Lee Smolin Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

Each black hole is a bud that leads to a new universe of moments.

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
Is the flow of time something real, or might our sense of time passing be just an illusion that hides the fact that what is real is only a vast collection of memories?

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
We are the result of processes much more complicated than the small aspects of our lives and societies over which we have some control.

Lee Smolin
Just like an ordinary guitar string, a fundamental string can vibrate in different modes. And it is these different modes of vibration of the string that are understood in string theory as being the different elementary particles.

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
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
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
It can no longer be maintained that the properties of any one thing in the universe are independent of the existence or non-existence of everything else. It is, at last, no longer sensible to speak of a universe with only one thing in it.

Lee Smolin
It is absurd in general relativity to speak of a universe in which nothing happens.

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
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
I was joined by Carlo Rovelli, and we were able to make a full-fledged quantum theory of gravity... This became loop quantum gravity.

Lee Smolin
The suggestion was that a positive energy proof for general relativity could be gotten by restricting supergravity to its bosonic sector, which is general relativity.

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.

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
The positive energy theorem was for half a century or more an open challenge to relativists. Many attempts were made to prove flat spacetime was stable, but none completely succeeded completely until a majestic tour de force of geometric reasoning of Shoen and Yau. This was followed two years later by a proof of Witten, which was as elegant as it was short. It is this proof of Witten's that we take as a template here for the quantum theory.

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

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
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
We show that some known classical results have particularly simple derivations within the Ashtekar formalism. These include Witten's positive energy theorem...

Lee Smolin
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
The landscape problem represents a serious problem in the development of science. Its solution requires... the construction of speculative cosmological scenarios, which posit regions or epochs of our universe for which we presently have no observable evidence. Nonetheless we must insist on taking seriously only scenarios and hypotheses that make falsifiable or strongly verifiable predictions, otherwise people can just make stuff up and the distinction between science and mythology becomes porous.... there are already candidate solutions that make real, falsifiable predictions.

Lee Smolin
I believe that the main lesson of relativity and quantum theory is that the world is nothing but an evolving network of relationships.

Lee Smolin
To be human is to be suspended between danger and opportunity.... The challenge of life is to choose wisely, from the enormous number of possible dangers, what's worth worrying about. It is also about choosing, from all the opportunities... always in the face of incomplete knowledge of the consequences.

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
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
The geometry of space changes when things in the universe change their relationships to one another.

Lee Smolin