SLAC Labs, Stanford. On the night of December 6-7, 1979, Alan Guth wrote “A Spectacular Idea” in his notes. Guth intuited a mechanism capable of explaining how the Big Bang works. Certain types of particles, under certain conditions, can spontaneously aggregate into a state he calls vacuum, which is part of the very fabric of space-time and contains energy—vacuum energy. Before the Big Bang, the universe was completely empty, cold, and dark, but there exists at least one speck of space with vacuum, within which space begins to expand dramatically, driven by the anti-gravity of vacuum energy. This will be called “Guth’s Inflation.”
