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 Big Bang theory says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged.
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'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.
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.
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.
We don't have a solid theory of how the universe originated, but that doesn't mean we have to invoke a deity.
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.
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.
If laws are just properties of objects, how can those laws continue to operate when the object is not really there?
To a theoretical physicist, there is no greater joy than to see that this curious activity we call calculation - the depositing of ink on paper, followed by throwing away the paper and depositing new ink on more paper - can actually tell us something about reality.
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.
Space is certainly something more complicated than the average person would probably realize. Space is not just an empty background in which things happen.
Now, what space ultimately is - I should confess, I think most physicists believe - we don't yet know.
Our best theory of describing space at a fundamental level is probably string theory.
My parents were not at all involved in science. In fact, neither of them went to college.
I had considered MIT a place where brilliant people came.
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.
