Top 26 Quotes & Sayings by Lee Smolin

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American physicist Lee Smolin.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Lee Smolin is an American theoretical physicist, a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a member of the graduate faculty of the philosophy department at the University of Toronto. Smolin's 2006 book The Trouble with Physics criticized string theory as a viable scientific theory. He has made contributions to quantum gravity theory, in particular the approach known as loop quantum gravity. He advocates that the two primary approaches to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity and string theory, can be reconciled as different aspects of the same underlying theory. His research interests also include cosmology, elementary particle theory, the foundations of quantum mechanics, and theoretical biology.

American - Physicist | Born: 1955

Source: Wikipedia

How we think about the future and the past determines everything about how we think about our situation as human beings.

Lee Smolin

Science moves fastest when there's plenty of debate and controversy.

Lee Smolin

There certainly is a tension between the relativity of simultaneity and non-locality in quantum theory, but it's not strong enough to add up to a falsification of either side by itself.

Lee Smolin

If string theory is a mistake, it's not a trivial mistake. It's a deep mistake and therefore kind of worthy.

Lee Smolin

When we human beings hypothesize that a law of nature holds - even temporarily or situationally - we are creating an idea, but we are also making a hypothesis about how nature behaves, whose truth or usefulness has nothing to do with what we know or believe.

Lee Smolin

General relativity predicts that time ends inside black holes because the gravitational collapse squeezes matter to infinite density.

Lee Smolin

Every string theory that's been written down says the speed of light is universal. But other ideas about quantum gravity predict the speed of light has actually increased.

Lee Smolin

We know that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, which means a number called the cosmological constant must be positive.

Lee Smolin

We know no more than we did in 1975 - and that's not good

Lee Smolin

Just like an ordinary guitar string, a fundamental string can vibrate in different modes. And it is these different modes of vibration of the string that are understood in string theory as being the different elementary particles.

Lee Smolin

There is nothing outside the universe.

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

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

A successful unification of quantum theory and relativity would necessarily be a theory of the universe as a whole. It would tell us, as Aristotle and Newton did before, what space and time are, what the cosmos is, what things are made of, and what kind of laws those things obey. Such a theory will bring about a radical shift - a revolution - in our understanding of what nature is. It must also have wide repercussions, and will likely bring about, or contribute to, a shift in our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the rest of the universe.

Lee Smolin

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

Lee Smolin

Surprise is inherent in the structure of the world.

Lee Smolin

It can no longer be maintained that the properties of any one thing in the universe are independent of the existence or non-existence of everything else. It is, at last, no longer sensible to speak of a universe with only one thing in it.

Lee Smolin

One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.

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

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

Lee Smolin

The page of my notebook was filled with many messy integrals, but all of a sudden I saw emerge a formula for counting. I had begun to calculate a quantity on the assumption that the result was a real number, but found instead that, in certain units, all the possible answers would be integers. This meant that areas and volumes cannot take any value, but come in multiples of fixed units.

Lee Smolin

Having begun my life in science searching for the equation beyond time, I now believe that the deepest secret of the universe is that its essence rests in how it unfolds moment by moment in time.

Lee Smolin

But in spite of the obvious effectiveness of mathematics in physics, I have never heard of a good a prioriargument that the world must be organised to mathematical principles.

Lee Smolin

Simplicity and beauty are the signs not of truth but of a well-constructed approximate model of a limited domain of phenomena.

Lee Smolin

The revolution which began with the creation of quantum theory and relativity theory can only be finished with their unification into a single theory that can give us a single, comprehensive picture of nature.

Lee Smolin

Science is not about what's true or what might be true, science is about what people with originally diverse viewpoints can be forced to believe by the weight of public evidence.

Lee Smolin

Top 26 Quotes & Sayings by Lee Smolin

Related Authors