Quotes from Alan Guth

an understanding of the infinite tree of universes seems to be needed in order to make statistical predictions about the properties of our own universe, which is assumed to be a typical "branch" on the tree.

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 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'm a cosmologist. All I do is cosmology.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I'm pretty slow at writing papers.

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.

I had considered MIT a place where brilliant people came.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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