At the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, this month, Alan Guth and Andrei Linde are receiving the 2004 Cosmology Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation. This annual award recognizes scientists who have made groundbreaking contributions in cosmology. The prize is sponsored jointly by the foundation, which is based in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, and the International Astronomical Union in Paris. Guth and Linde are each receiving a gold medal and will split the purse of $200 000.

The prize honors Guth, Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics and Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT, and Linde, professor of physics at Stanford University, 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 citation adds that “the original concept of inflation and its many variations, including chaotic inflation, proposed and developed by Guth and Linde,...

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