Skip to main content

Steven Weinberg - Four Way Interview

Steven Weinberg was educated at Cornell, Copenhagen, and Princeton, and taught at Columbia, Berkeley, M.I.T., and Harvard. In 1982 he moved to The University of Texas at Austin and founded its Theory Group. At Texas he holds the Josey Regental Chair of Science and is a member of the Physics and Astronomy Departments. His research has spanned a broad range of topics in quantum field theory, elementary particle physics, and cosmology, and has received numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize in Physics. His latest book is To Explain the World.

Why science?

I have known that I wanted to be a theoretical physicist since I was sixteen  It was irresistible to me to think that, by stewing over what is known experimentally in the light of present theories, and noodling around with equations, someone could come up with a new theory that turned out to make successful predictions about the real world.  That earlier successful theories like quantum mechanics and relativity were esoteric and counter-intuitive and used fancy mathematics only added to the challenge.

Why this book?

A while ago I decided that I needed to learn more about an earlier era of the history of science, when the goals and standards of physics and astronomy had not yet taken their present shape.  I became impressed with the many differences between the mentality of scientists before the seventeenth century and our own.  It was terribly difficult for them to learn what sort of thing can be learned about the world, and how to learn it.  I tried in this book to give the reader an idea of hard it has been to come to anything like modern science.

What’s next?

Cambridge University Press and I are nursing the second edition of my graduate-level treatise, “Lectures on Quantum Mechanics,” through to publication later this year.  I have added a lot of new material, and sharpened the arguments that lead to a controversial conclusion, that at present there is no really satisfactory interpretation of quantum mechanics.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

There are several experimental facilities that are now coming on line, and that we hope will make discoveries of fundamental importance.  One is the improved Large Hadron Collider, which is starting up again soon at higher energy, and may be able to discover signs of supersymmetry, and/or the dark matter particles that astronomers tell us make up 5/6 of the matter of the universe.  Another instrument is the Advanced Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory, which will be completed soon and will have a good chance of observing gravitational waves produced by pairs of neutron stars as they coalesce.  That’s just two examples.

Photograph (c) Matt Valentine - reproduced with permission (Penguin Books)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Meteorite Hunters - Joshua Howgego *****

This is an extremely engaging read on a subject that everyone is aware of, but few of us know much detail about. Usually, if I'm honest, geology tends to be one of the least entertaining scientific subjects but here (I suppose, given that geo- refers to the Earth it ought to be astrology... but that might be a touch misleading). Here, though, there is plenty of opportunity to capture our interest. The first part of the book takes us both to see meteorites and to hear stories of meteorite hunters, whose exploits vary from erudite science trips to something more like an Indiana Jones outing. Joshua Howgego takes us back to the earliest observations and discoveries of meteorites and the initial doubt that they could have extraterrestrial sources, through to explorations of deserts and the Antarctic - both locations where it tends to be easier to find them. I, certainly, had no idea about the use of camera networks to track incoming meteors, which not only try to estimate where they wi...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...