“One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.”
― Lee Smolin
“Some string theorists prefer to believe that string theory is too arcane to be understood by human beings, rather than consider the possibility that it might just be wrong.”
― Lee Smolin
“The most cherished goal in physics, as in bad romance novels, is unification.”
― Lee Smolin
“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 a unified-field theory. Life is tough.”
― Lee Smolin
“Space and time emerge from the laws rather than providing an arena in which things happen.”
― 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."
― Lee Smolin
"Surprise is inherent in the structure of the world."
― Lee Smolin
"Simplicity and beauty are the signs not of truth but of a well-constructed approximate model of a limited domain of phenomena."
― Lee Smolin
"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."
― Lee Smolin
"But in spite of the obvious effectiveness of mathematics in physics, I have never heard of a good a priori argument that the world must be organised to mathematical principles."
― Lee Smolin