Lee Smolin - Science Quotes

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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
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
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
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
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