Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe

by Lee Smolin

Heraclitus, who, barely a few steps into the epic story that is science, had the wisdom to warn us that “Nature loves to hide.”

There’s a lesson here, which is that neither mathematical beauty nor agreement with experiment can guarantee that the ideas a theory is based on bear the slightest relation to reality.

Bohr proclaimed that the purpose of a scientific theory is not to describe nature but to give us rules for manipulating objects in the world and a language we can use to communicate the results.

This is the gift of space; almost everything is far away from us and can be ignored for the time being.