Alexander Vilenkin (; ; born 13 May 1949) is the Leonard Jane Holmes Bernstein Professor of Evolutionary Science and Director of the Institute of Cosmology at

Tufts University Tufts University is a private research university in Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts, United States, with additional facilities in Boston and Grafton, as well as Talloires, France. Tufts also has several Doctor of Physical Therapy p ...

. A

theoretical physicist Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain, and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experi ...

who has been working in the field of

cosmology Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe, the cosmos. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', with the meaning of "a speaking of the wo ...

for 25 years, Vilenkin has written over 260 publications.

Biography

As an undergraduate studying physics at the University of Kharkiv, Vilenkin turned down collaborator offer from the

KGB The Committee for State Security (, ), abbreviated as KGB (, ; ) was the main security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991. It was the direct successor of preceding Soviet secret police agencies including the Cheka, Joint State Polit ...

, causing him to be blacklisted from pursuing a graduate degree.MENCONI, DAVID.
TO FIND HERSELF AS A MUSICIAN, ALINA SIMONE FIRST HAD TO FIND HER RUSSIAN ROOTS
", Tufts Magazine, 2010.Freedman, David H.
The Mediocre Universe
, Discover Magazine, 01 February 1996. Then he was drafted into a building brigade and later worked at the state zoo as a night watchman while conducting physics research in his spare time.STOBER, DAN.
Physicist: Universes pop up ad infinitum
, Stanford News, 01 April 2009. In 1976, Vilenkin immigrated to the United States as a Jewish refugee, obtaining his Ph.D. at SUNY Buffalo. His work has been featured in numerous newspaper and magazine articles in the United States, Europe,

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

, and Japan, and in many popular books. Vilenkin is the father of writer and musician Alina Simone.

Work

In 1982,

Paul Steinhardt Paul Joseph Steinhardt (born December 25, 1952) is an American theoretical physicist whose principal research is in cosmology and condensed matter physics. He is currently the Albert Einstein Professorship in Science, Albert Einstein Professor in ...

presented the first model of eternal inflation, Vilenkin showed that eternal inflation is generic. Furthermore, working with Arvind Borde and Alan Guth, he developed the Borde–Guth–Vilenkin theorem, showing that a period of

inflation In economics, inflation is an increase in the average price of goods and services in terms of money. This increase is measured using a price index, typically a consumer price index (CPI). When the general price level rises, each unit of curre ...

must have a beginning and that a period of time must precede it. This represents a problem for the theory of inflation because, without a theory to explain conditions before inflation, it is not possible to determine how likely it is for inflation to have occurred. He also further developed Edward P. Tryon's idea of quantum creation of the

universe The universe is all of space and time and their contents. It comprises all of existence, any fundamental interaction, physical process and physical constant, and therefore all forms of matter and energy, and the structures they form, from s ...

from a quantum vacuum. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1989 ''"for pioneering research in the application of particle physics to cosmology, and in particular for seminal contributions in the areas of cosmic strings and quantum cosmology"''.

Books

*''Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes'' A. Vilenkin (Macmillan, July 2006) *''Cosmic Strings and Other Topological Defects'' by A. Vilenkin, E. P. S. Shellard (paperback – July 31, 2000)

References

External links

Publications of Alexander Vilenkin
@

INSPIRE-HEP INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP). It is the successor of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) database, the main literature database for high energy physics since the 1 ...

Interview with Tufts cosmologist Alex Vilenkin
on his new book, "Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes" on the podcast and public radio interview progra
ThoughtCast.

Inflationary spacetimes are not past-complete

Interview
with Vilenkin on "New Books in Astronomy"
Lecture
by Vilenkin on "Proving the Universe Had a Beginning" {{DEFAULTSORT:Vilenkin 1949 births Living people 20th-century Ukrainian physicists 21st-century American physicists Soviet emigrants to the United States National University of Kharkiv alumni University at Buffalo alumni Tufts University faculty American cosmologists Fellows of the American Physical Society