Quotes from Lee Smolin

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

When it comes to revolutionizing science, what matters is quality of thought, not quantity of true believers.

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.

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.

Space and time emerge from the laws rather than providing an arena in which things happen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

there is nothing real or true that is timeless

Leibniz had a vision of a world in which everything lives not in space but immersed in a network of relationships.

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

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.

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.