Smolin's Quotes

#1. Smolin's idea, expounded in The Life of the Cosmos, hinges

Richard Dawkins

#2. 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

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

Lee Smolin

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

Lee Smolin

#5. 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

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

Lee Smolin

#7. There is nothing outside the universe

Lee Smolin

#8. What we have, in fact, is not a theory at all but a large collection of approximate calculations, together with a web of conjectures that, if true, point to the existence of a theory.

Lee Smolin

#9. 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

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

Lee Smolin

#11. The fact that the amount of missing information depends on the area of the boundary of the trapped region is a very important clue.

Lee Smolin

#12. 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

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

Lee Smolin

#14. 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

#15. Copernicus, 1996). Julian

Lee Smolin

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Because string theory is such a high-risk venture - unsupported by experiment,

Lee Smolin

#19. My heart is the sad fact of time moving irreversibly forward. My heart is a demiurge, freely allegiant, an anchor in the void.

Barry Smolin

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. Expressed in Planck units, the temperature T of a black hole is inversely proportional to its mass, m. This is a third law, Hawking's law: T = k/m. The constant k is very small in normal units. As a result, astrophysical black holes have temperatures of a very small fractionnof a degree.

Lee Smolin

#24. 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

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

Lee Smolin

#26. 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

#27. If a surface can be seen as a kind of channel through which information flows from one region of space to another, then the area of the surface is a measure of its capacity to transmit information. This is very suggestive.

Lee Smolin

#28. Surprise is inherent in the structure of the world.

Lee Smolin

#29. 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

#30. The most cherished goal in physics, as in bad romance novels, is unification.

Lee Smolin

#31. there is nothing real or true that is timeless

Lee Smolin

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

Lee Smolin

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

Lee Smolin

#34. (Of course, there really is no chicken and egg problem; certainly there were eggs long before there were chickens.)

Lee Smolin

#35. Some of its proponents like to say that string theory is a piece of twenty-first- century mathematics that has, by our good fortune, fallen into our hands in the twentieth century.

Lee Smolin

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

Lee Smolin

#37. 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

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

Lee Smolin