Saturday, May 31, 2014

5 Ways Liberal Race Hustling Is Bad For America

Calling someone a "racist" used to mean that a person disliked certain people because of their skin color.
Today, MOST OF THE TIME, it means something entirely different.
Now, if someone is better and smarter than a liberal, a liberal cries "white privilege."
If a liberal is failing and he doesn't know what to do about it, he yells "racism."
If a liberal doesn't know how to counter your argument, he calls it "racist."
If liberal can't counter your political argument, he screams out "bigot."
So, if you're conservative, it's almost a backwards compliment at this point. "You're just too good for me and this is the only way I know how to deal with it!"
Of course, it's still irritating to be falsely accused of racism. Additionally, it does a lot of real damage to the country that's just shrugged off and brushed aside by the shameless, selfish people who view crying "racism" as nothing more than a big political game.
1) It creates a victim mentality that turns people into losers: If you're Hispanic or black and you really believe all the liberals who say America is hopelessly racist, why work hard, go to school, and try to get ahead? How are you going to make it in a society that's 63.3% white, if all those white people are going to hate you for the color of your skin no matter what you say or do? How many black and Hispanic Americans have given up on making a good life for themselves and have settled for a mediocre life of dependency because they falsely believe that life in America is stacked against them?
2) It does more to promote real racism than the KKK: Most people, after being convinced that someone hates them, detest them back. If you're black and you believe most white people are no different than George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Robert Byrd, why wouldn't you be racist? If most black Americans were actually hateful, anti-white mooches like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who could blame white people for being racists? Liberals spend a lot of time trying to turn people against each other based on the color of their skin and they undoubtedly create racism in the process.
3) It has led to both political parties treating minority voters like an afterthought: Democrats get roughly 90% of the black vote and 70% of the Hispanic vote. In return for that incredible loyalty from important constituent groups, they call Republicans racist non-stop. Republicans respond to that by incessantly trying to prove that we're not racist. What this means is that ultimately, neither party does anything of significance for minorities. Democrats feel like they have minority voters in the bag and Republicans feel like they will be branded as racists no matter what they do; so what motivation does any politician have to actually try to make the lives of their minority constituents better?
4) It takes the focus off of our real problems: Even if you think racism in America is a serious problem, it's still small potatoes compared to the other challenges we face as a people. It doesn't matter what color you're talking about, how much of an impact does racism make versus jobs, crime, or out-of-wedlock births? Yet, we hear about racism incessantly because Democrats believe it helps them at the polls. Maybe it does. But, does it ever make anybody's life better? Does it make any neighborhoods safer? Does it put people to work? Does it keep families together? Is there ever a point when the big issues impacting people's lives get addressed or twenty years from now, is everyone still going to be mired in the same place, yelling at each other over the next "Trayvon" or "Donald Sterling?"
5) It creates the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" effect:One of the problems with crying "racism" every time someone criticizes Obama, knocks the Democrat Party, or just doesn't do whatever liberals want him to do is that it masks real racism. Because of talentless wastes of space like Toure and Eugene Robinson whose whole careers revolve around pretending the world hasn't changed since the sixties, minorities who are really discriminated against because of their skin color often have to overcome deep skepticism about their motives after they've been wronged. Just as false cries of "rape" hurt women, false cries of "racism" hurt minorities in this country.
http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2014/05/31/5-ways-liberal-race-hustling-is-bad-for-america-n1845701/page/full

Sunday, May 11, 2014

MSNBC Host Alex Wagner on 'Today': 'Every Time Lewinsky is Mentioned, It is Good for Hillary Clinton'

During a report on Thursday's NBC Today about Monic Lewinsky's article in Vanity Fair magazine, correspondent Peter Alexander touted liberal spin that the former Bill Clinton mistress speaking out would actually help Hillary Clinton's political prospects: "Clinton watcher Ruth Marcus argues Lewinsky has done Hillary a big favor." A soundbite followed of the Washington Post columnist proclaiming: "Now if there's a Hillary Clinton campaign for president in 2016, we can move on from the Lewinsky scandal of yore."

In a discussion segment that followed Alexander's report, co-host Matt Lauer wondered to  MSNBC host Alex Wagner: "How does this article, this essay, impact Hillary Clinton should she run for office in 2016?" Wagner argued: "Every time Lewinsky is mentioned, it is good for Hillary Clinton. It reminds everybody of her major accomplishments on the world stage. And people tend to be more sympathetic to Hillary Clinton than Monica Lewinsky because she is the woman scorned." [Listen to the audio]
Wagner's declaration was reminiscent of Washington Post reporter Dan Balz parroting Democratic talking points to NBC political director Chuck Todd on Monday's MSNBC Daily Rundown that the Benghazi scandal "could actually be good for Clinton."

Appearing with Wagner on Thursday's Today, Republican strategist Nicolle Wallace rejected such crass partisan spin:
I'm really uncomfortable looking at this in only political terms. And so, I'm going to refrain from offering a political analysis. And I think this article reminds us that there was a 22-year-old woman, Monica Lewinsky, whose life was irreparably altered by her encounter with the Clintons.
Earlier in the exchange, Lauer highlighted Lewinsky denouncing the feminist movement for not supporting her during the 1998 scandal: "...given the issues at play – gender politics, sex in the workplace – you'd think they would have spoken up..."

Wagner responded by gloating:
...we think, you know, the narrative written about this moment in American history favors Bill Clinton, to be truthful about it. I mean, Monica Lewinsky has spent the last twenty years effectively being kryptonite. Here is a man who has ascended to the highest levels of, you know, global profile, and Monica Lewinsky has not been able to restart her life. And it does prompt questions about, you know, who – if she was a victim, whether she was given her due.
Wallace replied: "And it's amazing to me that even when this article came out this week – I think the full article is out this morning – the only people that are getting blamed or muddied by it are Monica Lewinsky and Hillary Clinton. Bill Clinton was involved too." Lauer added: "And gets a pass on this." Wallace remarked: "Always."    
Here is a full transcript of the May 8 segment with Wagner and Wallace:
7:33 AM ET
MATT LAUER: Alex Wagner is the host of MSNBC's Now with Alex Wagner and Nicolle Wallace served as White House communications director for George W. Bush and a campaign advisor to Senator John McCain. Hi, ladies. Good morning.

ALEX WAGNER: Hey, Matt.

NICOLLE WALLACE: Good morning.

[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: Lewinsky's Legacy & 2016; What Does Article Mean for Possible Hillary Run?]

LAUER: Why do you think Monica Lewinsky wrote this essay now?

WAGNER: I feel like there's been a lot of Lewinsky in the air. Whether it's Senator Rand Paul and his comments about Bill Clinton being a sexual predator, I feel like, you know, there is constant Hillary talk that only is going to ramp up as we get closer to 2016. And this is a woman who feels like she's been sidelined and marginalized.

LAUER: She says she's written it only for herself, not for anyone else. Lynne Cheney thinks the Clintons had a hand in this, in the timing, so they can get this out of the way now, before a run for Hillary Clinton.

WALLACE: Yeah, listen, political operatives are never quite as scheming as people give them credit for being. I think that what she writes is the truth. She's been waiting for a moment when the Clintons aren't on the national political stage and realizes that they will be on the national political stage for infinity. So if not now, then when?

LAUER: Let's talk about the "what" in the essay now. She writes about the relationship with then-President Bill Clinton, "It was an authentic connection, with emotional intimacy, frequent visits, plans made, phone calls and gifts exchanged. In my early 20s, I was too young to understand the real-life consequences and too young to see that I would be sacrificed for political expediency." Doesn't that take the Clintons out of having a hand in this right off the bat?

WALLACE: Yeah, this is not a good story for the Clintons. And this is not a story that they can get over and get past. If voters decide they want to hear more about it, that will determine the arch of the story more than anything else.

WAGNER: I feel like I disagree with that. I mean, I think Monica Lewinsky is an accepted truth about the Clintons. And this is a woman who spends a lot of time in that article trying to get past the trauma of her early twenties and move on and talk about the online harassment that plagues many young people today.

LAUER: I want to get your – both of your take on this. When she talks about at the height of the scandal, quote, "I sorely wish for some sign of understanding from the feminist camp...given the issues at play – gender politics, sex in the workplace – you'd think they would have spoken up...I understood their dilemma: Bill Clinton had been a president 'friendly' to women's causes."
WAGNER: I mean, I think in retrospect – I'd love to get Nicolle's view on this, too – we think, you know, the narrative written about this moment in American history favors Bill Clinton, to be truthful about it. I mean, Monica Lewinsky has spent the last twenty years effectively being kryptonite. Here is a man who has ascended to the highest levels of, you know, global profile, and Monica Lewinsky has not been able to restart her life. And it does prompt questions about, you know, who – if she was a victim, whether she was given her due.

WALLACE: And it's amazing to me that even when this article came out this week – I think the full article is out this morning – the only people that are getting blamed or muddied by it are Monica Lewinsky and Hillary Clinton. Bill Clinton was involved too.

LAUER: And gets a pass on this.

WALLACE: Always.

LAUER: As she puts it, he comes out – they come out, the Clintons, "as one of the most celebrated powerful political couples of our time." And she has, "a scarlet albatross around her neck."

Real quickly, how does this article, this essay, impact Hillary Clinton should she run for office in 2016?

WAGNER: Every time Lewinsky is mentioned, it is good for Hillary Clinton. It reminds everybody of her major accomplishments on the world stage. And people tend to be more sympathetic to Hillary Clinton than Monica Lewinsky because she is the woman scorned.

WALLACE: I'm really uncomfortable looking at this in only political terms. And so, I'm going to refrain from offering a political analysis. And I think this article reminds us that there was a 22-year-old woman, Monica Lewinsky, whose life was irreparably altered by her encounter with the Clintons.

LAUER: Nicolle Wallace, Alex Wagner, thank you ladies. Appreciate it. You can catch Now with Alex Wagner weekdays at 4 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC.
http://www.mrc.org/biasalerts/msnbc-host-today-every-time-lewinsky-mentioned-it-good-hillary-clinton

Chris Matthews Warns GOP’s ‘Nasty’ and ‘Insidious’ Politics on Benghazi Could Backfire Like ‘Watergate’

MSNBC's Chris Matthews slammed Republican policies like voter ID laws and a special investigation of the Benghazi attacks as an "insidious plan" that could backfire like "Watergate."

"Let me finish tonight with this insidious plan to scare up right-wing voters and scare off the votes the of those who tend to vote Democratic," Matthews ranted at the end of Thursday's Hardball. "The trouble with nasty politics like the kind we're getting from the House leadership is it makes you look nasty," he continued. [Audio here.]
He added the Democratic talking point that Republicans are profiting from the Benghazi attacks: "It makes it look like you're moneygrubbing on the deaths of those four American diplomats, like you're ready to kill a little more faith in government to get a few more votes."

And Matthews warned that "I've watched how exactly this kind of stuff blows up in your face," like with Richard Nixon "when he took a sure win for re-election and turned it into Watergate."
Below is a transcript of the May 8 Hardball segment:
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let me finish tonight with this insidious plan to scare up right-wing voters and scare off the votes the of those who tend to vote Democratic. This is just the kind of campaign mentality that leads to trouble on the part of those who pursue it. Everyone knows the Republicans are heading for a good election night this November. They are poised to win the Senate. Poised, at least, and to pick up five to ten seats in the House of Representatives. You know it. They know it. Believe me, smart Democrats know it.

So why this plan to roll up the score, to bring out the crazies on the right and to drown out the progressives, including many minorities who will be intimidated by the new Republican-pushed voter laws. I've watched how exactly this kind of stuff blows up in your face. It did with Richard Nixon several times in 1950 when he called his senatorial opponent pink right down to her underwear and in 1972 when he took a sure win for re-election and turned it into Watergate.

The trouble with nasty politics like the kind we're getting from the House leadership is it makes you look nasty. It makes it look like you're moneygrubbing on the deaths of those four American diplomats, like you're ready to kill a little more faith in government to get a few more votes. It's a rotten deal, and the people who play it will pay for it. Maybe not this year, but in the years to come. You can't build a brand by painting a bathtub ring around your rivals. Why? Because people, voters, are watching when you do it. So is the media. Nobody wants somebody in the White House who got there through scare tactics and keeping people from voting.
http://www.mrc.org/biasalerts/chris-matthews-warns-gops-nasty-and-insidious-politics-benghazi-could-backfire-watergate

Saturday, May 10, 2014

COURT RULES MASSACHUSETTS ATHEISTS FAILED TO SHOW WORDS 'UNDER GOD' HARMED THEIR CHILDREN

BOSTON, May 9 (UPI) -- An atheist Massachusetts couple failed to prove their children had been harmed by the words "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, the state's highest court ruled Friday.
The couple, identified only as "John and Jane Doe," argued their children's rights were violated by the voluntary recitation of the pledge -- including "Under God" -- in the public schools in the Acton-Boxborough district. But the Supreme Judicial Court ruled unanimously they failed to make their case, saying they had not proved the children had been subjected to bullying, ostracism or any other punishment or mistreatment for refusing to say the pledge or for keeping quiet while everyone else was saying "Under God."
The couple sued in state court under the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights because the U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled on the issue.
Chief Justice Roderick Ireland, who wrote the opinion, also said school officials in the district -- which includes two wealthy suburbs northwest of Boston -- do not track students' patriotism, or lack thereof.
"The fact that a school or other public entity operates a voluntary program or offers an activity that offends the religious beliefs of one or more individuals, and leaves them feeling 'stigmatized' or 'excluded' as a result, does not mean that the program or activity necessarily violates equal protection principles,'' Ireland said.


The Does, Acton residents, got legal backing from the American Humanist Society for the lawsuit filed in Middlesex County. Another Acton couple, Daniel and Ingrid Joyce, weighed in on the other side, with support from the Knights of Columbus.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/05/09/Court-rules-Massachusetts-atheists-failed-to-show-words-Under-God-harmed-their-children

Another Actress Offends the Media With Anti-Feminist Comments

It turns out Jezebel’s hatred for Kirsten Dunst was short-lived, as they've found a new female celebrity to skewer. Dunst ruffled feminists’ feathers in April by promoting traditional gender roles. Now, it's 'Divergent' film star Shailene Woodley who is rejecting modern feminism. Here's an excerpt from her interviewwith Time, when they asked her if she considered herself a feminist:
No because I love men, and I think the idea of ‘raise women to power, take the men away from the power’ is never going to work out because you need balance. With myself, I’m very in touch with my masculine side. And I’m 50 percent feminine and 50 percent masculine, same as I think a lot of us are. And I think that is important to note. And also I think that if men went down and women rose to power, that wouldn’t work either. We have to have a fine balance.

Jezebel, true to form, quickly jumped on Woodley's comments, accusing her of being "young and a bit sheltered" and reasoned that if only someone sat her down and "explained that feminism is actually about equality and women's empowerment, she'd get the message."
Tell me again how constantly criticizing candid female celebrities the moment they even hint they don't want to be called a feminist is empowering to women? To prove how much they believe in female unity, Jezebel even put together a hit list, if you will, of female celebrities who have refused to embrace the title of "feminist."
Jezebel or The Daily Beast may ignore it, but there is truth to what these celebrities are saying. Modern feminism, by continually defining the opposite sex as dominating or misogynistic, has worked to diminish some men's confidence. What's more, some feminists' 'women don't need men' diatribe, suggested by well-known figures such as Gloria Steinem, who is often attributed with the infamous "fish without a bicycle" quote, has had a negative impact on society at large. Consider the fact that 85 percent of children with behavioral disorders come from father-absent homes.
These are statistics today's feminists want nothing to do with. Thankfully, more and more Hollywood starlets are standing up for the men in their lives by rejecting this sexist movement
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2014/05/10/another-actress-offends-the-media-with-antifeminist-comments-n1836003

What made the Big Bang bang Nearly 35 years ago, the MIT physicist figured out what made the Big Bang bang. Finally, there’s evidence.? , “The Big Bang theory says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it bange?







There’s a moment near the start of Joseph Haydn’s classical masterpiece The Creation, after the bass soloist slowly sings, “In the beginning, God made Heaven and Earth,” and after the angelic choir softly joins in with “And God said: Let there be light.” There is silence, and then the choir returns to intone, almost mistily, “And there was light.”
On that last word, “light,” the choir and orchestra explode in a fortissimo C-major chord to create an experience that is both gorgeous and transcendent.
If you close your eyes, you can almost imagine the Big Bang erupting around you.
Of that musical moment, the late physicist Victor Weisskopf once said, “There cannot be a more beautiful and impressive artistic rendition of the beginning of everything.” Weisskopf, a crucial figure in the development of both the atomic bomb and the nuclear disarmament movement that followed it, regularly played the oratorio for his students at MIT.
He was a lover of classical music. But on the cosmic question of how it all began, this giant of science knew there was another reason to seek insight from a deeply religious 18th-century composer. Weisskopf and his fellow 20th-century scientists fundamentally had no answer for how the universe began.
The theory that came to be known as the Big Bang started its long gestation nearly a century ago. Eventually, it won the backing of science and, after it got its catchy name on a BBC broadcast in 1949, the general public. Today, most of us walk around assuming that the Big Bang explains how the universe began. But look at it closely, and you realize it doesn’t.
The Big Bang theory offers an explanation for how the early universe expanded and cooled and how matter congealed, from a primordial soup into stars, planets, and galaxies. What it describes, then, is the aftermath of the Bang. But it is effectively silent on why or how that first massive expansion happened or where all the original matter came from.
As Alan Guth, the physicist who holds the MIT professorship named after Weisskopf, puts it, “The Big Bang theory says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged.” Guth has been using that line for years, and it almost always draws an appreciative laugh from his audience, whether that audience is made up of scientists or laypeople. It has a piercing quality to it, reminding us that we’d overlooked something that should have been obvious, like leaving the house with a freshly pressed shirt and perfectly knotted tie but no pants.
Guth (rhymes with “truth”) has had opportunity to trot out some version of that line for more than three decades now, ever since he came up with his revolutionary prequel to the Big Bang theory. For most of that time, Guth, a short, slightly rumpled man who displays a refreshing mix of modesty and self-confidence, has been making his case in academic lectures. He began using flimsy overhead transparencies and later moved to PDFs, but the message has remained the same. He has continued to promote it with undiminished enthusiasm, even as observational evidence remained elusive and seemed unlikely to emerge in his lifetime, if ever.
Then in March, he received an e-mail from Harvard astrophysicist John Kovac, who had spent a good chunk of the past eight years looking at data from highly sophisticated telescopes planted on the South Pole. “Dear Alan,” the e-mail began, “I am eager to talk to you about a topic that concerns both your research and mine. It is important and somewhat urgent, and I would be grateful if you would keep my request to speak with you confidential.”
The next day, Kovac appeared in Guth’s MIT office, having used a back staircase to avoid detection. A week after that, Alan Guth, at age 67, became an academic celebrity, treated not just as a scientist who finally had backing for his theory, but also as a sort of seer who could help explain our place in the cosmos.
***
“The Big Bang theory says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged,” says MIT physicist Alan Guth, pictured in younger days.
ALAN GUTH
“The Big Bang theory says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged,” says Guth, pictured in younger days.
PERHAPS YOU WENT TO SCHOOL WITH someone like Alan Guth, a child so preternaturally gifted that the teachers didn’t know what to do with him. He grew up in Highland Park, New Jersey, occasionally helping his father at the family dry cleaning business but clearly destined for greater things. In his junior year of high school, his physics teacher gave him a college textbook and sent him and a couple of other smart kids into a back room, telling them to teach themselves. Just before he took his high school sweetheart, Susan, to the junior prom, he was stunned to learn he wouldn’t be coming back for his senior year. His soon-to-be chemistry teacher, no doubt dreading a year of pesky questions he might not be able to answer, had conspired with the guidance office to get Guth accepted to MIT. So Guth said goodbye to Susan and Highland Park and headed for Cambridge.
He continued to excel at MIT, earning his bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD in physics there. He carried that enormous promise with him when he left Cambridge at the dawn of the 1970s for a postdoctoral researcher position at Princeton. But by the end of that decade, his rapid ascent had reversed direction. He had cycled through a series of postdoc slots around the country, three years at Princeton, three years at Columbia, two years at Cornell, and a year at Stanford — elite shops, all of them, but despite his best efforts, he couldn’t land a job with any kind of future. He was starting to look like a dented can. When Guth asked one Cornell theorist to write him a recommendation for an assistant professor position, the man said the strongest letter he could honestly write would be “kindly but vague.”
Guth was a postdoc at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1979 when he made his “SPECTACULAR REALIZATION” about the universe.
ALAN GUTH
Guth was a postdoc at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1979 when he made his “SPECTACULAR REALIZATION” about the universe.
Part of the problem had to do with his area of research. Rather than follow the postdoc playbook of concentrating on subjects likely to lead quickly to publishable papers, Guth let his curiosity guide him. He spent a lot of time wrestling with abstract mathematical problems relating to the theory of elementary particles. And when a fellow physics postdoc at Cornell, Henry Tye, approached him in 1978 with a puzzling question relating to the early universe, Guth began searching for an answer, even if it lay way outside his field. “I knew only a little about cosmology,” Tye recalls, “and Alan knew even less.” (While astronomy focuses on the observation and study of the planets, stars, and galaxies, cosmology explores the mysterious roots of the universe — and its future.)
As it happened, two leading lights in cosmology gave talks at Cornell, deepening Guth’s interest in the field. For one of those talks, by Robert Dicke, a professor at Princeton, Tye arrived so late that the only seats available were way in the back. The room was hot, and he could barely hear the speaker, so he got nothing out of it. But Guth had arrived early, got a good seat, and took extensive notes. At home that night, he logged an entry in his diary about the talk, pronouncing it “fascinating.”
What made it so was the Princeton professor’s identification of the “flatness problem” with the Big Bang theory. The flatness refers to the geometry of our continually expanding universe, where its mass density and expansion rate remain exquisitely balanced. If that balance tipped even slightly in either direction, the universe would either fly apart or collapse on itself. Yet because the universe has been expanding for 14 billion years, even slight variations in the beginning should have become exaggerated by now, to disastrous effect. Dicke pointed out that for our universe to look anything like it does today, at one second after the Big Bang, the number describing the balance would have to have been within 15 decimal places of one, lying in the minuscule interval between 0.999999999999999 and 1.000000000000001.
Yet the Big Bang theory offered absolutely no explanation for how that exceedingly precise balance might have come about. It would seem crazy to assume that it was just a coincidence.
***
Guth was a postdoc at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1979 when he made his “SPECTACULAR REALIZATION” about the universe. Pictured, Guth and his son, Larry, and the notation of his late-night epiphany.
ALAN GUTH
Pictured, Guth and his son, Larry, and the notation of his late-night epiphany.
ANOTHER TALK, BY THEN Harvard physicist and future Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, convinced Guth that there was important science to be done pondering the universe’s first infinitesimal fraction of a second. Other researchers dismissed this as impossible to study and best left to science-fiction writers.
And then there was that question that his postdoc pal Henry Tye had asked him. It concerned whether a new class of theories gaining traction in physics called grand unified theories would dictate the existence of something called magnetic monopoles. These are magnets with isolated North or South poles rather than normal equal-strength North-South poles. Working together, Guth and Tye concluded that the early universe should have been so overrun by magnetic monopoles that it would have collapsed.
In the fall of 1979, Guth left Cornell for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and he and Tye continued to talk by phone, hoping to get a publishable paper out of their monopole research. Their task was made harder because another young researcher had scooped them with a paper highlighting this monopole problem. So they were scrambling to salvage their work, hoping to write about possible solutions to the problem.
Guth was living in a rented house in Menlo Park with Susan, his high school sweetheart who had become his wife, and their son, Larry, who was just shy of his second birthday. Weighing heavily on Guth’s mind were his dim prospects for landing a job the following year.
Inspiration visited Guth around 1 a.m. on December 7, as Susan and Larry lay sleeping in the next room. Later that morning, he raced on his bike to work, setting a personal record of 9 minutes 32 seconds (Guth leaves very little in his life undocumented). After doing further number crunching relating to his early-morning epiphany, he wrote in large block letters in his notebook “SPECTACULAR REALIZATION,” drawing a double box around the words for emphasis.
His theory was what he would come to call inflation, the exponential expansion of the universe within its first fraction of a second. (More on that later.) He phoned Tye at Cornell and excitedly told him that this inflationary model solved not just the monopole problem but also the flatness problem.
At the time, Tye was preparing to leave for a long trip to his native China, so what he most wanted Guth to do was finish his revisions to their monopole paper. It was already far too long, and time was running short, so they agreed they wouldn’t include anything about inflation. Guth was disappointed that he couldn’t seem to get Tye excited about his new theory. What neither of them realized then, though, was that by sitting in the back for that Princeton professor’s lecture, Tye had completely missed the man’s explanation of the flatness problem. “When Alan told me he had solved the flatness problem,” Tye recalls, “I had no idea what he was talking about.”
Before Tye left for China, Guth asked him whether he minded if he continued to work on this inflation idea and tried to publish a paper while Tye was gone. “Of course not,” Tye replied.
At lunch at Stanford a few weeks later, Guth heard a few colleagues talking about another cosmology problem he’d never heard of. “The horizon problem” describes the implication of the Big Bang theory that the universe began in near-perfect uniformity, even if that would seem to be completely improbable. After a big bang, you would expect to get a clumpy universe, not one that is uniform in temperature and form, in every direction.
Guth made more scratches in his notebook. Then, like a child amazed to learn that his skeleton key opens every door in the house, he was delighted to discover that his new inflationary model could solve this problem as elegantly as it had the others.
On January 23, 1980, slightly more than a month after his “SPECTACULAR REALIZATION,” Guth took his model public, delivering a lecture at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Among the attendees was Sidney Coleman, a respected Harvard physicist who was spending the year there. Afterward, he told Guth “every word was pure gold.”
By the next day, Guth had a couple of job offers, as well as invitations to take his lecture to campuses across the country. Over the next few months, this long-neglected academic was suddenly hot again, with official and unofficial job offers pouring in from Harvard, Princeton, and a half dozen other universities. Still, his dream job was back at his intellectual home of MIT. But there were no physics teaching posts open there.
In the spring, after the last stop on his lecture circuit, his hosts at the University of Maryland took him out to a Chinese restaurant. When he cracked open his fortune cookie, it read “An exciting opportunity lies just ahead if you are not too timid.” After mulling it over for a weekend, Guth picked up the phone that Monday morning and called someone he knew at MIT. Allergic to self-promotion, Guth mustered the confidence to let it be known that if MIT could find a position for him, he would be very interested in accepting it. The next day, MIT called back and offered him not an entry-level position as an assistant professor but rather a tenure-track associate professorship.
In the matter of just a few months, his career trajectory had returned to warp speed. After accepting the offer from MIT to join the faculty in the fall of 1980, he spent the rest of his time at Stanford working on a paper describing his inflationary model.
In June, however, he was alarmed to discover that one piece of his model didn’t hold up. While his skeleton key still opened the doors to solve the flatness and monopole problems, it got jammed inside the horizon problem’s keyhole.
After his months-long run as the hot new property in the physics world, he felt a giant “Oh, crap” pit in his stomach, wondering if he might be headed back to obscurity. Still, he remained optimistic that a solution would emerge. “And I knew,” he says, “that at least I had already gotten the job at MIT.”
***
In March at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a team of scientists announced the first direct evidence for the existence of cosmic inflation.
SUZANNE KREITER/GLOBE STAFF/FILE
In March at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a team of scientists announced the first direct evidence for the existence of cosmic inflation.
ON THE LAST TUESDAY IN MARCH of this year, Alan Guth sits in the back seat of his Honda Accord. Susan is in the front passenger seat while their daughter, Jenny, is behind the wheel. Jenny (who did her graduate work in mathematical neuroscience) is 29 years old, so she wasn’t even born when Guth came up with the idea of inflation. Her brother, Larry, is now a 36-year-old mathematician and full professor at MIT.
I’m riding in the back with Guth as we head to Harvard. There, he’ll be giving a talk with John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who led the multi-institution team that came up with that long-elusive evidence. I ask Susan, a friendly woman who teaches English to adult foreigners, how comfortable she has become in explaining her husband’s work. “I don’t know the math, and I don’t know the fundamental science,” she says in a slow speaking style that her students must appreciate, “but if it’s well explained, I can follow the ideas.” Even after three decades of hearing her husband explain his theory, though, she admits that she still finds it difficult to grasp both the immensity of the universe that his theory suggests and the tininess of its starting point.
She turns her head to face her husband. “Alan, you used to say it all started from this singularity that was much smaller than an atom and that it got as big as a grapefruit” during inflation. “But now you say it was a marble?”
“That’s right,” he replies. “I’ve changed the grapefruit to a marble.” Then, in response to what sounds like whimsy with metaphors (but which is really the result of refined estimates from certain grand unified theories), he laughs, though Guth laughter is closer to a series of exuberant cackles.
Here, in language that you, Susan, and I can understand, is how Guth’s model of the inflationary universe works: Using the theories of Einstein and others, Guth points out that at extremely high energies, there are forms of matter that upend everything we learned about gravity in high school. Rather than being the ultimate force of attraction that Newton and his falling apple taught us, gravity in this case is an incredibly potent force of repulsion. And that repulsive gravity was the fuel that powered the Big Bang.
The universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old, and it began from a patch of material packed with this repulsive gravity. The patch was, as Susan notes, tiny — one 100-billionth the size of a single proton. But the repulsive gravity was like a magic wand, doubling the patch in size every tenth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. And it waved its doubling power over the patch about 100 times in a row, until it got to the size of that marble. All that happened within a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. As a point of comparison, the smallest fraction of time that the average human can detect is about one-tenth of a second.
This lab, located three-quarters of a mile from the Geographic South Pole, houses the telescope that captured images corroborating Guth’s theory. S
STEFFEN RICHTER/HARVARD UNIVERSITY
This lab, located three-quarters of a mile from the Geographic South Pole, houses the telescope that captured images corroborating Guth’s theory.
The ingredients of what would become our entire observable universe were packed inside that marble. While the density of ordinary material being put through that kind of exponential expansion would thin out to almost nothing, a quirk of this repulsive-gravity material allowed it to maintain a constant density as it kept growing. But at a certain point — while the universe was still a tiny fraction of a second old — inflation ended. That happened because the repulsive-gravity material was unstable, and, like a radioactive substance, it began to decay. As it decayed, it released energy that produced ordinary particles, which in turn formed the dense, hot “primordial soup.” At that point, after Guth’s model has explained what banged, why it banged, and what happened before it banged, he takes a bow and lets the standard Big Bang theory take over from there.
About a year after Guth joined the MIT faculty in 1980, the “Oh, crap” pit in his stomach finally went away. That’s when he received a preprint of a paper from Andrei Linde, a physicist in Moscow. Linde, who is now at Stanford, had figured out an ingenious way to use inflation to solve the “horizon problem” that had tripped up Guth. “It saved my model,” Guth says now.
Guth and a few colleagues made another big advance the following year in a paper showing that inflation, which remained pure theory, could conceivably be proved. That’s because inflation would have left a unique imprint on the expanding matter of the Big Bang. And this imprint could be seen in the oldest light of the universe — that is, if modern science could build tools sophisticated enough to detect the imprint. But Guth doubted that would happen in his lifetime.
Jenny pulls the Honda up to the edge of the Harvard campus and lets her father and me out before she and her mom continue the hunt for street parking, which in Harvard Square can sometimes feel as elusive as the universe’s ancient light. Guth blows a kiss to his wife and daughter and then begins his march to the Science Center.
Before long, Guth and Kovac are standing together in front of a packed auditorium, with all 350 seats occupied, along with scores of students sitting on the floor, clogging the aisles, and another 150 or so in the next room watching on a closed-circuit feed. Faculty members, many of them graybeards on the back nine of their careers, crowd in the front, while a diverse collection of students fills the rest of the room.
Physically, the two scientists are quite a contrast. The 43-year-old Kovac is tall and trim, with short brown hair, perfect posture, and the earnest presentation of a church youth director. At 67, Guth has a slight stoop that makes him look shorter, a glorious swoop of gray hair, and a navy blazer that is a bit too long in the sleeves.
I never made it to Kovac’s office, but my guess is it’s orderly. Guth’s is a chaotic collection of piles. In fairness, though, it looks markedly better than it did back in 2005, when he won Boston.com’s “messiest office” contest, which earned a free makeover of his MIT quarters by a design consultant. The designer clearly never made it to his home office in Brookline, though. There, an unruly pile of papers erupts from the center of the floor, calling to mind the mashed-potato mountain from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Despite the physical differences between Guth and Kovac, their soft-spoken, polite personalities make them as complementary as their streams of research. Although back in 2006 scientists using a NASA satellite had produced a map of the early universe that strongly suggested Guth was on the right track with his theory, the new evidence from Kovac’s team is the kind of rock-solid confirmation that theoreticians dream of. While acknowledging that the findings will need to be corroborated, Guth calls the new data “fantastically secure results.”
John Kovac, leader of the BICEP2 project and Associate Professor of Astronomy and and Physics at Harvard University, talks about the results of BICEP2 at MIT, Thursday, April 3, 2014. Gretchen Ertl for The Boston Globe.
GRETCHEN ERTL
“Dear Alan, I am eager to talk to you about a topic that concerns both your research and mine,” Harvard astrophysicist John Kovac (pictured), who led the team that found the evidence.
In what another scientist termed “a telegram from the first moments of time,” Kovac’s team found the smoking gun for inflation: evidence of gravitational radiation, or more specifically, swirling patterns in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background. In the viewfinder of their telescope on the South Pole was light formed just 380,000 years after our universe banged onto the scene. And in that ancient light they detected gravitational radiation that is far older, having been emitted during the universe’s first fraction of a second of existence.
In his Harvard talk, Guth employs the kind of fog-free language that made his 1997 book, The Inflationary Universe, understandable to readers without graduate degrees. After the talk, as a throng encircles Guth and both graybeards and young students begin peppering him with questions, I pull Kovac aside and ask what drew him to this research. “There are no bigger questions,” he says, than how it all began. Kovac’s own curiosity about inflation dates at least to his junior year of high school in Tampa, when he chose the geometry of the universe as the subject of an English term paper.
Because of all the attention surrounding his research, he says, his 9-year-old son is now grappling with inflation. That’s the beauty of cosmology: Scientists working at the top of the field are on the hunt for answers to the questions rattling around in the brains of 9-year-olds.
***
A FEW DAYS AFTER the Harvard talk, I walk with Guth into the basement of a two-story brick building at the edge of the MIT campus. It’s a lab for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which has sites in four states. Our guide is Nergis Mavalvala, a professor of astrophysics, who shows us a laser and a vacuum chamber housing a mirror so superbly stable that it moves about 100 million times less than the floor we’re standing on.
The goal of the observatory is to detect the kind of gravitational waves that Einstein predicted nearly a century ago. They’ve been at work for about 20 years and have in total spent about $1 billion of federal research money. “We still haven’t seen one,” Mavalvala says.
While that might lead some budget cutters in Washington to want to start slashing, she stresses that investment in science often takes time to pay out, but the rewards of patience can be tremendous.
Guth knows that as well as anyone. He waited 35 years for evidence to support his theory. And he points out that it took nearly 50 years for proof of the “God particle,” the Higgs boson, a linchpin for physicists trying to fathom the mass and diversity of particles in the universe. That particle had been first theorized by British physicist Peter Higgs and others back in 1964, but it wasn’t until 2012 that scientists at the multibillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider found evidence of it. Last year, at age 84, Higgs shared the Nobel Prize in physics.
It will probably take even longer to find evidence to support the breakthrough theories of tomorrow. “We’ve already understood,” Guth says, “the things that are close by” — the universe’s low-hanging fruit. “We have to wait.”
A little while later, as we walk through a different building on campus, an emeritus professor spots Guth and flags him down. “You know that when you win a Nobel, you lose a year of your life,” the man says. “So get ready.”
Guth flashes a polite but puzzled smile. I wonder whether this senior scientist is going to cite some kind of depressing actuarial table showing reduced lifespan for laureates.
“You’ve been to the Nobel ceremony before, right?” he asks Guth.
“Um, actually, I haven’t.”
The man, who later asks me not to use his name, explains that he had traveled to Stockholm when a friend won. “First of all, it’s winter, and there’s no sun, so they get you drinking!”
“Oh,” Guth replies. “I don’t drink very much.”
“And then the Swedes have you speak at every damn college in the country,” he says. “They get their money’s worth!”
By now, it’s clear that the man is not predicting a shortened life but rather a year of research lost to obligations of ceremony and speaking.
This kind of Cambridge shoptalk doesn’t appear to be something Guth is eager to engage in. He’s a self-effacing guy. Besides, who wouldn’t worry about the possibility of jinxing himself by acting too presumptuous?
Still, the prevailing view in the scientific community is that it’s hard to see how Guth won’t be one of the people getting an invite to Stockholm. Henry Tye, the former postdoc who put Guth on the path of inquiry that led to inflation, admits that he regrets he hadn’t grasped the significance of what his pal was trying to tell him back in 1979. But Tye, who went on to a distinguished career at Cornell that continues now in Hong Kong, says there can be no disputing how big a paradigm shift Guth’s inflationary model has made to science’s understanding of how it all began.
After a talk at MIT in April, Guth is mobbed by students and others with questions.
GRETCHEN ERTL
After a talk at MIT in April, Guth is mobbed by students and others with questions.
Later that same day, over sodas in the Museum of Science cafe, I revisit with Guth the issue of the Nobel. Although it comes with a coveted $1 million-plus purse, Guth says that wouldn’t make a major difference in his life. Two years ago, he won a brand new award, the Fundamental Physics Prize, which came with a stunning $3 million check. Nonetheless, Guth continues to drive a Honda sedan. But he admits the psychic benefits of the Nobel would be enormously rewarding. “It would be a final confirmation,” he says, “that a large portion of the world feels that the theory is right.”
And with proof that inflation is right, it starts to get even more interesting. In the lobby outside the museum planetarium, there’s a diorama display titled “Where in the Universe Are We?” It has a series of connected boxes, going from Earth to Solar System to Sun’s Neighborhood to Milky Way Galaxy to Local Group to Universe. Above the boxes is this message, “The universe is such an enormous place, it’s easy to get lost.”
But in Guth’s mind, that message understates things to a staggering degree. We already know that our sun is just one of at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy and our galaxy is just one of 100 billion in the observable universe. But Guth says the most plausible models of inflation suggest something called eternal inflation. That means that once inflation starts producing universes, it never stops.
And, by extension, Guth says, that would mean that we’re not just part of a vast universe, but that ours is merely one “pocket” universe in an ever-expanding multiverse. So if you’ve just come to terms with how infinitesimal a speck we earthlings are in the whole cosmic scheme of things, get ready to feel even smaller.
At this point, Guth’s thinking on the multiverse remains just theory and is by no means universally accepted in the physics world. But it’s already drawn influential backers, and even those who haven’t fully signed on yet find themselves intrigued. “It’s a very attractive picture, very plausible, and it leads to very interesting consequences,” says Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate whose talk at Cornell helped inspire Guth. “But we don’t have any way now of confirming those theories.”

Then again, that’s what people said about Guth’s revolutionary idea 35 years ago. So whether it takes 10 years or 50 years or 100 years for the evidence to emerge, the people who design the museum exhibits probably shouldn’t get too attached to their current signs presuming a single universe. As for the rest of us, rather than wallowing in our smallness, we might as well kick back and put on some Haydn to feel big once again.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2014/05/02/alan-guth-what-made-big-bang-bang/RmI4s9yCI56jKF6ddMiF4L/story.html