Alan Guth

“The Big Bang theory says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged.”

“It is rather fantastic to realize that the laws of physics can describe how everything was created in a random quantum fluctuation out of nothing, and how over the course of 15 billion years, matter could organize in such complex ways that we have human beings sitting here, talking, doing things intentionally.”

“From the time I was a student, I think I was very confident in my raw abilities. I would think that, given a problem, I was as likely to solve it as anybody. But that's not enough in science to succeed, really.”

“I'm a cosmologist. All I do is cosmology.”

“Our best theory of describing space at a fundamental level is probably string theory.”

“If laws are just properties of objects, how can those laws continue to operate when the object is not really there?”

“I am not aware of any sensible theory of how classical gravity could interact with quantum matter, and I can't imagine how such a theory might work.”

“It was sort of assumed, from the time I was born, really, that I would go to college. That's sort of the way that Jewish families in New Jersey handled things; that was the norm.”

“When one studies the properties of atoms, one found that the reality is far stranger than anybody would have invented in the form of fiction. Particles really do have the possibility of, in some sense, being in more than one place at one time.”

“The idea of combining the physics of modern particle theory with cosmology was very young when I started working on cosmology.”

“I had considered MIT a place where brilliant people came.”