Lee Smolin Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

Lee Smolin
The revolution which began with the creation of quantum theory and relativity theory can only be finished with their unification into a single theory that can give us a single, comprehensive picture of nature.

Lee Smolin
Spacetime... turns out to be discrete, described by a structure called spin foam.

Lee Smolin
Those who do good science do so because they choose problems that are suited to them.

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.

Lee Smolin
Any two particles in the universe attract each other through the gravitational interaction.

Lee Smolin
There are unfortunately not a few good professional physicists who still think about the world as if space and time had an absolute meaning.

Lee Smolin
There is no fixed, eternal frame to the universe to define what may or may not exist.

Lee Smolin
Science is, above everything else, a search for an understanding of our relationship with the rest of the universe.

Lee Smolin
In quantum theory, distance is inverse to energy, because you need particles of very high energy to probe very short distances. The inverse of the Planck energy is the Planck length.

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!

Lee Smolin
Calculation establishes that a quantum positive energy theorem may be possible using a representation based on the Ashtekar connection. Left open is a key question of whether this use of the Ashtekar connection is necessary or whether a positive quantum energy result can be achieved for representations based on other connections, i. e., for [other] values of the Immirzi parameter.

Lee Smolin
In the theory of electric fields it is assumed that points have meaning.... Physicists using general relativity... cannot speak of a point, except by naming some features of the field lines that will uniquely distinguish that point.... the network of relationships evolve with time... constantly changing.

Lee Smolin
Many of the founders of quantum mechanics, including Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, and Louis de Broglie... were realists. For them quantum theory... was not a complete theory, because it did not provide a picture of reality absent our interaction with it. On the other side were Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and many others. Rather than being appalled, they embraced this new way of doing science.

Lee Smolin
Some string theorists prefer to believe that string theory is too arcane to be understood by human beings, rather than consider the possibility that it might just be wrong.

Lee Smolin
Deep, persistent problems are never solved by accident; they are solved only by people who are obsessed with them and set out to solve them directly.

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...

Lee Smolin
Unfortunately, so far... a truly background independent formulation of string theory has not been achieved... [It is] often called the search for M theory...

Lee Smolin
While most people... were seeking to modify the principles of either relativity or quantum theory, we surprised ourselves (and many other people) by succeeding in putting them together without modifying their principles.

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.

Lee Smolin
There is nothing beyond the world except what we see, no background to it except its particular history.

Lee Smolin
Neither space nor time has any existence outside the system of evolving relationships that comprises the universe. Physicists refer to this feature of general relativity as background independence.

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.

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.

Lee Smolin