Lee Smolin Quotes

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

If we believe that the task of physics is the discovery of a timeless mathematical equation that captures every aspect of the universe, then we believe that the truth about the universe lies outside the universe.

In both quantum theory and general relativity, we encounter predictions of physically sensible quantities becoming infinite. This is likely the way that nature punishes impudent theorists who dare to break her unity. ...If infinities are signs of missing unification, a unified theory will have none. It will be what we call a finite theory.

Relativity and... quantum... remain incomplete. ...the main reason each is incomplete is the existence of the other. The mind calls for a third theory to unify all of physics, and for a simple reason. Nature is... "unified." …interconnected, in that everything interacts with everything else.

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

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.

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.

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

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...

Jacob Bekenstein found... in 1971 that every black hole must have an entropy proportional to the area of its horizon... Stephen Hawking then refined this by showing that the constant of proportionality must be... exactly one quarter. ...entropy is supposed to correspond to a measure of information ...Loop quantum gravity... [gives] a detailed description of the microscopic structure of a black hole. ...a horizon can have, for each quantized unit of area, a finite number of states. Counting them, we get exactly Bekenstein's result...

From the beginning of physics, there have been those who imagined they would be the last generation to face the unknown. Physics has always seemed to its practitioners to be almost complete. This complacency is shattered only during revolutions, when honest people are forced to admit that they don't know the basics.

While most people... were seeking to modify the principles of either relativity or quantum theory, we surprised ourselves (and many other people) by succeeding in putting them together without modifying their principles.

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.

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

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