1. Lee Smolin 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.
Lee Smolin has made contributions to quantum gravity theory, in particular the approach known as loop quantum gravity.
Lee Smolin said his parents were Jewish followers of the Fourth Way, founded by George Gurdjieff, an Armenian mystic.
Lee Smolin dropped out of Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Lee Smolin would take it as his "mission" to try to complete these tasks.
Lee Smolin 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.
Lee Smolin was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1995 and a visiting professor at Imperial College London, before becoming one of the founding faculty members at the Perimeter Institute in 2001.
Lee Smolin contributed to the theory of loop quantum gravity in collaborative work with Ted Jacobson, Carlo Rovelli, Louis Crane, Abhay Ashtekar and others.
Between 1999 and 2002, Lee Smolin made several proposals to provide a fundamental formulation of string theory that does not depend on approximate descriptions involving classical background spacetime models.
Lee Smolin is among those theorists who have proposed that the effects of quantum gravity can be experimentally probed by searching for modifications in special relativity detected in observations of high energy astrophysical phenomena, including very high energy cosmic rays and photons and neutrinos from gamma ray bursts.
Lee Smolin has worked since the early 1980s on a series of proposals for hidden variables theories, which would be non-local deterministic theories which would give a precise description of individual quantum phenomena.
Lee Smolin published the idea in 1992 and summarized it in a book aimed at a lay audience called The Life of the Cosmos.
When Lee Smolin published the theory in 1992, he proposed as a prediction of his theory that no neutron star should exist with a mass of more than 1.6 times the mass of the sun.
Lee Smolin predicted that inflation, if true, must only be in its simplest form, governed by a single field and parameter.
Lee Smolin has contributed to the philosophy of physics through a series of papers and books that advocate the relational, or Leibnizian, view of space and time.
Lee Smolin proposed that this meant the fostering of diverse competing research programs, and that premature formation of paradigms not forced by experimental facts can slow the progress of science.
Lee Smolin suggests that string theory suffers from serious deficiencies and has an unhealthy near-monopoly in the particle theory community.
Lee Smolin called for a diversity of approaches to quantum gravity, and argued that more attention should be paid to loop quantum gravity, an approach Smolin has devised.
Lee Smolin does not believe that quantum mechanics is a "final theory":.
Lee Smolin views rejecting the idea of a creator as essential to cosmology on similar grounds to his objections against the multiverse.
Lee Smolin has been a recurring guest on Through the Wormhole.
Lee Smolin is one of many physicists dubbed the "New Einstein" by the media.
Lee Smolin is married to Dina Graser, a lawyer and urban policy consultant in Toronto, Ontario.