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Smolin, Lee, 1955-
Oral history interview with Lee Smolin, 2021 April 1.
Interview with Lee Smolin, Founding and Senior Faculty Member at the Perimeter Institute with faculty appointments at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo. Smolin narrates the origins of the Perimeter Institute and he describes his unorthodox views on what exactly cosmology is. He describes loop quantum gravity and the notion of a theory of everything and why he has much love for string theory despite perceptions of the opposite. Smolin explains the utility and trappings of the Standard Model and he searches for deeper meaning in the origins and societal impact of the pandemic. He recounts his childhood in Cincinnati and his early appreciation for physics and the circumstances that led to his undergraduate education at Hampshire. Smolin explains his attraction in working with Sidney Coleman at Harvard, and why he saw a grand plan in his desire to learn quantum field theory. He describes meeting Abhay Ashtekar and his postdoctoral work at UC Santa Barbara and then at the Institute for Advanced Study. Smolin describes his formative relationship with Chandrasekhar at Chicago, his first faculty appointment at Yale, and his tenure at Syracuse where he found a strong group in relativity and quantum gravity. He explains his reasons for transferring to Penn State and his involvement in loop quantum gravity achieving a mature state amid a rapidly expanding relativity community throughout academic physics. He describes his time at Imperial College, where he developed a quantum gravity center with Chris Isham and he historicizes the technical developments that connected his theoretical work with observation. Smolin describes his book "The Life of the Cosmos" and his foray into thinking about biology and why he identifies as a self-conscious Leibnizian who tries to connect cosmology with the concept of a god and the centrality of astrobiology to these issues. At the end of the interview, Smolin explains why he continually returns to quantum gravity, and he conveys his interest in keeping philosophy at the forefront of his research agenda.
Lee Smolin is a Founding and Senior Faculty Member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and holds faculty appointments at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo. Smolin completed his graduate studies at Harvard and conducted postdoctoral research at UC Santa Barbara, the Institute of Advanced Study, and University of Chicago. Smolin has also served on faculty at Yale, Syracuse, and Penn State.
Ashtekar, Abhay
Barbour, Julian B.
Burton, Howard, 1965-
Chandrasekhar, S. (Subrahmanyan), 1910-1995
Coleman, Sidney, 1937-2007
Deser, S. (Stanley)
Hawking, Stephen, 1942-2018
Isham, C. J.
Kauffman, Stuart A.
Lanier, Jaron
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von, 1646-1716
Rovelli, Carlo, 1956-
Smolin, Lee, 1955-
Strominger, Andrew Eben
Susskind, Leonard
Harvard University.
Imperial College, London
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
Pennsylvania State University
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
Syracuse University -- Faculty.
University of California, Santa Barbara. Institute for Theoretical Physics
University of Chicago
Yale University
Cosmology
Exobiology
Quantum field theory
Quantum gravity
Relativity.
Standard model (Nuclear physics)
String models.
Theoretical physics -- Research.
Interviews. aat
Oral histories. aat
Transcripts. aat
Zierler, David, 1979- interviewer.
AIP-ICOS
American Institute of Physics. Niels Bohr Library & Archives. One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740, USA
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