Quotes from 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.

Because string theory is such a high-risk venture—unsupported by experiment, though very generously supported by the academic

Whatever we most admire and look up to—God, the truths of mathematics, the laws of nature—is endowed with an existence that transcends time. We act inside time but judge our actions by timeless standards. As a result of this paradox, we live in a state of alienation from what we most value. This alienation affects every one of our aspirations.

So the challenge for any quantum theory of gravity is to give us a deeper understanding of Bekenstein's entropy and Hawking's temperature.

So we may now pose a question which could be answered only if we have a quantum theory of gravity. What is the nature of the information trapped in a quantum black hole? Keep this in mind as we go ahead and explore the different approaches to quantum gravity, for a good test of a theory of quantum gravity is how well it is able to answer this question.

Quantum mechanics has to be expanded, to allow for many different descriptions, depending on who the observer is.

a universe in thermal equilibrium, in which nothing happened except random motion of the atoms, would have no clock.

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.

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