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

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

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 ...

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...