Principal Investigator Alan Guth
Co-investigators Edmund Bertschinger , Max Tegmark , Washington Taylor , Hong Liu , Frank Wilczek , David Kaiser , Tracy Slatyer
Cosmology is the study of the large-scale structure and history of the universe. In recent years, cosmology has changed from being a highly speculative area of theoretical physics into a field where precise experimental data and deep theoretical considerations interact to form an increasingly clear picture of the early history and future fate of the universe. Recent high-precision results from the WMAP satellite, from supernova studies, and from other extragalactic observations seem to confirm the inflationary model of the universe developed by Alan Guth. Inflation can explain why the universe is so large, so uniform, and so close to geometric flatness. Inflation also helps to cement the link between particle physics and cosmology by proposing that the ripples that we measure today in the cosmic background radiation originated as quantum fluctuations perhaps only 10-35 seconds after the instant of the big bang. The recent observational results also show that the rate of expansion of the universe is accelerating, due to a nonvanishing cosmological constant or something similar. These new results raise profound theoretical questions which drive one of the most exciting fields of physics in this decade.
Faculty members at MIT working on theoretical problems related to cosmology include Alan Guth and Frank Wilczek in the CTPexternal link icon , as well as Ed Bertschinger and Max Tegmark in astrophysics, and David Kaiser in Science, Technology, and Society, and physics. A number of experimentalists in the astrophysics and particle experiment groups are working on research relevant to cosmology. String theorists Hong Liu and Washington Taylor are also currently working on problems related to cosmology.