Alan Guth Quotes

There really is not a new law of nature. It was all in the theory to begin with but nobody worked it out.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive.

It would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.

All phenomena] are equally susceptible of being calculated, and all that is necessary, to reduce the whole of nature to laws similar to those which Newton discovered with the aid of the calculus, is to have a sufficient number of observations and a mathematics that is complex enough.

I always looked at myself as a physicist learning new tricks by looking at nature.

Most of us who become experimental physicists do so for two reasons; we love the tools of physics because to us they have intrinsic beauty, and we dream of finding new secrets of nature as important and as exciting as those uncovered by our scientific heroes.

Intellectual curiosity drove Einstein to some of the world's most important discoveries.

The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one. One worth clinging to. But you don't need religion to appreciate the ordered existence. It's not just an idea, it's reality. We're discovering the hidden orders of the universe every day.

In physics, all can you do is predict the consequences of physical laws.

The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers.

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.

The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.

During this time I had the singular good fortune of being able to discuss the problem constantly with Einstein. Some experiments done at Einstein's suggestion yielded no decisively new result.

I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing, and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions.

When we human beings hypothesize that a law of nature holds - even temporarily or situationally - we are creating an idea, but we are also making a hypothesis about how nature behaves, whose truth or usefulness has nothing to do with what we know or believe.

Working out another system to replace Newton's laws took a long time because phenomena at the atomic level were quite strange. One had to lose one's common sense in order to perceive what was happening at the atomic level.

When modern physics exerts itself to establish the world's formula, what occurs thereby is this: the being of entities has resolved itself into the method of the totally calculable.

I wanted to understand the secrets behind my chemical experiments and behind the processes in nature.

Gravitation is, so far, not understandable in terms of other phenomena.

My background is in theoretical physics, and it's something very close to my heart.

Physics is about questioning, studying, probing nature. You probe, and, if you're lucky, you get strange clues.

There's something really beautiful about science, that human beings can ask these questions and can answer them. You can make models of nature and understand how it works.