Alan Guth

“Relativity can, for instance, explain that the universe had once been clumped into a dense fireball. But it can never explain how matter actually behaved.”

“It's not a coincidence that the Bible starts with Genesis. Most people really want to know where we came from and where everything around us came from. I like to strongly push the scientific answer. We have evidence. We no longer have to rely on stories we were told when we were young.”

“In high school, I was the best broad jumper on our team, and I kind of thought that when I got to MIT, I'd probably still be the best broad jumper, 'cause why do broad jumpers come to MIT? But it turned out to actually be the other way around. There was another person in my class who could jump about 3 feet further than I could.”

“Now, what space ultimately is - I should confess, I think most physicists believe - we don't yet know.”

“If you consider the universe one second after the Big Bang, the expansion rate would have to have been just right to an accuracy of 15 decimal places, or else the universe would really not work.”

“It’s hard to build models of inflation that don't lead to a multiverse. It’s not impossible, so I think there’s still certainly research that needs to be done. But most models of inflation do lead to a multiverse, and evidence for inflation will be pushing us in the direction of taking [the idea of a] multiverse seriously.”

“My parents were not at all involved in science. In fact, neither of them went to college.”

“In the context of general relativity, space almost is a substance. It can bend and twist and stretch, and probably the best way to think about space is to just kind of imagine a big piece of rubber that you can pull and twist and bend.”

“Space is certainly something more complicated than the average person would probably realize. Space is not just an empty background in which things happen.”

“I'm pretty slow at writing papers.”

“If one just tried to invent a universe on one's own, it would probably end up being a much less colorful and interesting universe than the one that we live in.”

“I do worry about the fact that science is becoming a slower process as society is becoming less patient.”

“If there's no limit to how big the entropy can get, then you can start anywhere, and from that starting point, you'd expect entropy to rise as the system moves to explore larger and larger regions of phase space.”

“I think I always wanted to go into physics. What always fascinated me about science was the desire to understand what underlies it all, and I think physics is basically the study of that.”

“If we assume there is no maximum possible entropy for the universe, then any state can be a state of low entropy.”

“From a theoretical point of view, it is very hard to imagine how gravity could avoid being quantized.”

“Reformed Jews don't have to quite believe in God.”

“We don't have a solid theory of how the universe originated, but that doesn't mean we have to invoke a deity.”

“If you bang two electrons together with enough energy, you produce protons. If there are no independent laws, then all the properties of protons must somehow be 'known' by the electrons. By extension, every elementary particle must carry around enough information to produce the entire universe. I find that difficult to believe.”

“To a theoretical physicist, there is no greater joy than to see that this curious activity we call calculation - the depositing of ink on paper, followed by throwing away the paper and depositing new ink on more paper - can actually tell us something about reality.”