Lee Smolin: Trending quotes (page 3)

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Lee Smolin: 104   quotes 1   like

“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

as quoted by Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (2000)

Sense , Memory , Time

“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

Describing work with Ted Jacobson
"Loop Quantum Gravity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Time

“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.”

Lee Smolin

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (2007)

Way , Nature

“In quantum theory, distance is inverse to energy, because you need particles of very high energy to probe very short distances. The inverse of the Planck energy is the Planck length.”

Lee Smolin

"Loop Quantum Gravity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“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

"Loop Quantum Gravity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Study , Time , Dependency

“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 book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity

Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)

World

“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.”

Lee Smolin book The Life of the Cosmos

The Life of the Cosmos (1997)

Disappointment , Search , Communication , Idea

“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 book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity

Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)

Change , Time

“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

"A perspective on the landscape problem" arXiv (Feb 15, 2012)

Search

“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

"Loop Quantum Gravity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

World

“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.”

Lee Smolin

"Loop Quantum Gravity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

People

“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

"Positive energy in quantum gravity" arXiv (Jun 10, 2014)