Lee Smolin - Background Quotes

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

Lee Smolin