"I AM very pleased and very surprised. It was a pretty radical idea and I was pretty much a novice in cosmology. I was quite nervous that the whole thing could just blow up and fall apart. But now it's just a matter of filling in the details."
That was Alan Guth's reaction when the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe's results were released in February 2003. More than 20 years earlier, Guth had come up with the idea that the universe went through a brief period of extremely rapid expansion shortly after the big bang. According to the WMAP data gleaned from the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the big bang, Guth's idea - known as inflation - was spot on.
WMAP measured the way the temperature of the microwave background radiation varies across the sky. It wasn't the first such measurement: essentially, WMAP confirmed the results of projects ...
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