Lake Views: This World and the Universe [Hardcover]

The Cote d'Azur Men's Book Group has been reading "Lake Views" by Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize winning physicist and cosmologist. The book is a collection of essays published between 2000 and 2008. The Group, which boasted two physics degrees among those contributing, came to the book hoping for enlightenment on such topics as the search for a unified field theory, dark energy, string theory and the multiverse, but came away baffled. Not only baffled, but also somewhat put out, because the book has obviously been written for the educated and intelligent layman, in other words people like us! And although we could recognize the words, we could not understand the underlying concepts, apparently explained in a most intelligent and insightful style by the author, perhaps because one does need more scientific background knowledge to do so.

Fortunately, the book includes a number of pieces in the form of book reviews or talks which he has given on other subjects. He writes about religion and science, for example. Here his sense of humour appears. He is an atheist, but he notes that friends where he lives in Texas have not attempted to convert him, which might convey that they do not care whether he spends eternity roasting in hell fire. The conjunction in this book of religion and cosmology, notably the concept of the multiverse, the idea that our universe is one of many parallel universes, led one member of the group to wonder whether in one or more of these other universes things were arranged better than in ours. Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were a universe without cruelty and illness? Wouldn't it be heaven to live in such a universe?

More down to earth, Weinberg criticises the US anti-missile programme under the Bush administration in the most trenchant and practical terms, displaying his clarity of thought. In addition he argues well that NASA should not waste its resources putting men into space, for scientific work can now be done more efficiently by robots. He also wrote a short piece about the hostility of many 'liberals and intellectuals' towards the state of Israel, of which he is a staunch supporter. The majority of our group disapprove of the idea that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. After all, one can criticise the French state and its policies, or China, without hating the French or Chinese people. However, at least one member of our group thought Weinberg justified in condemning the boycott of Israel by a British association of teachers as due to "spectacular moral blindness, hatred of Jews, or both." A clear case of applying double standards.
In his review for the TLS of 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins, Weinberg nicely traces the decreasing degree of religious certainty with the rise of scientific knowledge. He accuses the author of focusing on Christianity and Islam, both faith-based religions, and of ignoring others such as Hinduism, Judaism or Shinto which stress observance rather than faith. He also shows his strong distaste for extremist Islam, with "I share Dawkins's lack of respect for all religions, but in our times it is folly to disrespect them all equally".

Despite several black holes, we enjoyed the book, in which the personality of Prof. Weinberg comes through strongly. He is, we decided, a man of deep culture and wide interests (including somewhat to our surprise an interest in military history), a man we would like to meet.

"I do not think we have to worry that giving up religion will lead to a moral decline," opines physicist Steven Weinberg on the penultimate page of this collection of essays. "There are plenty of people without religious faith who live exemplary moral lives (as for example, me)."

Even if you do say so yourself.

Weinberg at once sums up his attitude to the subjects he canvasses and identifies why few (other than the already-persuaded) will find much of interest in this mediocre book: Weinberg believes his arguments go without saying, and only the dim or the mendacious would quarrel with them.

It rather makes you wonder which he thinks his target audience is.

Essay collections are often lacklustre affairs: disjointed, disconnected, duplicative and lazy: little editorial, let alone authorial, work is needed to compile material that's already been published, after all.

This collection, especially so. The subjects are eclectic, but clumped: the quest for a final theory in elementary physics gets about four airings; why missile defence is a bad idea gets three; why manned space flight is an inferior use of public money than a particle accelerator (now fancy hearing a particle physicist say that!) gets a couple, and the collection is rounded out with a couple on Judaism and Israel, and a couple about the non-existence of God. (Yes, quite: I thought that jarred a bit, too). The collection's organising principle is no more inspiring than that they were all written in Weinberg's home study, overlooking a lake. Except, he tells us, it isn't actually a lake.

Weinberg has an unshakeable conviction in the rectitude of his own research programme. This informs his view of the topics he canvasses and affords him licence to gloss over the many objections to his point of view. I had trouble with all that glossing. For example I couldn't see why it was a good use of tax money to sink 10 billion into a particle accelerator (super cooling 25 kilometres of electro magnets to absolute zero can't be cheap) in the hope of credentialising a theory which, as stated by Weinberg, is unfalsifiable and plainly in crisis. (On the other hand, putting a man on mars would at least give David Bowie and excuse to re-release his back catalogue (not, of course, that he needs one).

Lest you think I'm being flippant, I'm not: the standard model of modern particle physics fails to account for gravity unless there are 11 space-time dimensions, seven of which are so tiny as to be undetectable (they need to be this small because there is utterly, butterly, no evidence of any kind for them), and/or a "Multiverse": an infinite realm of other universes which we cannot (by definition) see or experience (also so required because there's no evidence for them). Similarly, modern cosmology fails unless vacuum space contains undetected, unseen anti-gravitational force which can explain the fact that the universe is not just expanding, but the expansion is accelerating.

These are not trivial problems. They're barnstormers. Modern physics, that is to say, has many of the hallmarks of a research programme deeply in crisis. I'm not the only one to say this - astrophysicists such as Peter Woit and Lee Smolin have published compelling books on the topic in the last decade.

So it is an odd chair from which to find a practitioner making lofty declarations. Even Weinberg concedes that the outlook for convergence to one final theory is considerably less certain now than it was when he wrote it. Kind of makes you wonder why he didn't trouble to update (or just omit) the offending article.

All this hubris could be forgiven if there were insightful content elsewhere, but there isn't much. Weinberg includes an essay about the history of military technology (intended as yet another assault on the missile defence issue). This is about as close as Weinberg gets to having anything new to say. But even this (largely concerned with whether the stirrup - which permitted a horseman to charge with a "couched" lance - really was the game-changer its proponents claimed) seems to me to fail badly for selection bias. "Because the stirrup was an exaggerated innovation, ergo so is (in this case) missile defence".

Now Weinberg is persuasive that missile defence is a waste of money (which isn't exactly hard: you'd need to be an imaginatively paranoid Neo-con to think otherwise), but this argument about stirrups doesn't help him. For every stirrup there's a horse, rifle, canon or nuke, which really was a game changer. (There will, of course, be countless "stirrups" which have faded from history's pages for precisely the same reasons of selection bias, of course: rather like extra dimensions curling tinily into unseen universes).

And so it goes on. Many of the essays are cursory, and most are infused with an exasperating certitude. We hear an impassioned plea for the restoration and defence of the Jewish state, book-ended with a vigorous piece of atheism. Again, a dissonance there: This might be naivety on my part but I had understood the Jewish connection to Israel to be a religious one (and as such I have no quarrel with it). But for an atheist? If there's no God, what is the special attraction of a land where people are lobbing missiles over your back fence all the time?

Anyhow - a touchy subject which I only raise to point out the internal dissonance.

I didn't get much from this collection, other than the reinforcement of my hunch that modern particle physics has disappeared down a conceptual rabbit-hole (a worm-hole into another universe perhaps?) from which it is unlikely to re-emerge.

In the mean time there are some splendid, challenging and batty books written by leading scientists, which provide enlightenment and unexpected entertainment. This isn't one of them.

Olly Buxton

I found Prof Weinberg's thoughts interesting, but there were not the revelations that I had hoped for. I e-mailed him with a few comments and thoughts of my own,(I do have a scientific background)but he couldn't be bothered answering.