Lee Smolin

Contents

The Life of the Cosmos
Lee Smolin
Published in 1997

Prologue

Revolutions 3

Introduction 11

Light and Life 23

The Logic of Atomism 30

3 The Miracle of the Stars 36

The Dream of Unification 47

The Lessons of String Theory 58

An Ecology of Space and Time 73

Detective Work 107

The Ecology of the Galaxy 116

Games and Galaxies 129

The Organization of 139

The Cosmology of an Interesting Universe 161

The Flower and the Dodecahedron 177

Philosophy Religion and Cosmology 192

Beyond the Anthropic Principle 202

Space and Time in the New Cosmology 213

17 The Road from Newton to Einstein 222

The Meaning of Einsteins 233

The Meaning of the Quantum 240

Einsteins Revenge 255

21 A Pluralistic Universe 267

The World as a Network of Relations 276

The Evolution of Time 285

Testing Cosmological 301

Notes and Acknowledgments 324

Selected Bibliography 337

Index 347