Lee Smolin - Space Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

View all Lee Smolin Quotes
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 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
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
The geometry of space changes when things in the universe change their relationships to one another.

Lee Smolin
Time is described only in terms of change in the network of relationships that describes space.

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
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
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