 and in a total of 202 notations we were out in-and-around the Age of the Universe and the Observable Universe.
Now, this is all happening just up river from the New Orleans Zoo, downriver from the NOLA international airport. We’re just high school folks and the kids.
That was 2011. We rushed right by Kees Boeke whose work MIT’s Phil Morrison embraced. When we included all the Planck base units in our little chart, it got very challenging.
1. Nobody talks about those 67 notations from the fermion-proton range down to the first Planck base units’ doublings.
“Much too small to be meaningful!” say the kings and queens of physics. Why? “Off with your head!” (in the spirit of Alice in Wonderland’s Queen of Hearts).
2. Really now, if Max Planck found a path to such small numbers (length, time, mass) and to the not so small charge, and to an absolutely gargantuan temperature, shouldn’t there be a way to get to them through a bit of simple logic and simple math?
Why not? We’ve mapped it out in a large horizontal chart: https://81018.com/chart/. It’s rich with information, but it could be all wet. Any advice for us literal abstractionists? Thanks.
Most sincerely,
-Bruce
*****************
Bruce Camber
http://81018.com
PS. Long ago, in 1976, I was the guest of Victor Weisskopf at the MIT faculty club where I had arranged for a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) writer to interview him for an “A-Hed” article. It was to be about how the chairman of the MIT physics department was involved with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome. Though the article was never published, Weisskopf invited me to his home to review great artwork, some quite religious, that challenged our understanding of space-time and infinity.
About six months later, on a trip to visit with folks in Geneva at both CERN and the World Council of Churches, Weisskopf arranged my first meeting with John Bell to talk about the EPR paradox and his inequalities.
Then, in 1979, I had a display project under the dome at 77 Massachusetts Avenue called, “What is life?” after Schrodinger’s book of the same title. It was an attempt to examine the first principles and answers to the question by 77 leading, living scholars from around the world.
Jerome Wiesner buttonholed me at that time, “What’s this?” thinking it was a right-to-life group! Such memories. So, now so many years later, I am still wrestling with the same old questions!
These paragraphs from the preface of your book, The Inflationary Universe, I enjoy:

Thanks. -BEC
BY PAUL HALPERN, FRIDAY, MAY 30, 2014, THE NATURE OF REALITY
“Guth realized that a sudden, ultra-rapid stretching of the universe could take a tiny uniform patch and expand it to a size where it ultimately would grow and become the observable universe. During the fleeting instant of inflation, any irregularities in the primordial cosmos would be propelled beyond detection, offering a kind of blank slate. It is like taking a crinkled tablecloth and stretching it out so quickly that it appears flat on a tabletop and any wrinkles left are off the table and out of view. Only tiny, jiggling quantum fluctuations would disturb the uniformity; these fluctuations would be the seeds of the galaxies and galaxy clusters we see today.
“Inflation solved critical problems in cosmology, but it also split the Big Bang into distinct phases: In the inflationary portrait, the creation of almost all of the matter and energy in the universe takes place at the close of the inflationary period, through a process called “reheating,” rather than before inflation. Reheating involves a massive release of energy from inflation’s driving engine: an entity called the “inflaton,” thought to be a fluctuating energy field that ignited ultra-rapid cosmic expansion.”
“Theorists think that at the end of inflation, the inflaton field released an enormous reservoir of potential energy into space—which, following Einstein’s famous equivalence between energy and mass, converted into a deluge of particles. Before then, because stretching causes cooling, the universe was actually relatively cold. As the cosmos rapidly expanded, its hot initial temperature dropped by a factor of many thousand (the precise amount depends on the particular model), becoming extraordinarily hot only after reheating. If you feel that an event should be fiery if it’s going to be called the “Big Bang,” then reheating, not the cosmic dawn, was the true “bang.” That’s because the energy fields created then wouldn’t have been very hot.”