Lee Smolin - Time Quotes

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

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

Lee Smolin