25 quotes
String theory seems to be incompatible with a world in which a cosmological constant has a positive sign, which is what the observations indicate.
Loop Quantum Gravity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)
There are unfortunately not a few good professional physicists who still think about the world as if space and time had an absolute meaning.
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)
Is the flow of time something real, or might our sense of time passing be just an illusion that hides the fact that what is real is only a vast collection of memories?
There is nothing beyond the world except what we see, no background to it except its particular history.
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)
I believe that the main lesson of relativity and quantum theory is that the world is nothing but an evolving network of relationships.
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)
Time is described only in terms of change in the network of relationships that describes space.
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)
We seem to have an ingrained idea that if something is valuable, it exists outside of time.
Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2013)
It is absurd in general relativity to speak of a universe in which nothing happens.
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)
The geometry of space changes when things in the universe change their relationships to one another.
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)
There is no fixed, eternal frame to the universe to define what may or may not exist.
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)
The suggestion was that a positive energy proof for general relativity could be gotten by restricting supergravity to its bosonic sector, which is general relativity.
Positive energy in quantum gravity" arXiv (2014)
Combine general relativity and quantum theory into a single theory that can claim to be the complete theory of nature. This is called the problem of quantum gravity.
The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (2007)
We are the result of processes much more complicated than the small aspects of our lives and societies over which we have some control.
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)
Spacetime... turns out to be discrete, described by a structure called spin foam.
Loop Quantum Gravity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)
In quantum theory, distance is inverse to energy, because you need particles of very high energy to probe very short distances. The inverse of the Planck energy is the Planck length.
Loop Quantum Gravity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)
The landscape problem and the problem of background independence are closely linked. The latter is the only route the former has to experimental confirmation.
A perspective on the landscape problem" arXiv (2012)
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.
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)
I... propose that time and its passage are fundamental and real and the hopes and beliefs about timeless truths and timeless realms are mythology.
Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2013)
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.
Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2013)
Having begun my life in science searching for the equation beyond time, I now believe that the deepest secret of the universe is that its essence rests in how it unfolds moment by moment in time.
Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2013)