Lee Smolin

Smolin was born in New York on June 6, 1955, to Michael and Pauline Smolin.⁠[1]

A high-school dropout, he came to tensor calculus and Einstein through Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes; after talking with a physics instructor while driving his girlfriend to a Hampshire College interview, he applied there and received a B.A. in 1975.⁠[1]

He received his PhD in theoretical physics from Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry in 1979.⁠[2]

From 1979 to 1984 he held postdoctoral posts at the Institute for Advanced Study in PrincetonPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry, the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara and the Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago.⁠[3]

He was assistant professor at Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry in 1984–1988 and associate professor to professor at Syracuse University in 1988–1993.⁠[3]

In 1986 Ted Jacobson and Smolin found that the Wheeler-DeWitt equation rewritten in Ashtekar variables has a simple class of exact solutions: Wilson loops of the Ashtekar connection around smooth non-self-intersecting loops.⁠[4]

This led Rovelli and Smolin in 1987 to take Wilson loops as the basis states of quantum gravity, introducing the loop representation, in which knot states completely solve the diffeomorphism constraint.⁠[4]

From 1993 to 2001 he was a professor at Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry, which he helped found; with Ashtekar and Rovelli he is regarded as a founder of the approach known as loop quantum gravity.⁠[2]

Mathematical physicist John Baez wrote in his column of February 18, 1994, that Smolin had spent about a year writing a popular book on evolutionary cosmology, proposing that black-hole formation creates baby universes whose constants differ slightly from the parent’s, so that the constants tend to favour producing many black holes.⁠[5]

On November 2, 1994, he and Carlo Rovelli submitted a paper to arXiv constructing the volume operator in the loop representation and computing its spectrum, finding that the volume of any physical region has a discrete spectrum and that a family of eigenstates corresponds one-to-one with Penrose’s spin networks.⁠[6]

In 1997 he published his first book for the public, The Life of the Cosmos, which sets out cosmological natural selection, a Darwinian-style explanation of how the laws of physics are chosen.⁠[7]

He was a visiting professor at Imperial College London from 1999 to 2001.⁠[2]

The Perimeter Institute officially launched on October 23, 2000, and its initial internal research staff included three faculty: Robert Myers, Smolin and Fotini Markopoulou.⁠[8]

Since 2001 he has been a founding and senior faculty member there, as well as adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a member of the graduate faculty of the University of Toronto’s philosophy department.⁠[7]

Basic Books published his 231-page Three Roads to Quantum Gravity in July 2001; Publishers Weekly described it as a report from the front of the search to unite relativity and quantum theory, aimed at beginners.⁠[9]

On December 11, 2001, he and João Magueijo submitted a paper to arXiv proposing a modification of special relativity in which a physical energy, possibly the Planck energy, joins the speed of light as an invariant while agreeing with Einstein’s theory at low energies.⁠[10]

Houghton Mifflin published his 392-page The Trouble with Physics in September 2006; the book calls string theory a dead end, criticizes physicists for seeking beauty and elegance rather than experimental support, and encourages work on alternatives.⁠[11]

He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Royal Society of Canada and was ranked 21st on Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines’ list of the 100 most influential public intellectuals.⁠[12]

He received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2013 and the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Award in Cosmology and Astronomy in 2016.⁠[3]

On March 17, 2009, the American Association of Physics Teachers announced that he had won its 2009 Klopsteg Memorial Award for communicating the excitement of contemporary physics to the public; the release said he had written more than 140 scientific papers.⁠[13]

On January 5, 2011, he, Giovanni Amelino-Camelia, Laurent Freidel and Jerzy Kowalski-Glikman submitted a paper proposing that the invariant arena for non-quantum physics is phase space rather than spacetime, replacing absolute locality with relative locality.⁠[14]

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published his 352-page Time Reborn in April 2013, arguing that time is real and that physical laws must evolve in real time.⁠[15]

On April 24, 2013, in a conversation with Duke University neuroscientist Warren Meck at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, he said the experience of the present moment is not an illusion but the deepest clue to the nature of reality; he acknowledged what he calls the meta-law dilemma but said it can be resolved.⁠[16]

Astrophysicist Adam Frank, reviewing the book for NPR, summarized its view that faith in timeless laws has led cosmologists astray and that the multiverse is a fiction.⁠[17]

Cambridge University Press published The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, written with Roberto Mangabeira Unger of Harvard Law School, in 2014; Part I is by Unger and Part II by Smolin.⁠[18]

Reviewing it in April 2015, David Orrell noted that the book runs to more than 500 pages and argues that there is only one universe and that time is real, with Smolin’s part focusing on cosmological models and proposing a research agenda.⁠[19]

On April 9, 2019, his Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum was published by Penguin Random House as a 352-page ebook and as an audiobook.⁠[20]

Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder wrote in her review that Smolin is dissatisfied with the current formulation of quantum mechanics for sacrificing realism and that the book lays out the ensemble interpretation he has developed over the years.⁠[21]

He appeared on episode 79 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, whose description calls him a theoretical physicist and co-inventor of loop quantum gravity; topics included what is real, the scientific method and scientific progress, radical ideas in science, quantum mechanics and general relativity, the many-worlds interpretation and string theory.⁠[22]

On April 1, 2021, the American Institute of Physics recorded an oral history interview with him, in which he recounts his childhood in Cincinnati, choosing to work with Sidney Coleman at Harvard, his formative relationship with Chandrasekhar at Chicago and developing a quantum gravity centre with Chris Isham at Imperial College.⁠[23]

On October 8, 2026, the Perimeter Institute announced that he would retire from his research role effective December 1, 2026; he said he would continue working on theoretical physics, biology and philosophy.⁠[24]

His Penguin Random House author biography says he lives in Toronto with his wife and son.⁠[20]

Personal website: Public link: https://leesmolin.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[12]

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics: Official website: https://perimeterinstitute.ca/ (opens in a new window)⁠[24]

University of Waterloo: Official website: https://uwaterloo.ca/ (opens in a new window)⁠[13]

Pennsylvania State University: Official website: https://www.psu.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[9]

University of Toronto: Official website: https://www.utoronto.ca/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]