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, […]

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 […]

From The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin. [T]here is no mystery or symmetry needed to explain why the air is spread uniformly in a room.  Each atom moves randomly, it is just the statistics of enormous numbers.  Perhaps the greatest nightmare of the Platonist is that, in the end, all of our laws […]

The Life of the Cosmos If we restrict ourselves to proposals which are falsifiable, what kind of explanations are available to us?  In the history of science there have been two kinds of explanation which generally succeeded: explanations in terms of general principles; and explanations in terms of history.  We are used to believing that […]