Lee Smolin Quotes

There are unfortunately not a few good professional physicists who still think about the world as if space and time had an absolute meaning.

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

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.

The first principle of cosmology must be 'There is nothing outside the universe'. This is not to exclude religion or mysticism... But if it is knowledge that we desire... we need to seek answers to questions about the things we can see... only things that exist in the universe.

Since the 1960s, particle theory had been split into two groups: those following the atomism of the quark theory and those who had followed the anti-atomism of that had led from the bootstrap program to the string theory. What happened in 1984 was that it was realised that string theory could combine and satisfy the aspirations of both approaches to fundamental physics. Thus, the community of gauge theorists, driven by the failure of the proton decay experiments to search for new ideas that could unify physics, all of a sudden encountered their old friends, the string theorists, in the middle of what might be called a desert of disappointed expectations.

Rule I: Except during a measurement, the wave evolves smoothly and deterministically, like a wave on water. ...
Rule II: During a measurement of position, the wave collapses around the position where it is seen, with a probability proportional to the square of the height of the wave, before the collapse. ...
In fact the two rules seem to contradict each other.

The five big questions in physics
1. How to unify quantum theory and gravity?
2. Does quantum mechanics really make sense?
3. Unify the different forces and particles
4. What sets the masses of the particles?
5. What are the dark matter and energy?

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?