UFF B| colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Quantum/dreams.txt The Dreams that Stuff is Made Of Victor J. Stenger Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature, by Steven Weinberg (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 336 pp., $25.00 cloth. Published in Free Inquiry 14(3), Summer 1994, p. 59. In October, 1993, the U.S. House of Representatives canceled the Superconducting Supercollider. The ramifications of this decision for high energy particle physics, and fundamental research in general, remain to be determined. Newspaper reports have tended to support the view that the project was yet another government boondoggle to be compared with Star Wars or the manned space program, mismanaged and budget-busting. Rarely have votes in the two houses of Congress been so lopsidedly opposite, with the new freshman class of representatives, especially, refusing to accept the wisdom of their senior colleagues who saw the SSC as an investment in the future. Since the death of Richard Feynman, Steven Weinberg has become widely regarded by the physics community, if not the press, as the worlds leading theoretical physicist. Weinberg shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 for his work on the unification of the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces. With his 1977 popular level book, The First Three Minutes, he established himself as an fine writer as well as a brilliant physicist. Dreams of a Final Theory is largely the product of Weinbergs efforts as a major spokesman for the SSC. The book represents his attempt to make understandableto the average citizen what he and many others feel are the compelling scientific reasons to build the SSC, or a machine like it. Though the SSC is now dead, those reasons remain. Unlike Star Wars, which most physicists always insisted was impractical, and the manned space program, which is justified more on political and public relations grounds than scientific ones, the SSC was designed to address questions every bit as fundamental and as potentially important to society as those addressed by Michael Faraday in the middle of the last century: What is matter? What are the basic forces of nature? When Queen Victoria asked Faraday what good was electricity, he reportedly replied, Madam, what good is a baby? He could not possibly have imagined the practical uses that would come of electricity and magnetism. Today, in an instant as history is measured, we cannot imagine life without the devices made possible by Faradays work. If the Queen had given Faraday a billion pounds to do his research, the investment would have paid off a billion-fold and more. Who today can imagine what the payoff, if any, will be for further explorations along the same lines pursued by Faraday? Dreams does not match the high standards set by The First Three Minutes, but it is well worth reading. Weinberg relates how particle physics moved, in the few decades of his career, from the confusing conglomerate of new particles produced in high energy accelerators, to quarks, gluons and the current standard model. For some twenty years, the standard model has passed every empirical test to which it has been subjected. The SSC was designed to reach an energy where the standard model is almost guaranteed to break down, thus pointing the way to the next level of understanding. Weinberg convinces me of this inevitability, but not that we are anywhere near a final theory, or even that one can be found. He extols the virtues of superstrings, but admits that its mathematics is so arcane that even most theoretical physicists do not comprehend what the specialists are doing. A far more likely possibility in my mind is that the constants and laws of physics are accidental. Weinberg notes that we are unlikely ever to derive the properties of complex matter from basic principles. He gives an excellent example with the genetic code, which is such an illogical mess that instead of providing the evidence for design that the religious would like to see, can be more reasonably interpreted as evidence for lack of design - mostly the result of chance. But Weinberg has more faith than I do that particle physics is different, that an ultimate, underlying theory will be found in the beauty of its mathematics. He is not yet ready to think that the laws of physics may be as accidental as the genetic code. Being puzzled by what Wigner called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, Weinberg adds another puzzle that he calls the unreasonable ineffectiveness of philosophy. He devotes a chapter to the uselessness, even harm, of too much philosophizing, particularly by positivism, relativism, and the more recent notion that science is simply another arbitrary social activity. Most scientists will love this chapter. Weinberg has similar distaste for all the metaphysical nonsense that has been associated with quantum mechanics. He says: So irrelevant is the philosophy of quantum mechanics to its use, that one begins to suspect that all the deep questions about the meaning of measurement are really empty, forced upon us by our language, a language that evolved in a world governed very nearly by classical physics. In another chapter near the end entitled. What about God? Weinberg amplifies the atheistic views he expressed at in The First Three Minutes. He discusses the attention that has been given to his most quoted statement from that book: the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. He protests that he did not mean that science teaches that the universe is pointless, but rather that the universe itself suggests no point. Still Weinberg finds no place for God, or for a reconciliation between science and religion. He does not think the Einsteinian retreat to Spinozas God as the order and harmony of the universe is what most people mean by religion. He sees this view as serving no purpose other than in avoiding, as Einstein did, the accusation of having no God. While he admits we cannot rule out finding God in the final theory - until we find the theory - Weinberg thinks that such an outcome is highly unlikely. Science has been an unbroken progression of demystification to the point where the retreat of religion from the ground occupied by science is almost complete. He guesses that, though we shall find beauty in the final laws of nature, we will find no special status for life or intelligence. _________________ Victor J. Stenger is professor of physics at the University of Hawaii and the author of Not By Design: The Origin of the Universe (Prometheus Books, 1988) and Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses (Prometheus Books, 1990).
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 04:08:31 +0000
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