ALAN GUTH

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

Space is certainly something more complicated than the average person would probably realize. Space is not just an empty background in which things happen.

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I had considered MIT a place where brilliant people came.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I'm pretty slow at writing papers.

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

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