Alexander Vilenkin

Alexander Vilenkin (born 1949) is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist who directs the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University. He studied physics at the University of Kharkiv, was refused graduate study after turning down an approach from the KGB, and emigrated to the United States in 1976, taking his doctorate at SUNY Buffalo. His work on eternal inflation showed that it is a generic feature of inflationary models, and with Arvind Borde and Alan Guth he proved the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, which implies that an inflating universe must have had a beginning. He also developed ideas about the quantum creation of the universe from a vacuum. He became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1989 and has written the popular book Many Worlds in One.