“A common example from physics is of a pencil balanced on its point. It is symmetric, in that while it is balanced on its point, one direction is as good as another. But it is unstable. When the pencil falls,… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“Much of the structure of the world, both social and physical, is a consequence of the requirement that the world, in its actuality, break symmetries present in the space of possibilities. An important feature of this requirement is the trade-off… — 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
“Problem 1: Combine general relativity and quantum theory into a single theory that can claim to be the complete theory of nature. This is… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
“The loop approach to quantum gravity is now a thriving field of research. Many of the older ideas, such as supergravity and the study… — 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 the end,… — Lee Smolin Copy Share Image
