Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist who has made major contributions to loop quantum gravity. He is currently a long term researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is the author of The Life of the Cosmos and Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, physics books written for a popular audience.
Smolin is well known to researchers in quantum gravity for advocating that the two primary approaches to that subject, string theory and loop quantum gravity, may eventually be reconciled as different aspects of the same underlying theory. But his most famous suggestion may be his fecund universes theory, which attempts to apply principles of biological evolution to cosmology, suggesting that universes evolve in favour of the production of black holes (see Gaia philosophy).
