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. Alan Guth Read Quote
If laws are just properties of objects, how can those laws continue to operate when the object is not really there? Alan Guth Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Alan Guth Read Quote
Now, what space ultimately is – I should confess, I think most physicists believe – we don’t yet know. Alan Guth Read Quote
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. Alan Guth Read Quote
Space is certainly something more complicated than the average person would probably realize. Space is not just an empty background in which things happen. Alan Guth Read Quote