"The discovery of the CMB cemented the notion of a big bang. But for all its elegance, the theory had thrown up some intractable problems. Soon after the CMB was discovered, Dicke went to Cornell to talk about... the flatness problem. ...the universe seemed to be flat, meaning that the ratio of actual matter density to the critical density... Omega, was very close to 1. And for today's universe to have Omega anywhere near 1, its value just one second after the big bang had to be exactly 1 to a precision of about fourteen decimal places. Nothing in the laws of physics suggested why... In Dicke's audience was a young postdoc named Alan Guth. He was a particle physicist who had no interest in cosmology. But something about the talk tickled his fancy and set him on a journey that would solve the big-bang theory's most frustrating problem."
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Academics from the United StatesJews from the United StatesCosmologistsPhysicists from the United StatesAstronomers from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Anil Ananthaswamy, The Edge of Physics: A Journey to Earth's Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe (2010).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Guth
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Alan Guth
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