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Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries

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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 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.

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!

Steven Weinberg is doing exactly what more scientists should do -- trying to explain the importance of science to the public. Bravo! However, this collection of essays is too superficial to do justice to any of the topics it addresses. The most disappointing aspect is that it is mistitled. Only 7 or so of the 23 essays address the "cultural adversaries" of science. These are some of the most engaging pieces, on Sokal's hoax, Kuhn's theory, and the Argument By Design for theism, which Weinberg rejects (as do I). Most of the essays are about particle physics (of course!), theoretical reductionism, and the nature of science more generally. My favorite, though, is Weinberg's rejection of several utopias, and his own modest proposal, which strikes me as just the sort of thing Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper would say.

Weinberg is a naive realist with an aversion to philosophy, and consequently his arguments often have a blunderbuss quality. He makes important points, and doesn't seem to realize their significance. For instance, he emphasizes the continuity between Newtonian physics and quantum physics. However, he points out that -- 1) The Standard Model is just that, a model, which is known to be wrong, because it does not include gravity. 2) Einstein's theory of gravity, just like Newton's, is an approximation, and should not be treated as sacred. 3) "...[N]one of the laws of physics known today ... are exactly and universally valid." (150). Weinberg's attitude is much more dogmatic than these insights seem to justify, quite different from, say, Feynman, another Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, or Popper the philosopher. I am on Weinberg's side in the Science Wars, (see my Against Obsurantism list), but he is not the most subtle and eloquent proponent of Science!

For a better overview of the Science Wars, I recommend WHO RULES IN SCIENCE. For the philosophy of science, try Salmon's CAUSALITY AND EXPLANATION and anything by Karl Popper. For a more in-depth summary of particle physics as of 2002, THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE emphasizes string theory, and Gribbin is still good on quantum physics (SCHRODINGER'S CAT and KITTENS). Feynman's "6 EASY PIECES/6 NOT-SO-EASY PIECES is a great introduction to physics for non-physicists. And on the science/theology issue, a great book is Raymo's SKEPTICS AND BELIEVERS, which emphasizes the sense of wonder and mystery in science, and avoids both religious and anti-religious dogmatism.

Contrary to what others have said, Weinberg is quite clear both that science cannot determine morality, and that there are metaphysical underpinnings to science -- page 120!

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.

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.

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.

The author Steven Weinberg is the Nobel-prize winning theoretical physicist. In this book 23 essays written between 1985 and 2000 are collected. The dust cover of the book has a photo of the statue of the 16th century astronomer Tycho Brahe with a posture of facing up. The author writes in the preface that this is only part of the reason for his choice of "Facing Up" for the title of the book. The other part of the reason is described as follows: Each of the essays in this collection struggles with the necessity of facing up to the scientific discoveries that show the laws of nature are impersonal, with no hint of a divine plan or any special status for human being. Weinberg adds some words about his viewpoints: rationalist, reductionist, and so on. These aptly describe his personal philosophy underlying all the essays in this volume.

In a sense the reductionism or the physics imperialism is considered a defective thought these days. However, Weinberg's reductionism (called "objective reductionism" in chapter 2 and "grand reductionism" in chapter 10) means the notion: "There are arrows of scientific explanation that converge to a common source at the level of the very small." He does not necessarily mean the constituents of the upper level structure by "the very small." Nor does he deny the emergence of new concepts at higher levels of organization to understand the behavior at those levels. Thus I find myself comfortably agreeing with him about defending his reductionism. As for his criticism of social constructivism (chapter 9), I also hold an opinion similar to his.

On the other hand, Weinberg's attack on religions is so scathing (especially in chapters 20 and 22) that I cannot completely agree with him, though I do not believe in any religion. He looks only at the aspect of religions as the adversary of science on the basis of big historical events unhappy to religions. In spite of this disagreement, I find instructive expressions here and there in this book. For example, I like Weinberg's words, "We will need to confirm and strengthen the vision of a rationally understandable world if we are to protect ourselves from the irrational tendencies that still beset humanity (chapter 12)." To sum up, this book gives the reader a lot of knowledge and a chance of deep thinking about the significance of science, religion and philosophy.

Steven Weinberg, a brilliant physicist who won the Noble Prize in 1979, does not disappoint in this series of essays and speeches. Weinberg covers not only science, but religion, politics, philosophy and other issues in this delightful book. He discusses science at a level that does not overwhelm the non-scientist. I particularly liked his critique of religion: "I have seen a mother die painfully of cancer, a father's personality destroyed by Alzheimer's, and scores of relatives murdered in the Holocaust. Signs of a benevolent designer seem pretty well hidden." Supporters of Israel will enjoy his writings on behalf of the Jewish state, where he reprimands his fellow liberals for their moral equivalency in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I cannot too highly recommend Facing Up.

The title of my review might be misleading so I will quickly say that these essays are not bad at all (see the other reviews). However, there is nothing very enlightening here either. Basically anyone with a good head on their shoulders who has a practical understanding of how science works and has studied a little bit of philosophy could have written this. These are interesting ideas but nothing new.

The man is amazingly bright, but it's funny how much advanced physics he probably considers to be "old news" and unworthy of writing about but now he comes up with some prevalent ideas in a subject different from his specialty (the philosophy of science as opposed to cosmology and particle theory) and thinks he has something profound here.

It just seems to be a waste of his talent. Please write some more physics texts in the same spirit as your QFT books Dr. Weinberg! Now THOSE are 5 star texts that it took a Nobel Laureate to write!

Weinberg's intelligence is overwhelming, almost suffocating, and he writes with force and brutal honesty. I particularly like his relentless hostility towards religion and theism. It never occurred to me that religion is THAT bad - I'd always thought that its net contribution to human happiness is simply zero. One of the many harmful effects religion has is certainly its key role in slowing down the progress of science. Perhaps that's somewhat balanced by the inspiration it provides in many forms of artistic creativity, from architecture to music, which may not be what they are without the impetus given by religion. Those of us who believe in genetic causes of behavior may well speculate that we're going to kill and torment one another anyway. And if we can't find a powerful enough excuse like differences in religious beliefs to do so then we would be compelled by evolution to find another. On balance though, I'm coming to like Weinberg's views on religion - very enlightening. (If Stalin and Mao had done one thing right, I think it was their mass arrests and executions of priests......too bad there are so few imitators nowadays.) Weinberg really is admirably UNCOMPROMISING. "I'm all for a dialogue between science and religion - but not a 'constructive' dialogue," says Weingberg. In other words, any such dialogue should be an opportunity for science to tear religion apart - blow it up to smithereens even. Good for him.

Weinberg seems to be pretty open-minded about the Guth-Linde's chaotic inflation idea. That he finds it plausible, even attractive, is significant, for Weinberg's authority is very great indeed.

There is an odd chapter on Arab-Israeli matters which I think is a bit of a stretch to be included in this book - although it casts more light on Weinberg's political views.

His hostility towards philosophy is probably right, if one keeps two things in mind: that some of the greatest philosophers, like Einstein and Schroedinger, were interested in philosophy; and that Weinberg is referring primarily to philosophy of science (which he rightly considers a waste of time), rather than philosophy in general, which deals with many subjects besides scientific method. (Contrast this with his high regard for mathematics.....something Weinberg is good at.)

Another of Weinberg's "adversaries" to science is social constructionism (which not surprisingly is closely related to sociology and philosophy of science). The notion that scientific truths are merely products of culture which only reflect the prevailing consensus and therefore change with time is not really worth a second thought except that there IS a small grain of truth in it in some rare cases. But here is a test: how many people today still consider the Earth the center of the solar system around which the Sun and other planets revolve? What we now know about the natural world is firmly grounded in objective reality and not a matter of consensus except in the most exceptional of cases. Social constructionism may be fashionable among American intellectuals......you'd be hard pressed to find a social constructionist among intellectuals outside the West, and none whatever among real scientists anywhere. Weinberg is right again (except that why so great a scientist should waste so much time refuting it is a bit of a mystery to me).