Howard Burton - Examining Time: A Conversation with Lee Smolin

Most Ideas Roadshow conversations involve me chatting at length, often in a surprisingly personal way, with people Ive never met before. Not so with Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist Ive known for many years in many different ways.

I knew who Lee was well before I ever spoke to him, having studied his pioneering contributions to so-called Loop Quantum Gravity as a graduate student. A few years later, when I suddenly, and quite inexplicably, found myself in the position of building a theoretical physics research institution from scratch, he was an obvious person to consider as a founding faculty member, given my determination to construct an environment that forthrightly encouraged the simultaneous pursuit of different approaches to foundational questions.

I arranged to meet him at the appropriately-named Albert Einstein Institute in Germany (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics) in early 2000, where he was visiting, and on the way I decided to read his book Life of the Cosmos, which had come out a few years earlier.

Normally, it must be admitted, I tended to avoid popular science books like the plague. The ones that concern topics that I know something about inevitably strike me as infuriatingly trivial and superficial, while those that cover fields where Im ignorant never seem to go into sufficient detail to give me any real understanding, instead simply bombarding me with a cascade of vague metaphors and clichs. I dont remember what I was expecting when I picked up Life of the Cosmos, but given that I was seriously considering hiring its author, it seemed like an obvious thing to at least flip through.

Well, it turned out to be a very significant move.

Life of the Cosmos is not your ordinary popular science book, not least of which because at its heart lies a captivating and astonishingly original idea: that the way to finally move beyond so many of the conceptual dead ends that fundamental physics seemed to be driving us towards lay in integrating evolutionary principles within a clearly-defined physics framework.

And it was hardly the sort of hand-wavy, airy-fairy, analogy-riddled argument that you might think such a necessarily speculative claim would involve. Instead lay a carefully mapped out approach of what, from a physics perspective, this so-called cosmological natural selection would entail: harnessing decades of work in foundational physics that weaved together black holes, stellar astrophysics, particle theory into one coherent and stunningly original thesis.

I was simply blown away. By the time I got to Potsdam I was completely convinced: this guy I simply had to hire. If the new (and still very secret) Perimeter Institute was going to be anything like I envisioned it to be, it must include the likes of Lee Smolin. Otherwise, what was the point, really?

And so, most fortunately, it turned out to be.

In addition to his well-recognized creativity and scientific breadth, Lee turned out to be a particularly good hire in many other ways too: deeply committed to our pioneering project, he was an indefatigable supporter of what must often have been an exasperatingly uncertain enterprise led by someone who clearly didnt have the slightest clue where he was going, let alone how to actually get there.

Of course, it must also be admitted that, in his own way, Lee gave as good as he got. Imagine the frustration of learning that one of the key leaders of your brand new research institute that was explicitly created to harbour different approaches to fundamental physics is spending the majority of his time penning a vainglorious screed to attack those who take a different research avenue from his own. It is not, to put it mildly, terribly helpful. And dont get me started on trying to construct a building with someone who fancies himself an architect.

So there were ups and downs. And through it all, Id sometimes ask him whenever Id pass him in the halls or chat with him over coffee, Hows that cosmological natural selection thing going lately, Lee? Hed smile and nod and say a few words, but for the most part, so far as I could determine, it didnt seem to be really going anywhere.

Imagine my surprise, then, when, many years after I had moved on from Perimeter Institute and had started Ideas Roadshow, I picked up his popular book Time Reborn and discovered that, among the expected uniquely Lee-type weirdnessesactive collaborations with legal theorists, panegyrics on the wonders of democracy, rambling condemnations of laissez-faire neoliberalismthere was cosmological natural selection front and centre once again, now framed in a new, enormously thought-provoking and typically breathtakingly creative way.

This book, I said to myself, I simply had to read.