Lee Smolin

Quantum theory can be described as a new kind of language to be used in a dialogue between us and the systems we study with our instruments. ...It tells us nothing about what the world would be like in our absence.

I... propose that time and its passage are fundamental and real and the hopes and beliefs about timeless truths and timeless realms are mythology.

We seem to have an ingrained idea that if something is valuable, it exists outside of time.

To be human is to be suspended between danger and opportunity. ...The challenge of life is to choose wisely, from the enormous number of possible dangers, what's worth worrying about. It is also about choosing, from all the opportunities... always in the face of incomplete knowledge of the consequences.

There is nothing beyond the world except what we see, no background to it except its particular history.

There is no fixed, eternal frame to the universe to define what may or may not exist.

There is no meaning to space that is independent of the relationships among real things of the world. ...Space is nothing apart from the things that exist. ...If we take out all the words we are not left with an empty sentence, we are left with nothing.

Thinking in time is not relativism but a form of relationalism... the truest description of something consists of specifying its relationships to other parts of the system it is part of.

It is absurd in general relativity to speak of a universe in which nothing happens.

In the theory of electric fields it is assumed that points have meaning. ...Physicists using general relativity... cannot speak of a point, except by naming some features of the field lines that will uniquely distinguish that point. ...the network of relationships evolve with time... constantly changing.

In both quantum theory and general relativity, we encounter predictions of physically sensible quantities becoming infinite. This is likely the way that nature punishes impudent theorists who dare to break her unity. ...If infinities are signs of missing unification, a unified theory will have none. It will be what we call a finite theory.

Neither space nor time has any existence outside the system of evolving relationships that comprises the universe. Physicists refer to this feature of general relativity as background independence.