Lee Smolin Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

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
There is a smallest unit of space. Its minimum value is given by the cube of the Planck length... If you take a volume of space and measure it to a very fine precision... It has to fall into some discrete series of numbers, just like the energy of an electron in an atom.... we can calculate the discrete areas and volumes from the theory.

Lee Smolin
On the way, I shared the backseat of Feyerabend's little sports car with the inflatable raft he kept there in case an 8-point earthquake came while he was on the Bay Bridge.

Lee Smolin
In both quantum theory and general relativity, we encounter predictions of physically sensible quantities becoming infinite. This is likely the way that nature punishes impudent theorists who dare to break her unity.... If infinities are signs of missing unification, a unified theory will have none. It will be what we call a finite theory.

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
I... propose that time and its passage are fundamental and real and the hopes and beliefs about timeless truths and timeless realms are mythology.

Lee Smolin
Combine general relativity and quantum theory into a single theory that can claim to be the complete theory of nature. This is called the problem of quantum gravity.

Lee Smolin
In string theory one studies strings moving in a fixed classical spacetime.... what we call a background-dependent approach.... One of the fundamental discoveries of Einstein is that there is no fixed background. The very geometry of space and time is a dynamical system that evolves in time. The experimental observations that energy leaks from binary pulsars in the form of gravitational waves—at the rate predicted by general relativity to the... accuracy of eleven decimal places—tell us that there is no more a fixed background of spacetime geometry than there are fixed crystal spheres holding the planets up.

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

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
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
Since the 1950s, the key equation of quantum gravity has been called the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. Bryce DeWitt and John Wheeler wrote it down, but in all the time since then, no one had been able to solve it. We found we could solve it exactly, and in fact we found an infinite number of exact solutions.

Lee Smolin
But in spite of the obvious effectiveness of mathematics in physics, I have never heard of a good a prioriargument that the world must be organised to mathematical principles.

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

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.

Lee Smolin
We detect light and particles that have traveled billions of light years on their way across the universe to us. During the billions of years of travel, very small effects due to quantum gravity can be amplified to the point that we can detect them.

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.

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
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
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
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.

Lee Smolin
Quantum theory can be described as a new kind of language to be used in a dialogue between us and the systems we study with our instruments.... It tells us nothing about what the world would be like in our absence.

Lee Smolin
String theory seems to be incompatible with a world in which a cosmological constant has a positive sign, which is what the observations indicate.

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.

Lee Smolin
We seem to have an ingrained idea that if something is valuable, it exists outside of time.

Lee Smolin
If we believe that the task of physics is the discovery of a timeless mathematical equation that captures every aspect of the universe, then we believe that the truth about the universe lies outside the universe.

Lee Smolin
The hypothesis underlying all approaches to the landscape is that there is a cosmological setting in which different regions or epochs of the universe can have different effective laws. This implies the existence of spacetime regions not directly observable... These regions must either be in the past of our big bang, or far enough away from us to be causally unrelated.

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

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

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

Lee Smolin