From The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin.

[T]he fact that general relativity and the quantum are not yet united means that we have no single picture of what the world is that we can believe in.  When a child asks, What is the world, we literally have nothing to tell her.

From The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin.

No wonder physics is so hard to learn.  As it is usually taught to students, Newton’s physics does not make complete sense, for they are almost never told the whole story.  Position, velocity, and acceleration are usually introduced as if they have simple and obvious meanings, but the do not.  Even more difficult are the concepts of force and mass; the definitions given of them in textbooks are almost always circular.  The students are seldom told that if they are puzzled it may be for good reason, or that the things that confuse them have been debated for centuries.  Some figure it out for themselves.  Many go away with an unjustified sense that they cannot learn science.

From The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin.

In science, as in politics or love, one can have all the good arguments and still be in the wrong.  When it comes down to it, what matters is not whose story is more logical or beautiful, but which leads to the greatest effect.

From The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin.

Does the world consist of a large number of independently autonomous atoms, the properties of each owing nothing to the others?  Or, instead, is the world a vast, interconnected system of relations, in which even the properties of a single elementary particle or the identity of a point in space requires and reflects the whole rest of the universe? The two views of space and time underlie and imply two very different views of what it means to speak of a property, of identity, or of individuality.  Consequently, the transition from a cosmology based on an absolute notion of space and time to one based on a relational notion – a transition that we are now in the midst of – must have profound implications for our understanding of the place of complexity and life in the universe.