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Lee Smolin
Summary
Lee Smolin (ˈsmoʊlɪn; born June 6, 1955) is an American theoretical physicist, a faculty member at 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 as a viable scientific theory. 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.
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 described 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 after that, 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.
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