Q &A

How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It

By A M A N D A G E F T E R

June 27, 2019

Lee Smolin has a radical idea for how to understand an object with no exterior: Imagine it built bit-by-bit from relationships
between events.

Lee Smolin at his home in downtown Toronto.

Philip Cheung for Quanta Magazine

he universe is kind of an impossible object. It has an inside but no outside; it’s a one-sided

T coin. This Möbius architecture presents a unique challenge for cosmologists, who nd
themselves in the awkward position of being stuck inside the very system they’re trying to
comprehend.

It’s a situation that Lee Smolin has been thinking about for most of his career. A physicist at the
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, Smolin works at the knotty
intersection of quantum mechanics, relativity and cosmology. Don’t let his soft voice and quiet
demeanor fool you — he’s known as a rebellious thinker and has always followed his own path. In the
1960s Smolin dropped out of high school, played in a rock band called Ideoplastos, and published an
underground newspaper. Wanting to build geodesic domes like R. Buckminster Fuller, Smolin taught
himself advanced mathematics — the same kind of math, it turned out, that you need to play with
Einstein’s equations of general relativity. The moment he realized this was the moment he became a
physicist. He studied at Harvard University and took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey, eventually becoming a founding faculty member at the Perimeter Institute.

“Perimeter,” in fact, is the perfect word to describe Smolin’s place near the boundary of mainstream
physics. When most physicists dived head rst into string theory, Smolin played a key role in working
out the competing theory of loop quantum gravity. When most physicists said that the laws of physics
are immutable, he said they evolve according to a kind of cosmic Darwinism. When most physicists said
that time is an illusion, Smolin insisted that it’s real.

Smolin often nds himself inspired by conversations with biologists, economists, sculptors,
playwrights, musicians and political theorists. But he nds his biggest inspiration, perhaps, in
philosophy — particularly in the work of the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, active in the 17th
and 18th centuries, who along with Isaac Newton invented calculus. Leibniz argued (against Newton)
that there’s no xed backdrop to the universe, no “stu ” of space; space is just a handy way of
describing relationships. This relational framework captured Smolin’s imagination, as did Leibniz’s
enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the world’s fundamental ingredient is
the “monad,” a kind of atom of reality, with each monad representing a unique view of the whole
universe. It’s a concept that informs Smolin’s latest work as he attempts to build reality out of
viewpoints, each one a partial perspective on a dynamically evolving universe. A universe as seen from
the inside.

Quanta Magazine spoke with Smolin about his approach to cosmology and quantum mechanics, which
he details in his recent book, Einstein’s Un nished Revolution. The interview has been condensed and
edited for clarity.

Philip Cheung for Quanta Magazine

You have a slogan: “The rst principle of cosmology must be: There is nothing outside the universe.”

In di erent formulations of the laws of physics, like Newtonian mechanics or quantum mechanics,
there is background structure — structure which has to be speci ed and is xed. It’s not subject to
evolution, it’s not in uenced by anything that happens. It’s structure outside the system being
modeled. It’s the framework on which we hang observables — the observer, a clock and so forth. The
statement that there’s nothing outside the universe — there’s no observer outside the universe —
implies that we need a formulation of physics without background structure. All the theories of physics
we have, in one way or another, apply only to subsystems of the universe. They don’t apply to the
universe as a whole, because they require this background structure.

If we want to make a cosmological theory, to understand nature on the cosmological scale, we have to
avoid what the philosopher Roberto Unger and I called “the cosmological fallacy,” the mistaken belief
that we can take theories that apply to subsystems and scale them up to the universe as a whole. We
need a formulation of dynamics that doesn’t refer to an observer or measuring instrument or anything
outside the system. That means we need a di erent kind of theory.

You’ve recently proposed such a theory — one in which, as you put it, “the history of the universe is
constituted of di erent views of itself.” What does that mean?

Smolin’s home bookshelf. In addition to his scienti c papers, Smolin has written six books for the
general public.

Philip Cheung for Quanta Magazine

It’s a theory about processes, about the sequences and causal relations among things that happen, not
the inherent properties of things that are. The fundamental ingredient is what we call an “event.”
Events are things that happen at a single place and time; at each event there’s some momentum,
energy, charge or other various physical quantity that’s measurable. The event has relations with the
rest of the universe, and that set of relations constitutes its “view” of the universe. Rather than
describing an isolated system in terms of things that are measured from the outside, we’re taking the
universe as constituted of relations among events. The idea is to try to reformulate physics in terms of
these views from the inside, what it looks like from inside the universe.
 How do you do that?

There are many views, and each one has only partial information about the rest of the universe. We
propose as a principle of dynamics that each view should be unique. That idea comes from Leibniz’s
principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Two events whose views are exactly mappable onto each
other are the same event, by de nition. So each view is unique, and you can measure how distinct one is
from another by de ning a quantity called the “variety.” If you think of a node on a graph, you can go
one step out, two steps out, three steps out. Each step gives you a neighborhood — the one-step
neighborhood, the two-step neighborhood, the three-step neighborhood. So for any two events you
can ask: How many steps do you have to go out until their views diverge? In what neighborhood are
they di erent? The fewer steps you have to go, the more distinguishable the views are from one
another. The idea in this theory is that the laws of physics — the dynamics of the system — work to
maximize variety. That principle — that nature wants to maximize variety — actually leads, within the
framework I’ve been describing, to the Schrödinger equation, and hence to a recovery, in an
appropriate limit, of quantum mechanics.

Lee Smolin on the Impossibility of Studying the Universe

Video: Lee Smolin explores the problem of understanding the universe from the perspective of being
inside the universe, as well as the need for physicists to know philosophy.

Philip Cheung for Quanta Magazine

I know from your book that you’re a realist at heart — you believe strongly in a reality independent of
our knowledge of it — and therefore, like Einstein, you think quantum mechanics is incomplete. Does
this theory of views help complete what you think is missing in quantum theory?

Einstein — as well as someone called Leslie Ballentine — advocated an “ensemble interpretation” of

the wave function [the mathematical object that represents a quantum system]. The idea was that the
wave function describes an ensemble of possible states. But one day, I was sitting in a cafe working and
suddenly I thought: What if the ensemble is real? What if, when you have a wave function describing a
single water molecule, it’s actually describing the ensemble of every water molecule in the universe?

So whereas normally we would think that there’s one water molecule but an uncertainty of states,
you’re saying that the uncertainty of states is actually the ensemble of all the water molecules in the
universe?

Yes. They form an ensemble because they have very similar views. They all interact with one another,
because the probability of interaction is determined by the similarity of views, not necessarily their
proximity in space.

Things don’t have to be near each other to interact?

In this theory, the similarity of views is more fundamental than space. Often, two events have similar
views because they’re close in space. If two people stand next to each other, they have very similar,
overlapping views of the universe. But two atoms have many fewer relational properties than big,
complex objects like people. So two atoms far apart in space can still have very similar views. That
means that at the smallest scale, there should be highly nonlocal interactions, which is exactly what
you get with entanglement in quantum mechanics. That’s where quantum mechanics comes from,
according to the real-ensemble formulation.

A passage from The Monadology that has inspired Smolin’s latest work.

Philip Cheung for Quanta Magazine

It reminds me of a lot of work that’s going on now in physics that’s nding surprising connections
between entanglement and the geometry of space-time.

I think a lot of that work is really interesting. The hypothesis that’s motivating it is that entanglement
is fundamental in quantum mechanics, and the geometry of space or space-time emerges from
structures of entanglement. It’s a very positive development.

You’ve said that these ideas were inspired by Leibniz’s Monadology. Did you just happen to pull out
your Monadology and reread it?

I rst read Leibniz at the instigation of Julian Barbour, when I was just out of graduate school. First I
read the correspondence between Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, who was a follower of Newton, in which
Leibniz criticized Newton’s notion of absolute space and absolute time and argued that observables in
physics should be relational. They should describe the relations of one system with another, resulting
from their interaction. Later I read the Monadology. I read it as a sketch for how to make a background-
independent theory of physics. I do look at my copy from time to time. There is a beautiful quote in
there, where Leibniz says, “Just as the same city viewed from di erent directions appears entirely
di erent … there are, as it were, just as many di erent universes, which are, nevertheless, only
perspectives on a single one, corresponding to the di erent points of view of each monad.” That, to
me, evokes why these ideas are very suitable, not just in physics but for a whole range of things from
social policy and postmodernism to art to what it feels like to be an individual in a diverse society. But
that’s another discussion!

Smolin works out a simple calculation in his “causal theory of views.” The theory describes the
information each event has about events in its immediate past, which is called the “view” of the event.
The universe grows by the continual creation of new events following a law that maximizes the
diversity of all these partial views of it.

Philip Cheung for Quanta Magazine

Your work has been very in uenced by philosophy. Looking back historically, people like Einstein and
Bohr and John Wheeler all took philosophy very seriously; it directly in uenced their physics. It
seems to be a trait of great physicists and yet —

And also of not-great physicists.

OK, fair! It just seems that it’s become almost taboo to talk about philosophy in physics today. Has
that been your experience?

Not at all. Many of the leading theorists in foundational physics — where the goal is to deepen our
knowledge of the fundamental laws — know philosophy very well. As an undergraduate at Hampshire
College, I did a lot of physics and some philosophy courses. Then when I went to Harvard for graduate
school, I intended to do a double Ph.D. in physics and philosophy, but I got disenchanted with
philosophy pretty quickly. I mean, the physicists were arrogant enough. But the philosophers even
more so.

Back when we had the revolutions in physics in the rst part of the 20th century in Europe, people like
Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and others were very well educated in philosophy, and it
informed their work as physicists. Then there was this pragmatic turn, where the dominant mode of
physics became anti-foundational, anti-philosophy.

The historian of physics David Kaiser at MIT has studied this in detail. He studied quantum mechanics
textbooks and lecture notes and saw how, through the 1940s into the 1950s, references to philosophy
and to foundational issues disappeared from quantum mechanics courses. Freeman Dyson once said,
normally the young people are rebels and the old people are the conservatives, but in his generation it
was the reverse. The young people didn’t want to hear about messy philosophy or foundational issues,
they just wanted to get out and apply quantum mechanics.

R E L AT E D :

1. A Defense of the Reality of Time

2. A Private View of Quantum Reality

3. String Theory Meets Loop Quantum Gravity

4. A ‘Rebel’ Without a Ph.D.

This was great for the explosion of applications of quantum mechanics from the 1940s into the 1970s,
through the establishment of the Standard Model, condensed matter physics and so forth. But then
fundamental physics got stuck, and part of the reason we got stuck is we reached a set of problems on
which you can’t make progress with this pragmatic, anti-foundational culture. I should make clear that
those elds where you can assume we know the relevant laws, like condensed matter and astrophysics,
continue to thrive. But if your goal is to discover new, deeper laws, you need to mix with philosophers
again. And it has been happening much more.

When I started mixing with philosophers, there were a few who really knew physics well, but most
didn’t. Today, the young people working in philosophy of physics, for the most part, know physics well.
The interchange with philosophy is coming back, and I think it’s a good thing.