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… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“The use of spontaneous symmetry breaking in a fundamental theory was to have profound consequences, not just for the laws of nature but for the larger question of what a law of nature is. Before this, it was thought that… — Lee Smolin Copy Share
“This unification of forces and motion has a simple consequence. In a particle theory, you can freely add all kinds of forces, so there is nothing to prevent a proliferation of constants describing the workings of each force. But in string theory, there can be only two fundamental constants. One, called the string tension, describes how much energy is contained… — Lee Smolin Copy Share
“One field Faraday studied was the electric field. This is not a number but a vector, which we may visualize as an arrow and which can vary its direction and length. Imagine such an arrow at each point of space. Imagine that the ends of the arrows at nearby points are attached to one another ny rubber bands. If I… — Lee Smolin Copy Share
“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 theory is required to have both open and closed strings. But this means it must include gravity. And the difference between gravity and the other forces is naturally explained, in terms of the difference between open… — Lee Smolin Copy Share
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 are at least doubled. A new superpartner is simply postulated to go along with each known particle. Not only are there squarks and sleptons and photinos, there are also sneutrinos to partner the neutrinos, Higgsinos with… — Lee Smolin Copy Share
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 small six-dimensional geometry over each point. They chose the geometry of the six wrapped-up dimensions to be one of the Calabi-Yau spaces (see Chapter 8). As noted, there are at least a hundred thousand of these,… — Lee Smolin Copy Share
“The current crisis in particle physics springs from the fact that the theories have gone beyond the standard model in the last thirty years fall into two categories. Some were falsifiable, and they were falsified. The rest are untested-either because they make no clean predictions or because the predictions they do make are not testable with current technology. Over the… — Lee Smolin Copy Share
“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… — Lee Smolin Copy Share
“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
