Alan Guth Quotes

I often feel a discomfort, a kind of embarrassment, when I explain elementary-particle physics to laypeople. It all seems so arbitrary - the ridiculous collection of fundamental particles, the lack of pattern to their masses.

We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature. The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.

What physics tells us is that everything comes down to geometry and the interactions of elementary particles. And things can happen only if these interactions are perfectly balanced.

The standard model of particle physics says that the universe consists of a very small number of particles, 12, and a very small number of forces, four. If we're correct about those 12 particles and those four forces and understand how they interact, properly, we have the recipe for baking up a universe.

There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature's actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained 'fine structure constant' ... governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions.

If everything is made up of little particles and all the little particles follow quantum mechanics, then shouldn't everything just follow quantum mechanics?

The aim of particle physics is to understand what everything’s made of, and how everything sticks together. By everything I mean me and you, the Earth, the Sun, the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Absolutely everything.

I was already studying physics, but Sputnik steered me toward space, cosmology, the Big Bang, and elementary particles.

A neutrino comes into a detector, and most of the time, you don't see it. But very, very seldom, it will satisfy your curiosity and interact.

There are 300 neutrinos in every cubic centimeter of the entire universe.

To me, the most exciting thing about the discovery of the Higgs particle is that its existence was predicted fifty years before its discovery through experiment.

I had been interested in particle physics, which deals with the fundamental constituents of matter.

My work indicated that if we consider smaller and smaller black holes, at some stage, the properties of black holes become indistinguishable from those of elementary particles.

The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night.

There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work.

A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.

I would hope that the publicity around the Higgs boson would increase the public awareness of physics and cosmology.

Molecule, n.: The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. It is distinguished from the corpuscle, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter, by a closer resemblance to the atom, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter ... The ion differs from the molecule, the corpuscle and the atom in that it is an ion.

We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.

Everything that can happen, does. That's quantum mechanics. But this does not mean everything happens. The rest of physics is about describing what can happen and what can't.

The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity.

Now the smallest Particles of Matter may cohere by the strongest Attractions, and compose bigger Particles of weaker Virture.... There are therefore Agents in Nature able to make the Particles of Bodies stick together by very strong Attraction. And it is the Business of experimental Philosophy to find them out.

Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.

If Atomes are as small, as small can bee,They must in quantity of Matter all agree