Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe
Lee Smolin
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Whatever is real in our universe is real in a moment of time, which is one of a succession of moments. The past was real but is no longer real. We can, however, interpret and analyze the past, because we find evidence of past processes in the present. The future does not yet exist and is therefore open. We can reasonably infer some predictions, but we cannot predict the future completely. Indeed, the future can produce phenomena that are genuinely novel, in the sense that no knowledge of the past could have anticipated them. Nothing transcends time, not even the laws of nature. Laws are not timeless. Like everything else, they are features of the present, and they can evolve over time.”
“Without having navigated waters shallow enough for us to see bottom, we’ll be easy prey to mystifiers who want to sell us radical metaphysical fantasies in the guise of science.”
“Leibniz had a vision of a world in which everything lives not in space but immersed in a network of relationships.”
“We live in a world in which it is impossible to anticipate most of the contingencies that will arise. Neither the political context, nor the inventions, nor the fashions, nor the weather, nor the climate are precisely specifiable in advance. There is, in the real world, no possibility of working with an abstract space of all the contingencies that may evolve. To do real economics, without mythological elements, we need a theoretical framework in which time is real and the future is not specifiable in advance, even in principle. It is only in such a theoretical context that the full scope of our power to construct our future can make sense.”
“laws they share some aspects of cosmological natural selection. One reason that cosmological scenarios with evolving laws succeed in making real predictions is that they don’t rely on the anthropic principle—which states that we can live only in a universe”
“Whatever we most admire and look up to—God, the truths of mathematics, the laws of nature—is endowed with an existence that transcends time. We act inside time but judge our actions by timeless standards. As a result of this paradox, we live in a state of alienation from what we most value. This alienation affects every one of our aspirations.”
“On a personal level, to think in time is to accept the uncertainty of life as the necessary price of being alive. To rebel against the precariousness of life, to reject uncertainty, to adopt a zero tolerance to risk, to imagine that life can be organized to completely eliminate danger, is to think outside time. To be human is to live suspended between danger and opportunity.”
“Newton’s concept of space was the opposite, for he understood space to be absolute. This means atoms are defined by where they are in space but space is in no way affected by the motion of atoms. In a relational world, there are no such asymmetries. Things are defined by their relationships. Individuals exist, and they may be partly autonomous, but their possibilities are determined by the network of relationships. Individuals encounter and perceive one another through the links that connect them within the network, and the networks are dynamic and ever evolving.”
“But another possibility is that a neutron star’s center contains exotic particles called kaons. This would lower the critical mass compared”
“Any feature of the world at a future time can be computed from the configuration of the present. That is, the passage of time can be replaced by a computation, which means that the future is logically a consequence of the present.”
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Book Keywords:
physics, time
