Lee Smolin Short Quotes

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

Lee Smolin
Spacetime... turns out to be discrete, described by a structure called spin foam.

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

Lee Smolin
Those who do good science do so because they choose problems that are suited to them.

Lee Smolin
There is no fixed, eternal frame to the universe to define what may or may not exist.

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

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

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

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

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

Lee Smolin
Science is, above everything else, a search for an understanding of our relationship with the rest of the universe.

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
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
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
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
String theory seems to be incompatible with a world in which a cosmological constant has a positive sign, which is what the observations indicate.

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

Lee Smolin
Combine general relativity and quantum theory into a single theory that can claim to be the complete theory of nature. This is called the problem of 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
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
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