Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries

by Steven Weinberg

Book Overview

In a recent New York Times profile, James Glanz remarked, "Steven Weinberg is perhaps the world's most authoritative proponent of the idea that physics is hurtling toward a 'final theory,' a complete explanation of nature's particles and forces that will endure as the bedrock of all science forevermore. He is also a powerful writer of prose that can illuminate--and sting...He recently received the Lewis Thomas Prize, awarded to the researcher who...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067400647X
• ISBN13: 9780674006478
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Well written articles on the culture of Science

This book is a collection of essays that to a large extent share the theme in the title: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries. Of course, the title begins with the words "Facing Up" which to Weinberg has three meanings: looking upwards as an astronomer, facing up to the conclusions one derives, and looking upwards rather than downwards as if in prayer. Well, who are the cultural adversaries of Science? Creationists? Certainly. But there are others. Weinberg agrees with most of the Creationists about truth being a value. The disagreement with them is about which side possesses it. There are others who attack the value of truth, including many multiculturalists. We Westerners say that the Milky Way is a Galaxy, our home Galaxy. That works for us. Mayan culture had the Milky Way as a river in the sky. That may have worked for them. Can Weinberg say that one belief is better than the other? He sure can. As he says, "Western astronomers got it right." Weinberg criticizes some political attacks on truth as well. That's the point of his very short (about one page) article on Zionism. His point is not that anti-Zionists may tell specific lies as a means to some goal (such as winning a war). It is that, especially when he deals with fellow Western liberals, anti-Zionism is an attack on Western civilization and the culture of science in general, so that defeating truth as a whole becomes an anti-Zionist goal. It is also the point of his article about utopias, some of which idealize a world in which the cultural adversaries of Science are either right or victorious or both. Still, the most interesting articles are on Reductionism. This is a philosophy of trying to explain phenomena in terms of a finite set of laws, describing something complex in terms of the less complex, and describing large numbers of obervations with just a few simple rules. It is not simply an act of trying to describe objects in terms of their components. For Weinberg, reductionism is an important part of scientific culture. It's an intriguing and informative book, and I recommend it.

Made me smile and laugh out loud

I just graduated from UT in 2002, I've seen Weinberg once and have heard many stories about him. None of the stories are positive with the possible exception that he is too smart for his students to understand (although there is a quote in his book that shows he's been trying to improve "It never was true that only a dozen people could understand Einstein's papers on General Relativity, but if it had been true, It would have been a failure of Einstein's, not a mark of his brilliance." This is on page 141 responding to an extremely funny quote from a deconstructionist). I've read his Discovery of Subatomic Particles and The First Three Minutes. They were okay readings with good information especially the former. I thought I'd give him another try with Facing Up. I was pleasantly surprised of how funny he is. The humor is dry, but I couldn't help smiling and sometimes laughing at some of his comments about philosophers and religious leaders. Maybe this is because I agree with him; I can imagine someone getting mad at some of the things he says. In any case, this book really makes you think about some philosophical issues relating to science and its value to us.

Good collection of essays

FACING UP brings together a number of talks and papers by Steven Weinberg that have been scattered here and there up until now. For anyone who has followed Weinberg for a while, there is nothing new here except for brief (on the order of a few paragraphs) introductions to each of the pieces; however, the essays are quite good, and well worth a second reading. Weinberg's primary concerns are to defend reductionism and scientific realism (in the senses both that science means to describe the real world, and that science in fact makes progress towards the one true description), and, in at least one brilliant essay, to argue that physics points in the opposite direction as religion. The quality of philosophical thought in the essays is not exceptionally deep, but Weinberg does offer the reader what I think is a healthy dose of common sense.

Defending science

This collection of twenty-three essays by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist are drawn from various publications and talks that Professor Weinberg has given over the last few years. The subjects range from defenses of reductionism and Zionism to spats with social constructionists (including his essay on the Sokal Hoax), to debates about the history of science and the prospects for utopia to the anthropic principle and final theories in physics. They have in common, besides Weinberg's well-mannered and modest (but not self-deprecating) prose, a belief in the advancement of scientific knowledge, and a criticism of mysticism, religion and ignorance. I found myself in substantial agreement with Weinberg on almost every subject, and in admiration of his measured, fair and very wise expression.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 hopele

A showdown with the enemies of science

This is a collection of essays, speeches, and reviews written by Steven Weinberg during 1987-2000. This inevitably means that there is a fair amount of repetition if you read the whole book. On the other hand all are clear and well written as usually is the case with Weinberg. They are also carefully argued and persuasive. The topics that Weinberg dwells on are the reasons why the superconducting supercollider should have been built, why reductionism is good (and what it is), scientific method and history, Thomas Kuhn's paradigm change view of scientific revolutions, Sokal's hoax, and the postmodernist views of science. Weinberg argues that the only real revolution in the history of science is that brought about by Newton when Aristotelian physics was crushed. After that science has evolved in such a way that new theories have included the older ones as limiting cases. The ideas that scientific knowledge should be social constructions are carefully shown to be nonsense. The book is enjoyable and does not avoid controversy. Weinberg states in the book that: "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". This has, of course made many angry, but Weinberg indicate by several examples from history how this, in fact, is so. Buy it and read it!