Alan Guth

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.