Lee Smolin Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

Surprise is inherent in the structure of the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

there is nothing real or true that is timeless

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

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

Copernicus, 1996). Julian

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

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

There is nothing outside the universe