Lee Smolin Public Lecture Special: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution

On April 17, in a special webcast talk based on his latest book, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, Perimeter’s Lee Smolin argued that the problems that have bedeviled quantum physics since its inception are unsolved and unsolvable for the simple reason that the theory is incomplete. There is more to quantum physics waiting to be discovered.

[Lp]

Hats Off to Lee Smolin for how he answered the young boys questions @1:04:27 rather than brushing the questions he answers it in a way that both answers the questions (to the extent that he can) and then encourage the boy to progress further. That is the job of a teacher and an elder. . A thousand bows to you Sir !

[ableone]

Lee Smolin is a truly rare Physicists. Brilliant, humorous, deliberate and humble human being!

[epolanowskirn]

In my top picks for the absolute best talk on qm I've ever watched. Lee is brilliant!

[pukulu]

Heisenberg :

"What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning."

[garydecad]

Lee Smolin is a wonderful storyteller. Thank you for a fascinating perspective

[bryanroland]

Lee Smolin waves his hands like no other physicist. I say "waves" but it could be particles.

[ConversationswiththeAI]

Love this man so much. (note: For neuro-divergents that have a difficult time with the pace, this video is absolutely wonderful at 1.5X speed. )
I found so many tools in his talk to use in elucidating the conceptual inconsistencies that are often ignored due to the efficacy of quantum physics.
A core issue is around dualistic language (right/wrong) that doesn't give the data density necessary.

Said in a simple way this is why Newton is called "wrong" because "something was missing" despite his theory still being one of the most useful and used theories even to this day.

"Wrong/Right" is a base 10 binary/boolean artifact rather than emergent-realist term, and the use of such binaries occults and confuses the actual nature of continuity and refinement of scientific theory.
It's all metaphors and metrics, scientific humility allows us to swap metaphors and refine metrics to achieve a more accurate description of basal reality.
The finger(theory) pointing at the moon(basal) will never be the moon itself, but this does not mean that the moon cannot be described, related and predicted with increasingly higher accuracy as we improve our science.

[KipIngram]

Smolin makes a *very good* point here: quantum theory was *constructed* to be only about observables and not about beables. The fact that we can't find beables in it does not mean there aren't any. It was deliberately crafted to "operate" at the level of observation. Quantum systems do have quantum states, but these states are just not "like, " say, the electric and magnetic fields, which have tangible existence at every point in space. Quantum states live in rather abstract Hilbert spaces, and in order to get a connection to the world you have to do math on them and that math, by design, yields *probabilities*. An unobserved quantum state will evolve in a deterministic way, but the change of state that results from an observation is *not* specified by the starting state at all - essentially it's put in by hand.

None of this is meant as a criticism of quantum theory. It does exactly what it was designed to do, and as far as we can tell it does it *perfectly*. But as Smolin points out here, it just wasn't intended to "describe the world." It was intended to describe our "witnessing" of the world. Totally different thing.

[vinay]

Lee Smolin is such a good COMMUNICATOR! I am struck not just by his utter brilliance but his fantastic ability to convey his knowledge in as few words as possible, in such a way that the layperson can understand it. For the most part he speaks absolutely smoothly and fluently and you can see where he does pause before he speaks, it is not because he does not understand a question or the answer to it, he is stopping to consider what is the best way to convey this information in the shortest amount of time so that anyone listening will get a full grasp not just of the words coming out of his mouth, but the content of what he is trying to say.

[migueldelagos]

Thank you Perimeter Institute! For an educated non-expert in physics like myself, Lee Smolin does one of the best jobs explaining the current state of the field of QM and potential developments. I've been a fan since his book, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. This talk was a real pleasure to watch.

[garyhansen]

The Zen Koan about a tree falling in the forest was generated centuries ago as a means to exhaust the excursions of linear mind. Once a physicist realized that sound was actually energy waves being propagated thru air or any other medium, the question if the falling tree made a sound became absurd. Of course it made a sound, whether there was a detector present (human ear or mechanical or electronic) or not.

Quantum mechanics, as currently propagated, represents an incredibly useful and in many ways a phenomenally accurate understanding of the universe of the very small. Like the question of sound in the absence of a human detector, the current QM model is also obviously INCOMPLETE. Once a physicist of adequate insight is able to add to the QM model, in the same way that Einstein added one additional term to expand Newton's equations, the need to include an observer in the QM model will disappear.

Thank you Lee Smolin and Roger Penrose for standing for the probability that once a more complete model of QM is propagated, the widespread inability to understand QM, will in part disappear.

[duggydo]

This is a great lecture. Lee Smolin is a treasure.

[AbbeyRoad]

Smolin really is absolutely brilliant.
I say this just from the things he says on the fly.

[jh]

"Philosophical, which just means difficult" is a fantastic quote

[NeilRieck]

During the Q&A, Professor Smolin commented that the "many worlds interpretation" was crazy. How refreshing!

[hakantomasoglu]

perimeter institute and his collegues must be proud of for working with him. today a complete view of theoretical physicist around his frontier attitude.

[lhoaichau]

His answer to the question about how quantum theory can be wrong is absolutely adorable.

[thirumalmurugesan]

Good One Prof. Lee Vs Operational-ism(observables)

[dannyadrian]

The realist point of view is a lot more logical than any other in this moment in time.

[FonsecaStatter]

One PhD student of Louis De Broglie was a Portuguese scientist named João Luís Andrade e Silva. He only came back to Portugal after Salazar's death and he brought with him De Broglie's ideas about Physics. These have been under development by a small group of «unorthodox-rebel» researchers (who, in turn, were students of Andrade e Silva), the main culprit being Prof. José Croca, who has published extensively on these matters.