Lee Smolin > Quotes

“One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.”
― 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, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next

“But what is equally important, and sobering, is how often we fool ourselves. And we fool ourselves not only individually but en masse. The tendency of a group of human beings to quickly come to believe something that its individual members will later see as obviously false is truly amazing. Some of the worst tragedies of the last century happened because well-meaning people fell for easy solutions proposed by bad leaders.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next

“The most cherished goal in physics, as in bad romance novels, is unification.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next

“When it comes to revolutionizing science, what matters is quality of thought, not quantity of true believers.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next

“Do you want a revolution in science? Do what businesspeople do when they want a technological revolution: Just change the rules a bit. Let in a few revolutionaries. Make the hierarchy a bit flatter, to give the young people more scope and freedom. Create some opportunities for high-risk/high-payoff people, so as to balance the huge investment you made in low-risk, incremental science. The technology companies and investment banks use this strategy. Why not try it in academia? The payoff could be discovering how the universe works.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next

“By the time I began my study of physics in the early 1970s, the idea of unifying gravity with the other forces was as dead as the idea of continuous matter. It was a lesson in the foolishness of once great thinkers. Ernst Mach didn’t believe in atoms, James Clerk Maxwell believed in the aether, and Albert Einstein searched for a unified-field theory. Life is tough.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next

“Good ideas are not taken seriously enough when they come from people of low status in the academic world; conversely, the ideas of high-status people are often taken too seriously.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next

“Whatever is real in our universe is real in a moment of time, which is one of a succession of moments. The past was real but is no longer real. We can, however, interpret and analyze the past, because we find evidence of past processes in the present. The future does not yet exist and is therefore open. We can reasonably infer some predictions, but we cannot predict the future completely. Indeed, the future can produce phenomena that are genuinely novel, in the sense that no knowledge of the past could have anticipated them. Nothing transcends time, not even the laws of nature. Laws are not timeless. Like everything else, they are features of the present, and they can evolve over time.”
― Lee Smolin, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe

“Space and time emerge from the laws rather than providing an arena in which things happen.”
― Lee Smolin

“On the way, I shared the backseat of Feyerabend's little sports car with the inflatable raft he kept there in case an 8-point earthquake came while he was on the Bay Bridge.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next

“Without having navigated waters shallow enough for us to see bottom, we’ll be easy prey to mystifiers who want to sell us radical metaphysical fantasies in the guise of science.”
― Lee Smolin, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe

“So, in the end, the most improbable and hence the most puzzling aspect of space is its very existence. The simple fact that we live in an apparently smooth and regular three dimensional world represents one of the greatest challenges to the developing quantum theory of gravity. If you look around at the world seekimg mystery, you may reflect that one of the biggest mysteries is that we live in a world in which it is possible to look around, and see as far as we like. The great triumph of the quantum theory of gravity may be that it will explain to us why this is so.”
― Lee Smolin, Three Roads To Quantum Gravity

“Science is not about what’s true. It’s about what people with originally diverse viewpoints can be forced to believe by way of public evidence.”
― Lee Smolin

“The dark-matter hypothesis is preferred mostly because the only other possibility—that we are wrong about Newton’s laws, and by extension general relativity—is too scary to contemplate.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next

“These two discoveries, of relativity and of the quantum, each required us to break definitively with Newtonian physics. However, in spite of great progress over the century, they remain incomplete. Each has defects that point to a deeper theory. But the main reason each is incomplete is the existence of the other.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next

“The current crisis in particle physics springs from the fact that the theories have gone beyond the standard model in the last thirty years fall into two categories. Some were falsifiable, and they were falsified. The rest are untested-either because they make no clean predictions or because the predictions they do make are not testable with current technology. Over the last three decades, theorists have proposed at least a dozen new approaches. Each approach is motivated by a compelling hypothesis, but none has so far succeeded. In the realm of particle physics, these include Technicolor, preon models, and supersymmetry. In the realm of spacetime, they include twistor theory, causal sets, supergravity, dynamical triangulations, and loop quantum gravity. Some of these ideas are as exotic as they sound”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next

“Over the last three decades, theorists have proposed at least a dozen new approaches. Each approach is motivated by a compelling hypothesis, but none has so far succeeded. In the realm of particle physics, these include Technicolor, preon models, and supersymmetry. In the realm of spacetime, they include twistor theory, causal sets, supergravity, dynamical triangulations, and loop quantum gravity. Some of these ideas are as exotic as they sound.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next

“Quantum theory can be described as a new kind of language to be used in a dialogue between us and the systems we study with our instruments. This quantum language contains verbs that refer to our preparations and measurements and nouns that refer to what is then seen. It tells us nothing about what the world would be like in our absence.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next

“The full story of the invention of the matrix form of quantum mechanics is far more complex than I can tell here, as it reveals a very dynamic, collective effort of a diverse community of theorists, in close interaction. Still, diverse as they were, the matrix mechanicians were by 1927 all framing the new theory in terms of the radically anti-realist philosophy that Bohr preached. The only holdouts were those who had come to quantum mechanics through the wave-particle duality, Einstein, de Broglie, and Schrödinger, who stubbornly remained realists. But once it was proved that Schrödinger’s wave mechanics was equivalent to Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics, the realists could be dismissed as stubbornly grasping on to old metaphysical fantasies, and ignored.”
― Lee Smolin, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum

“The story I will tell could be read by some as a tragedy. To put it bluntly—and to give away the punch line—we have failed. We inherited a science, physics, that had been progressing so fast for so long that it was often taken as the model for how other kinds of science should be done. For more than two centuries, until the present period, our understanding of the laws of nature expanded rapidly. But today, despite our best efforts, what we know for certain about these laws is no more than what we knew back in the 1970s. How unusual is it for three decades to pass without major progress in fundamental physics? Even if we look back more than two hundred years, to a time when science was the concern mostly of wealthy amateurs, it is unprecedented.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next

“if physics is much simpler to describe under the assumption that space is discrete, rather than continuous, is not this fact itself a strong argument for space being discrete? If so, then might space look, on some very small scale, something like Wilson's lattice.”
― Lee Smolin, Three Roads To Quantum Gravity

“The use of spontaneous symmetry breaking in a fundamental theory was to have profound consequences, not just for the laws of nature but for the larger question of what a law of nature is. Before this, it was thought that the properties of the elementary particles are determined directly by eternally given laws of nature. But in a theory with spontaneous symmetry breaking, a new element enters, which is that the properties of the elementary particles depend in part on history and environment. The symmetry may break in different ways, depending on conditions like density and temperature. More generally, the properties of the elementary particles depend not just on the equations of the theory but on which solution to those equations applies to our universe.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next

“Recent measurements reveal a universe consisting mostly of the unknown. Fully 70 percent of the matter density appears to be in the form of dark energy. Twenty-six percent is dark matter. Only 4 percent is ordinary matter. So less than 1 part in 20 is made out of matter we have observed experimentally or described in the standard model of particle physics. Of the other 96 percent, apart from the properties just mentioned, we know absolutely nothing.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next

“The search for the meaning of temperature and entropy of matter led to the discovery of atoms. The search for the meaning of the temperature and entropy of radiation led to the discovery of quanta. In just the same way, the search for the meaning of the temperature and entropy of a black hole is now leading to the discovery of the atomic structure of space and time.”
― Lee Smolin, Three Roads To Quantum Gravity

“One quantum theory of the atom is great, but two are a problem, especially since they both reproduced the right spectrum of hydrogen. The two theories could not have differed more, as reflects the philosophies of their discoverers. Einstein, de Broglie, and Schrödinger were realists. Even if there were mysteries, they believed an electron was real and somehow existed as both wave and particle. Bohr and Heisenberg were enthusiastic anti-realists who believed we have no access to reality, only to tables of numbers which represent the interactions with the atom, but not the atom directly.”
― Lee Smolin, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum

“Leibniz had a vision of a world in which everything lives not in space but immersed in a network of relationships.”
― Lee Smolin, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe

“We live in a world in which it is impossible to anticipate most of the contingencies that will arise. Neither the political context, nor the inventions, nor the fashions, nor the weather, nor the climate are precisely specifiable in advance. There is, in the real world, no possibility of working with an abstract space of all the contingencies that may evolve. To do real economics, without mythological elements, we need a theoretical framework in which time is real and the future is not specifiable in advance, even in principle. It is only in such a theoretical context that the full scope of our power to construct our future can make sense.”
― Lee Smolin, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe

“Whatever is happening on very small scales near the horizon of the black hole will be enlarged by the effect whereby the wavelengths of light are stretched as the light climbs up to us. This means that jf we can observe light coming from very close to the horizon of a black hole, we may be able to see the quantum structure of space itself.”
― Lee Smolin, Three Roads To Quantum Gravity

“There was a sense that the one true theory had been discovered. Nothing else was important or worth thinking about. Seminars devoted to string theory sprang up at many of the major universities and research institutes. At Harvard, the string theory seminar was called the Postmodern Physics seminar.
This appellation was not meant ironically.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next