Alan Guth Quotes

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Alan Guth

Profession : Physicist

Birth : February 27, 1947

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.

Alan Guth

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.

Alan Guth

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

Alan Guth

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.

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.

Alan Guth

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

Alan Guth

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.

Alan Guth

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.

Alan Guth

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

Alan Guth

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.

Alan Guth

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

Alan Guth

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

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.

Alan Guth

I had considered MIT a place where brilliant people came.

Alan Guth

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.

Alan Guth

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

Alan Guth

I'm pretty slow at writing papers.

Alan Guth

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.

Alan Guth

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

Alan Guth

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.

Alan Guth