36 Quotes by 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.