The Life of the Cosmos Quotes

“(Of course, there really is no chicken and egg problem; certainly there were eggs long before there were chickens.)”
― Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos

“a universe in thermal equilibrium, in which nothing happened except random motion of the atoms, would have no clock.”
― Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos

“To quote Richard Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker, “The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is, in principle, capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. Even if the evidence did not favor it, it would still be the best theory available.” The”
― Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos

“Although it is hard to visualize a landscape in a space of high dimensions, the more the number of parameters, the more likely it is that a walk of any finite distance, taken in a random direction from a place near the summit of a mountain, will go down rather than up. Thus, we may conclude that, if the hypotheses made here are true, most changes in the parameters of the laws of physics will decrease the rate at which black holes are produced in our universe. Because of this, the theory I am sketching here is actually subject to observational test.”
― Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos

“But Einstein was not the best mathematician around, and others, undeterred by neither the difficulty of the equations nor the war that was ravaging Europe (this was 1916), were able to find solutions. Some of the most important solutions ever found—those that describe the gravitational fields of stars and black holes—were written down by a German officer named Karl Schwarzchild as he lay dying in a field hospital of a skin disease he had picked up in the trenches.”
― Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos

“I first began to worry about this during the summer of 1989, when it began to be clear that string theory would not quickly lead to a unique theory of everything. Henry Tye, a string theorist from Cornell University, had told me of his computer program to produce new string theories. When you run Tye’s program, you input a rough description of a universe you would like to describe. You tell it the dimension of spacetime, and something about how the world should look. It outputs all the string theories it can construct that lead to the world you requested, one per page.”
― Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos

“Indeed, as string theory was understood better, it became clear that the gauge interactions naturally emerged from it. But even more than this, during their period of exile from the mainstream, the string theorists realized that their theory naturally gave rise to an interaction that had all of the hallmarks of the gravitational force. In order to get the force to come out with the right strength, all they had to do was fix the length of the string to be about the Planck length. Thus, string theory had the potential to unify all of physics in a simple framework, in which all phenomena arise from the motion and vibrations of fundamental one-dimensional strings.”
― Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos

“Of course, there are many artists — and many "intellectuals" who write about art — who are still caught in the trap of Nietzsche, playing with death and violence and negativity, playing out the death of some old and obsolete notions of the world. But these people are more and more irrelevant; what's interesting is that some artists have understood that the world's not going to end soon, that the twenty-first century is going to be an extraordinary time, and that the time is now to begin imagining what direction the human community may go in”
― Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos

“the logic of life is continual change, continual motion, continual evolution.”
― Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos

“This means that for most values of the parameters, black holes, if they form at all, do not form by the collapse of stars. From this we can draw the conclusion that the rate at which black holes form is strongly dependent on the parameters. A universe such as ours makes as many as 1018 black holes. A universe roughly like ours, but without atomic nuclei or stars, would make many fewer. But, as we discussed in that chapter, the range of parameters for which atomic nuclei, and hence stars, exist is rather small. From this we may conclude that there are small ranges of parameters for which a universe will produce many more black holes than for other values. Now, I reach into the collection and pick out a universe out at random. It is easy to see that it is much more likely to have come from a universe that itself had many progeny than it is to have come from a universe that had only a few progeny.”
― Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos

“A singularity is a point or region in spacetime at which some physical quantity such as the density of mass or energy, the temperature, or the strength of the gravitational field, becomes infinite. Whenever they happen, they pose serious difficulties for physics because they signal a breakdown in the description of the world in mathematical terms.”
― Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos

“Some of its proponents like to say that string theory is a piece of twenty-first- century mathematics that has, by our good fortune, fallen into our hands in the twentieth century.”
― Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos