李·思莫林

李·斯莫林（英语：Lee Smolin，/ˈsmoʊlɪn/，1955年6月6日—），美国理论物理学家，圆周理论物理研究所的教师，滑铁卢大学兼职物理学教授，多伦多大学哲学系的指导教师。他对量子引力理论做出了贡献，尤其是圈量子引力。他的研究兴趣还包括宇宙学、基本粒子理论，量子力学和数理生物学。

出版物

1997. The Life of the Cosmos ISBN 0195126645

2001. Three Roads to Quantum Gravity ISBN 0-465-07835-4

2006. The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-618-55105-7

2013. Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. ISBN 978-0547511726

2014 The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy by Lee Smolin and Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-1107074064

Lee Smolin (born June 6, 1955) is an American theoretical physicist, a founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo, and a member of the graduate faculty of the philosophy department at the University of Toronto. Smolin's 2006 book The Trouble with Physics criticized string theory's viability. He has made contributions to quantum gravity theory, in particular the approach known as loop quantum gravity. He advocates that the two primary approaches to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity and string theory, can be reconciled as different aspects of the same underlying theory. He also advocates an alternative view on space and time that he calls temporal naturalism. His research interests also include cosmology, elementary particle theory, the foundations of quantum mechanics, and theoretical biology.

Early life and education

Smolin was born in New York City to Michael Smolin, an environmental and process engineer and Pauline Smolin, a playwright. Smolin said his parents were Jewish followers of the Fourth Way, founded by George Gurdjieff, an Armenian mystic. Smolin describes himself as Jewish. His brother, David M. Smolin, became a professor at the Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama.

Smolin dropped out of Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio. His interest in physics began at that time when he read Einstein's reflections on the two tasks he would leave unfinished at his death: 1, to make sense of quantum mechanics, and, 2 to unify that understanding of the quanta with gravity. Smolin would take it as his "mission" to try to complete these tasks. Shortly afterward, he browsed the Physics Library at the University of Cincinnati, where he came across Louis de Broglie's pilot wave theory in French. "I still can close my eyes," Smolin wrote in Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, "and see a page of the book, displaying the equation that relates wavelength to momentum." Soon after that he would "talk his way into" Hampshire College, find great teachers, and get lucky in his applications to graduate school. As to his mission of solving Einstein's two big questions, by Smolin's account, he did not succeed; "Very unfortunately, neither has anyone else."

Career

He held postdoctoral research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago, before becoming a faculty member at Yale, Syracuse, and Pennsylvania State Universities. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1995 and a visiting professor at Imperial College London (1999–2001), before becoming one of the founding faculty members at the Perimeter Institute in 2001. In 2026, he agreed to "pause" his relationship with the Institute in light of revelations that he had maintained contact with Jeffrey Epstein after the latter's initial conviction.

Theories and work

Loop quantum gravity

Smolin contributed to the theory of loop quantum gravity (LQG) in collaborative work with Ted Jacobson, Carlo Rovelli, Louis Crane, Abhay Ashtekar and others. LQG is an approach to the unification of quantum mechanics with general relativity which utilizes a reformulation of general relativity in the language of gauge field theories, which allows the use of techniques from particle physics, particularly the expression of fields in terms of the dynamics of loops. With Rovelli he discovered the discreteness of areas and volumes and found their natural expression in terms of a discrete description of quantum geometry in terms of spin networks. In recent years he has focused on connecting LQG to phenomenology by developing implications for experimental tests of spacetime symmetries as well as investigating ways elementary particles and their interactions could emerge from spacetime geometry.