Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries [Paperback]

In the essay, "Confronting O'Brien" (that's the O'Brien of Orwell's 1984), Weinberg makes it clear where he stands on the possibility of two plus two equaling five, or on the so-called "strong" social constructionist view of scientific knowledge. He writes that while "there is no such thing as a clear and universal scientific method", nonetheless, "under the general heading of scientific method" there is "a commitment to reason...and a deference to observation and experiment," and "Above all...a respect for reality as something outside ourselves, that we explore but do not create." (p. 43)

In the chapter, "The Non-Revolution of Thomas Kuhn," Weinberg writes that "the task of science is to bring us closer and closer to objective truth." It is here that I demur. I think it would be better to say that science more and more allows us to better manipulate the environment to our advantage (or disadvantage!) and to see further into that environment--to smaller phenomena, more distant objects, and more clearly into the past and the present--rather than to speak of "objective truth," which in this context is little different from "ultimate truth," or a "final theory of everything." The dream of "objective truth" is the dream of religion and is anathema to Weinberg's sentiments elsewhere in the book. Note, however, that he carefully writes, "closer and closer to objective truth." That's a nice qualification, but I think he should have qualified the notion of "objective truth" as well.

But Prof. Weinberg is not without the means for having fun with his listeners and readers. He writes on page 87 from a talk to the National Association of Scholars about the scientific method, that "There is one philosophic principle that I find of use here...[that] there is a kind of zing--to use the best word I can think of--that is quite unmistakable when real scientific progress is being made." Clearly he is playing with the notion of a "philosophic" principle. Indeed, on the last page of the book he confesses, "I don't believe it is actually possible to prove anything about most of the things (apart from mathematical logic) that they [philosophers] argue about."

Proving that he is not hopelessly locked into a finite but unbounded universe, he notes several times in the book that the universe may be infinite; indeed one of the chapters is entitled, "Before the Big Bang." He also writes, "Chaotic inflation has in a sense revived the idea of a steady state theory in a grander form; our own Big Bang may be just one episode in a much larger universe that on average never changes." (pp. 176-177)

Weinberg's sense of humor is rather dry. While scolding journalists for writing that the Big Bang theory is unraveling, he observes (p. 175), "Journalists generally have no bias toward one cosmological theory or another, but many have a natural preference for excitement." Or, his take off on Kuhn's repeated and grandiose use of the word "paradigm" (after noting a paradigm shift from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics): "Now that really <was> a paradigm shift. For Kuhn it seems to have been the paradigm of paradigm shifts..." (p. 204)

Also: "Any possible universe could be explained as the work of some sort of designer. Even a universe that is completely chaotic...could be supposed to have been designed by an idiot." (p. 232) Or (same page), "The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather."

Weinberg's critique of religion takes no prisoners. He writes (p. 241), "...on balance the moral influence of religion has been awful." He adds, "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil--that takes religion." (p. 242) He got a lot of flak for that, but considering the situation in the Middle East, his words seem prescient, although he was merely glancing back at history.

My favorite essays are the ones on the argument from design, the critique of Thomas Kuhn's thought, and the chapter on utopias. In the first he makes a neat distinction between anthropic reasoning that is "mystical mumbo jumbo," and that which is "just common sense." (p. 238) In the latter, while denigrating the prospect of a technological utopia, he writes that a world without work, a world in which people instead pursue the arts, science, etc., would be unsatisfactory (actually he mentions "general misery") because "there is only so much new literature...only so much new music," etc. to see and hear, and with so much competition, our work would get but scant notice. I really didn't understand this because people will make work where there is none, even if it is only working on their psyches and those of their friends, their bodies, etc. And besides, where is the end of exploring and of learning? Furthermore, the real joy is in the doing, not in the being noticed.

Perhaps this reveals part of Steven Weinberg's personality to us. He is a man who has done the very best work while being noticed at the highest level. What he writes is very much worth our time and consideration.