Physicist

If laws are just properties of objects, how can those laws continue to operate when the object is not really there?

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I had considered MIT a place where brilliant people came.

I'm a cosmologist. All I do is cosmology.

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

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.

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.