Alan Guth Quotes

From a theoretical point of view, it is very hard to imagine how gravity could avoid being quantized.
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 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.
I do worry about the fact that science is becoming a slower process as society is becoming less patient.
I had considered MIT a place where brilliant people came.
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.
I'm a cosmologist. All I do is cosmology.
I'm pretty slow at writing papers.
If laws are just properties of objects, how can those laws continue to operate when the object is not really there?
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 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 we assume there is no maximum possible entropy for the universe, then any state can be a state of low entropy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My parents were not at all involved in science. In fact, neither of them went to college.
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AuthorName
Alan Guth
Profession
Physicist
BirthDate
27 February, 1947
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