Lee Smolin quotes

Having begun my life in science searching for the equation beyond time, I now believe that the deepest secret of the universe is that its essence rests in how it unfolds moment by moment in time. (Lee Smolin)
One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself. View quote
Lee Smolin
Jacob Bekenstein found... in 1971 that every black hole must have an entropy proportional to the area of its horizon... Stephen Hawking then refined this by showing that the constant of proportionality must be... exactly one quarter. ...entropy is supposed to correspond to a measure of information ...Loop quantum gravity... [gives] a detailed description of the microscopic structure of a black hole. ...a horizon can have, for each quantized unit of area, a finite number of states. Counting them, we get exactly Bekenstein's result... View quote
Lee Smolin
Some of the effects predicted by the theory [of loop quantum gravity] appear to be in conflict with one of the principles of Einstein's special theory of relativity... that the speed of light is a universal constant. ...Photons of higher energy travel slightly slower than low-energy photons. ...the principle of [general] relativity is preserved but Einstein's special theory of relativity requires modification. ...A photon can have an energy-dependent speed without violating the principle of [general] relativity! View quote
Lee Smolin
General relativity predicts that time ends inside black holes because the gravitational collapse squeezes matter to infinite density. View quote
Lee Smolin
Science moves fastest when there's plenty of debate and controversy. View quote
Lee Smolin
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. View quote
Lee Smolin
There certainly is a tension between the relativity of simultaneity and non-locality in quantum theory, but it's not strong enough to add up to a falsification of either side by itself. View quote
Lee Smolin
How we think about the future and the past determines everything about how we think about our situation as human beings. View quote
Lee Smolin
The relational picture of space and time has implications that are as radical as those of natural selection, not only for science but for our perspective on who we are and how we came to exist in this evolving universe of relations. View quote
Lee Smolin
Relativity and... quantum... remain incomplete.... the main reason each is incomplete is the existence of the other. The mind calls for a third theory to unify all of physics, and for a simple reason. Nature is... "unified." ...interconnected, in that everything interacts with everything else. (Lee Smolin)
Spacetime... turns out to be discrete, described by a structure called spin foam. View quote
Lee Smolin
We have known since the middle of the nineteenth century that the world is not composed only of particles. ...the world is also composed of fields. ...General relativity is a theory of... the gravitational field. ...Because there are three sets of field lines, the gravitational field defines a network of relationships having to do with how the... lines link with one another. ...This is why we call relativity a relational theory. View quote
Lee Smolin
The first principle of cosmology must be 'There is nothing outside the universe'. This is not to exclude religion or mysticism... But if it is knowledge that we desire... we need to seek answers to questions about the things we can see... only things that exist in the universe. View quote
Lee Smolin
One of the evident facts about the world is the stability of empty space-time. In classical general relativity we can explain this as a consequence of the positive energy theorem... the positive energy theorem must extend in some suitable form to any viable quantum theory of gravity. View quote
Lee Smolin
Thinking in time is not relativism but a form of relationalism... the truest description of something consists of specifying its relationships to other parts of the system it is part of. View quote
Lee Smolin
The landscape problem and the problem of background independence are closely linked. The latter is the only route the former has to experimental confirmation. View quote
Lee Smolin
We show that some known classical results have particularly simple derivations within the Ashtekar formalism. These include Witten's positive energy theorem... View quote
Lee Smolin
We seem to have an ingrained idea that if something is valuable, it exists outside of time. View quote
Lee Smolin
I was joined by Carlo Rovelli, and we were able to make a full-fledged quantum theory of gravity... This became loop quantum gravity. View quote
Lee Smolin
Many of us believed in the possibility of a principled explanation for the laws of nature. We hoped to discover a short list of principles, which could be realized in a unique theory, which would retrodict the standard model and uniquely predict the physics to be discovered beyond it. The shocking implication of the results of Strominger reported in 1986 was that it was not to be, at least within the confines of string theory. ...String theory offered more, however... It offered the promise of a setting in which the different perturbative string theories are realized as expansions around solutions of a still more fundamental theory. ...That more fundamental theory would have to be background independent... (Lee Smolin)
There is no time apart from change. There is no such thing as a clock outside the network of changing relationships. ...one can only compare how fast one thing is happening with the rate of some other process. View quote
Lee Smolin
From the beginning of physics, there have been those who imagined they would be the last generation to face the unknown. Physics has always seemed to its practitioners to be almost complete. This complacency is shattered only during revolutions, when honest people are forced to admit that they don't know the basics. View quote
Lee Smolin
Special pleading that the standards of science should be lessened to admit explanations with no falsifiable consequences, in order to keep alive a bold speculative idea, should be strongly resisted. ...ultimately science is not interested in what might be true, it is interested only in what can be convincingly demonstrated by deductions from observational evidence. View quote
Lee Smolin
There is no meaning to space that is independent of the relationships among real things of the world. ...Space is nothing apart from the things that exist. ...If we take out all the words we are not left with an empty sentence, we are left with nothing. View quote
Lee Smolin