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Facing Up: Science and its Cultural Adversaries, Steven Weinberg

04 Apr 2002

Facing Up: Science and its Cultural Adversaries
Steven Weinberg
2001 Harvard University Press 283pp £17.95/$26.00hb

Taking on all-comers

Steven Weinberg inhabits a bleak world infested with adversaries that he is impelled to combat. He faces up to them with scientific rigour and lawyerly precision, as readers of this fascinating book of essays will discover with pleasure. His opponents range from his peers in other areas of physics – such as Philip Anderson, the Nobel-prize winning condensed-matter theorist who successfully opposed the now-defunct Superconducting Super Collider project – through to the enemies of reductionism, proponents of vitalism, methodological anti-realists, critics of the scientific method and people with religious convictions.

Weinberg is a private person, and his Manichean world must be rather lonely sometimes, offering little emotional comfort. But, as he writes in this book: “Melancholy…is not without its own consolations.” Weinberg is an object of intellectual respect, rather than a matey type one might go for a beer with. He becomes momentarily more approachable when he describes his discovery of the electroweak theory that bears his name while tooling along in his red Camaro, a welcome autobiographical sketch.

Weinberg’s starting point is his affirmation that science is a liberal art that is an integral part of the history of humanity. He is determined not to dwell monastically in some reductionist ivory tower, but to sally forth to do battle under reductionist colours. He soon nails these firmly to the mast: Newton’s dream, which has morphed into particle physics, is more fundamental than other sciences. Debating Freeman Dyson, Weinberg does not deny others the right to drink the “orange juice” of emergent phenomena – the idea that a system with many mutually interacting parts can lead to novel macroscopic behaviour – but he asserts vigorously his right to drink the “gin” of reductionism.

Many readers will enjoy Weinberg’s comments on emergence, the anthropic principle and the Copenhagen interpretation, among other chestnuts. Personally, I was less convinced by the “civilized egalitarian capitalist” utopia he proposes: even Weinberg is less than fervent about it.

Among the essays I valued most were his gleeful wades into the furore generated by Alan Sokal, who published a now famous hoax article in the journal Social Text parodying the sloppy thinking of some sociologists and philosophers. It is hard for physicists to resist chuckling over this, and groaning at the solecisms of the Post-Modernists skewered in a couple of Weinberg’s essays. Who can resist deriding Derrida?

I also appreciated his thoughtful dissection of the good and bad in Thomas Kuhn’s interpretation of the scientific process, notably his critique of Kuhn’s later deconstruction of “paradigm shifts” – the very concept for which Kuhn had originally made his name. Having myself been severely disappointed by a leading gladiator of the so-called strong programme of the Edinburgh school of “sociologists of science” – after he parodied the emergence of the quark paradigm in particle physics, despite my having discussed it with him at length – I particularly enjoyed the essay on Ian Hacking, whom Weinberg dissects in one of his final essays. “The philosophy of science”, writes Weinberg, “is no help to the practising scientist.” I wonder whether it is even a hindrance?

Weinberg’s stance as a “philistine philosopher” resonated with me, but I had less patience with his jousts with religion. I do not perceive contemporary Western religion as a threat to the scientific enterprise – a role that I do assign to sociologists of science. I prefer, therefore, not to stimulate unnecessary antibodies by positing strong scepticism of religion, as Weinberg does. His defence of Zionism also seems out of place and jarred at least my sensibilities. And what would moral philosophers take of his assertion that “for good people to do evil – that takes religion”?

The central essay in this book may be the ninth, where Weinberg describes his “night thoughts” of a quantum physicist. The Standard Model of particle physics works very well in describing the data available from accelerators, and there are high hopes for new discoveries with the Large Hadron Collider, which is currently being built at CERN. However, the Standard Model is clearly unsatisfactory and incomplete. Weinberg’s nightmare is that direct experimental tests of the “theory of everything” – or “final theory” as he calls it – may lie beyond our reach.

However, I have another nightmare, which should also trouble Weinberg. What if the glorious reductionist enterprise succeeds and we formulate a unified description of all the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions? Unlike India confronting Alexander the Great, there would be no more reductionist worlds for us to conquer. Would we be reduced to practising condensed-matter physics, sociology, Post-Modernism or religion in order to keep body and soul together?

This is a hypothetical question, whatever string theorists may say. For the foreseeable future, our fellowship of fundamental physicists has a long, narrow and winding reductionist road ahead. As company on our way, we should be grateful to Weinberg for his swashbuckling assaults on the demons threatening our quest, as well as being stimulated by the barbs in this excellent book. Those of you who are engaged in other quests will find this book full of fascinating insights into the mind set of one of the leading contemporary scientific intellectuals.

I, for one, share his outspoken confidence that research at the limits of science is destined to become part of everyone’s intellectual heritage, along with Newtonian physics. We are surely getting closer to the truth, just as jumbo jets land closer to their destinations when general-relativistic effects are included in their Global Positioning Satellite navigational calculations. No matter what the sociologists of science may say, we do need to take Einstein and quarks into account. Weinberg is a noble warrior in the science wars. His destruction of the sociological Taliban is clinical and thorough. Read this book.

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