“The loop approach to quantum gravity is now a thriving field of research. Many of the older ideas, such as supergravity and… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“During the life of a black hole, it will pull in huge amounts of matter, carrying huge amounts of intrinsic information. At… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“Many of the important principles in twentieth century physics are expressed as limitations on what we can know. Einstein's principle of relativity… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“So we may now pose a question which could be answered only if we have a quantum theory of gravity. What is… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“The entropy of the hot radiation she observes as a result of her acceleration turns out to be exactly proportional to the… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“Similarly, a law of physics that allows information to be converted into geometry, and vice versa, but gives no account of why,… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“The search for the meaning of temperature and entropy of matter led to the discovery of atoms. The search for the meaning… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
General relativity predicts that time ends inside black holes because the gravitational collapse squeezes matter to infinite density. — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“Both loop quantum gravity and string theory assert that there is an atomic structure to space. In the next two chapters we… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“Expressed in Planck units, the temperature T of a black hole is inversely proportional to its mass, m. This is a third… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“For simple black holes, which do not rotate and have no electric charge, the values of the temperature and entropy can be… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“General relativity has a problem with infinities because inside a black hole the density of matter and the strength of the gravitational… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“Whatever is happening on very small scales near the horizon of the black hole will be enlarged by the effect whereby the… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“This unification of forces and motion has a simple consequence. In a particle theory, you can freely add all kinds of forces, so there… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“One field Faraday studied was the electric field. This is not a number but a vector, which we may visualize as an arrow and… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“It is interesting to note that the quantum-mechanical revolution was made by a virtually orphaned generation of scientists. Many members of the generation above… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“In fact, the particle-antiparticle annihilation and the closing of the string is necessary, if the theory is to be consistent with relativity, meaning the… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
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… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“Unfortunately, no one has ever successfully postulated a super-symmetry holding between two known particles. Instead, in all the supersymmetric theories the numbers of particles… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
Those who do good science do so because they choose problems that are suited to them. — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“Here's a simplified version of what the Stanford group did. They started with a much-studied kind of string theory-a flat four-dimensional spacetime with a… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“The current crisis in particle physics springs from the fact that the theories have gone beyond the standard model in the last thirty years… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“By the time I began my study of physics in the early 1970s, the idea of unifying gravity with the other forces was as… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“These two discoveries, of relativity and of the quantum, each required us to break definitively with Newtonian physics. However, in spite of great progress… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“So the challenge for any quantum theory of gravity is to give us a deeper understanding of Bekenstein's entropy and Hawking's temperature.” — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
