Editing Alan Guth (section)

==Early life and education==
Guth was born to a [[Jewish]] family<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/innovators/2014/06/140630-alan-guth-profile-inflation-cosmology-science/ |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140702172441/http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/innovators/2014/06/140630-alan-guth-profile-inflation-cosmology-science/ |url-status=dead |archive-date=July 2, 2014 |title=Alan Guth: Waiting for the Big Bang }}</ref> in [[New Brunswick, New Jersey]] in 1947 and grew up across the [[Raritan River]] in [[Highland Park, New Jersey|Highland Park]], where he attended the local public schools.<ref>[https://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes/prizerecipient.cfm?last_nm=Guth&first_nm=Alan&year=1992 1992 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize Recipient - Alan H. Guth], [[American Physical Society]]. Accessed January 23, 2018. "Professor Alan Guth was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1947. He grew up and attended the public schools in Highland Park, NJ, but skipped his senior year of high school to begin studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."</ref> After his junior year at [[Highland Park High School (New Jersey)|Highland Park High School]],<ref name=":0">{{Cite news |date=1 Feb 1971 |title=Susan Tisch, Alan H Guth Plan to Wed |pages=7 |work=[[Home News Tribune|The Central New Jersey Home News]] |url=https://www.newspapers.com/image/316046041 |access-date=26 May 2023}}</ref> he left school and enrolled in a five-year program at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] where he could get his [[bachelor's degree|bachelor's]] and [[master's degree|master's]] after two more years.<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=yooYAAAAIAAJ&q=highland+park+high+school+Alan+Guth ''Current Biography Yearbook, Volume 48''], p. 219. [[H. W. Wilson Company]], 1988. Accessed January 23, 2018. "At the end of his junior year he left Highland Park (New Jersey) High School to enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his extracurricular activities included, as they had in high school, debating, track, and the mathematics club."</ref> Guth obtained a bachelor's and master's degree in 1969 and a doctorate in 1972. In 1971, he married Susan Tisch, his high school sweetheart.<ref name=":0" /> They have two children: [[Larry Guth|Lawrence]] (born 1977) and Jennifer (born 1983).<ref name="Cosmos2015">{{Cite web |url=https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/physicist-who-inflated-universe |title=The physicist who inflated the Universe |last=da Silva |first=Wilson |work=Cosmos |quote=When people said that gravitational waves would be the smoking gun for inflation, my response was that I thought the room was pretty filled with smoke already. |date=March 2, 2015 |access-date=February 20, 2020}}</ref>

Guth was at [[Princeton University|Princeton]] 1971 to 1974, [[Columbia University|Columbia]] 1974 to 1977, [[Cornell University|Cornell]] 1977 to 1979, and the [[Stanford Linear Accelerator Center]] (SLAC) 1979 to 1980. Like many other young physicists of the [[Baby boomers|baby boom]] era, he had a hard time finding a permanent job, because there were far fewer assistant professorships than there were young scientists seeking such jobs, a phenomenon that has been referred to as the "generation of lost scholars."<ref>{{cite web |date=1978 |publisher=Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education |title=Preserving a Lost Generation: Policies to Assure a Steady Flow of Young Scholars Until the Year 2000 |url=http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~rradner/publishedpapers/42PreservingLostGeneration.pdf |access-date=July 9, 2011 }}</ref>

At the start of his career, Guth studied [[particle physics]], not [[physical cosmology]]. Guth's earliest work at Princeton was in the study of [[quark]]s, the elementary particles that make up protons and neutrons. At Columbia, Guth studied [[grand unification theories]] (GUTs), focusing on the [[cosmological phase transitions]] generated by [[spontaneous symmetry breaking]]. Most GUTs predict the generation of [[magnetic monopoles]] during spontaneous symmetry breaking, but none had ever been detected—the [[monopole problem]].