Lee Smolin

Lee Smolin at Harvard University

Lee Smolin (born June 6, 1955 in New York City , USA ) is an American theoretical physicist .

life and work

Smolin attended Hampshire College , where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1975, and Harvard University , where he received his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1979 with Sidney Coleman and Stanley Deser . From 1980 to 1981 he was at the University of California, Santa Barbara , then until 1983 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , from 1983 to 1984 at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago , from 1984 to 1988 Assistant Professor at Yale University , from 1988 until 1993 professor at Syracuse University and then at Pennsylvania State University . He is currently working at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada .

Smolin made significant contributions to loop quantum gravity and advocates the thesis that the two main approaches to quantum gravity , loop quantum gravity and string theory, can be merged into a single underlying theory.

In 2007 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society and in 2010 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada .

Cosmological inheritance

Lee Smolin developed in his book Why Does the World Exist? the idea of ​​a cosmological inheritance , which should make a contribution to fundamental cosmological and physical questions such as the fine-tuning of the natural constants . He assumes that massive black holes in a universe will give rise to new “baby universes” that could take on the essential properties of the “mother universes”. This could lead to a “cosmological evolution” in which “successful” universes (e.g. in terms of longevity and thus the possibility of creating more black holes) prevail over others.

Although this idea has been taken up again and again by other scholars such as John D. Barrow , Brian Greene, and Martin Rees and discussed in their books, it has not yet found recognized dissemination.

Works

• Why does the world exist? ( The life of the cosmos ). Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1997, ISBN 0-297-81727-2 .
• Three roads to quantum gravity . BasicBooks, New York 2001, ISBN 0-465-07835-4 .
• The future of physics: problems of string theory and how it goes ( The trouble with physics: the rise of string theory, the fall of a science, and what comes next ). Houghton Mifflin, Boston (Mass.) 2006, ISBN 0-618-55105-0 . ( The Trouble with Physics )
• Atoms of space and time, Scientific American, January 2004
• Time reborn - from the crisis in physics to the future of the universe. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston 2013, ISBN 978-0-547-51172-6 .
  • German by Jürgen Schröder : In the universe of time. On the way to a new understanding of the cosmos . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-421-04575-1 .
• Einstein's Unfinished Revolution. The search for what lies beyond the quantum. Penguin Press, New York 2019.
  • German by Jürgen Schröder : Quantum World. How we think through to the end of what began with Einstein . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-421-04686-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ The Royal Society of Canada (RSC) New Fellows 2010. Accessed September 20, 2016 . 

Web links

Wikiquote: Lee Smolin  - Quotes

• Literature by and about Lee Smolin in the catalog of the German National Library
• Lee Smolin's homepage at the Perimeter Institute
• Publications by Lee Smolin at SPIRES
• Lee Smolin . In: arXiv.org
• The Evolution of the Laws of Physics Colloquium Series @ SETI-Institut , June 2013, accessed on September 27, 2013