Linde receives Gruber Foundation prize

Andrei Linde, professor of physics at Stanford, and Alan Guth, Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have been selected to receive the 2004 Cosmology Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation. The two played prominent roles in developing and refining the theory of cosmic inflation.

"We are extremely pleased to honor the work of Professors Guth and Linde and to pay tribute to the theory of cosmic inflation," said Peter Gruber, chairman of the Peter Gruber Foundation. "Their original ideas over more than 20 years have profoundly changed the field of cosmology."

The foundation annually presents its gold medal and a $200,000 unrestricted cash award to an outstanding scientist or scientists who have made groundbreaking contributions in the field of cosmology. This year's award, which the co-recipients will share, will be presented on June 4 at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

The citation lauds the researchers "for their development of fundamental ideas of cosmic inflation, which has been one of the dominant themes of cosmology for more than two decades. The original concept of inflation and its many variations, including chaotic inflation, proposed and developed by Guth and Linde, have led to a revolution in our approach to studying cosmology and to understanding the history of the universe."

Inflationary theory describes the very early stages of the evolution of the universe and its structure. A modification of cosmology's Big Bang theory, it holds that all matter in the universe was created during a period of inflation, as the universe expanded at an incredible rate: It doubled in size each 10^-37 seconds. (Imagine a pea growing to the size of the Milky Way in less time than the blink of an eye.)

Models of inflationary cosmology had been considered by others in the 1970s, but in 1981 Guth pulled the ideas together and pointed out the cosmological problems solved by inflation, publishing his work in the article "The Inflationary Universe: A Possible Solution to the Horizon and Flatness Problems."

There were problems with specific details of Guth's model (acknowledged by him also), and later in 1981 at an international conference in Moscow, Russian cosmologist Andrei Linde presented an improved version, called "new inflation." Others added to the refinements, and Linde went on to propose additional versions of inflationary theory, including the chaotic inflationary universe scenario and the theory of eternal chaotic inflation.

Guth, 57, received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in physics from MIT and worked at Princeton, Columbia, Cornell and Stanford before returning to MIT in 1980. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he is author of many technical publications and of the popular book The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins.

Moscow-born Linde, 56, received a bachelor's degree from Moscow State University and a doctorate from Moscow's Lebedev Physical Institute. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty in 1990, Linde worked at the Lebedev Physical Institute and at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Switzerland. He is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and has written two books on particle physics and inflationary cosmology.