42 Quotes by Lee Smolin

Deep, persistent problems are never solved by accident; they are solved only by people who are obsessed with them and set out to solve them directly.

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.

There is nothing outside the universe.

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.

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

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.

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.

To understand what we mean when we say that space is discrete, we must put our minds completely into the relational way of thinking, and really try to see and feel the world around us as nothing but a network of evolving relationships. These relationships are not among things situated in space – they are among the events that make up the history of the world. The relationships define the space, not the other way around.

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.