From the man who revolutionized cosmology, the story of what happened before the Big Bang.. This is the compelling, first-hand account of Alan Guths paradigm-breaking discovery of the origins of the universeand of his dramatic rise from young researcher to physics superstar. Guths startling theorywidely regarded as one of the most important contributions to science during the twentieth centurystates that the big bang was set into motion by a period of hyper-rapid inflation, lasting only a billion-trillion-billionth of a second. The Inflationary Universe is the passionate story of one leading scientists effort to look behind the cosmic veil and explain how the universe began.