At the end of a quiet, carpeted hallway in MIT's physics department, a display case stands empty outside the office of physicist Alan Guth.

Framed in blond wood and clear glass, the empty cube waits for the world to fill nothing with something.

"It would be nice if it happens," says Guth, a rumpled 67-year-old, who sits in his respectably cluttered office, sunlight brightening piles of papers scattered over a desk and table.

"It" is not just any prize but one thing in particular: a citation for the Nobel Prize in physics. Ever since his remarkable work analyzing the gravitational ripples after the big bang, Guth's perhaps inevitable acceptance of a Swedish-accented phone call from the Nobel committee is now the talk