Alan Guth

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I'm pretty slow at writing papers.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.