Andrei Linde (b. March 2, 1948 in Moscow, USSR) is a Soviet theoretical physicist and professor of Physics at Stanford University. Dr. Linde is best known for his work on the concept of the inflationary universe. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from Moscow State University. In 1975, Linde was awarded a Ph.D. from the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow. Among the various awards he's received for his work on inflation, in 2002 he was awarded the Dirac Medal, along with Alan Guth of MIT and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University.

Linde's Key Idea

"Eternal chaotic inflation" the false vacuum is eternally inflating in exponential growth powered by repulsive constant random zero point dark energy of negative pressure. This false vacuum is like supersaturated steam in which liquid bubbles of more stable vacuum form with Higgs-Goldstone fields that describe the cohering of most of the pre-inflationary random dark energy into the smooth fabric of curved spacetime. Our universe is only a small causal part of a single bubble. There are an infinity of bubbles and in fact there are an infinity of universes like ours on a single bubble which is more like an expanding infinite sheet than a finite spherical surface (suppressing 1 space dimension for ease of visualization. The problem with this, as pointed out by Lee Smolin in "The Trouble With Physics" for example, is that it is not Popper falsifiable if nonlocal signals outside of the local light cones are not possible. One way to get such nonlocal signals is if there are stable traversable wormholes connecting the different "Hubble horizon limited" "pocket universes" (Leonard Susskind) on the same bubble and on different bubbles floating in hyperspace (see also floating "branes"). Antony Valentini has, in addition, proposed a generalization of quantum theory that allows nonlocal signaling that is forbidden in orthodox quantum theory.

Links

* Andrei Linde's webpage at Stanford University

* Linde's views on religious