Teachers at the
In his The First Three Minutes,
Weinberg’s
attempt to describe the first three minutes of our universe’s
existence, he
argues that the search for scientific truth can give meaning to life:
“The
effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that
lifts
human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the
grace of
tragedy.” According to Weinberg, the
better we understand nature, the more the scientist’s “sense of wonder”
has
expanded as he or she grapples with the remaining mysteries.
Science, Weinberg believes, has
changed our values
and beliefs in ways that can scarcely be overestimated.
“Nothing in the last five hundred years has
had so great an effect on the human spirit as the discoveries of modern
science.” While Weinberg finds the discoveries and liberating and
believes “the
night sky is as beautiful as ever,” others claim that the sense of
“magic” they
once experienced has been replaced by a sense of sadness.
Ever the secular rationalist, Weinberg
is known
among scientists for his outspoken opinions on the subject of religion. Weinberg told a New York Times
interviewer in 1999, “With or without religion, you would have good
people
doing good things and evil people doing evil things.
But for good people to do evil things, that
takes religion.” His hostility to religion seems to have grown. “As time has passed,” he observed, “my
feelings have gotten stronger and stronger.
I really dislike religion intensely.”
On one major question, however, Steven
Weinberg is
in complete agreement with Phillip Johnson and many fundamentalists. Weinberg believes that evolution, if taught
properly, will reduce a student’s sense of his or her “own
special
importance.” Weinberg argues that
science and spiritual matter cannot “be kept in separate compartments.” That is a good thing, according to Weinberg,
because it means science can “help each of us grow up as an individual.”
Weinberg is scornful of those who
describe science
as just one way among many of finding truth.
Science, Weinberg insists, is not merely a belief system and
certainly
is not, as philosopher Paul Feyerabend suggested, “a superstition.” Science is the path to truth, Weinberg
thinks, and he is not shy about showing his irritation with
philosophers who
disagree. In his book Dreams of a
Final Theory, Weinberg asserted: “I know of no one who has
participated actively in the advance of physics in the postwar period
whose
research has been significantly helped by the work of philosophers.
Weinberg, like
In his 1997 essay, “Before the Big
Bang,” Weinberg
describes a meeting he and other physicists had with Al Gore, in which
the
scientists tried to sell the Vice President on the value of funding the
Super
Collider. Just as Gore left the meeting,
he turned back in the room to ask if the scientists “could tell him
what
happened before the Big Bang.” They had
no satisfactory answer. (Al Gore,
incidentally,
is not the first politician to take an interest in scientific questions
about
origins. The defense in the Scopes case
introduced a letter written by President Woodrow Wilson to one of its
scientific experts, W. C. Curtis. In his
letter to Curtis,
A lot has happened since Al Gore and
the physicists
talked about the Super Collider.
For now, we can say no more. Weinberg writes, “We don’t know if the
universe is infinitely old or if there was a first moment; but neither
view is
absurd, and the choice between them will not be made by intuition, or
by
philosophy or theology, but by the ordinary methods of science.” As Weinberg sees it, the bubble theory
favored by many cosmologists today is “the third step in a historical
progression” that began in 1584 with the discovery that our own sun is
but
another star, and continued in 1923 with the discovery that are own
galaxy is
but one of countless many such galaxies.
To most observers, our universe (and
especially our
planet, of course) seems almost perfectly suited to produce just the
sort of
intelligent life we represent. So
perfect are conditions for life, in fact, that many people have been
led to
argue that the universe must have been intelligently designed. At a recent conference, Weinberg compared our
existence to a player in a poker tournament who finds he has been dealt
a royal
flush. The hand might be blind luck, but
there is another possibility that comes to mind: “Namely, is the
organizer of
the tournament our friend?”
In response to these arguments,
Weinberg points to
the “anthropic principle,” which he
calls “a nice non-theistic explanation of why things are as nice as
they
are.” The principle, in its weak form,
states “that the laws of nature must allow for the appearance of living
beings
capable of studying the laws of nature.” To fully explain the universe
we find
ourselves in, Weinberg suggests, we might have to resort to “a stronger
form of
the anthropic principle.” It may be that
the “final theory”—the theory that explains all of the laws of
nature—turns out
to be “the only logically consistent principles consistent with the
appearance
of intelligent life.” In other words, the physical laws that govern our
particular universe might be highly improbable—improbable to the point
of
seeming almost impossible—but, given enough time and enough universes
being
created, a universe with laws such as we find in ours was bound to come
along
sooner or later. As one cosmologist put it, “Our universe is just one
of those
things that happens from time to time.”
It should not be surprising then, according to the anthropic
principle,
that we find the laws of nature that we find, because those laws are
precisely
the ones necessary for us to exist and for us to be able to ponder such
a
mystery.
The anthropic principle is, Weinberg
admits, “an
unconventional hypothesis.” He claims to
be “not that fond of anthropic reasoning.” He would be “much happier”
if he
could explain why the laws of nature have to be precisely what they
are, but
acknowledges that task might be impossible.
Science might well turn out to lack the means ever to prove or
disprove
the anthropic hypothesis, but it is just the sort of strange principle
that
physicists such as Weinberg must consider if they are ever to fully
explain
man’s existence.
As for the Big Bang itself, Weinberg
expresses
little doubt that it occurred. He calls
it “almost certain to endure.” The event
is consistent with our understanding of the laws of physics, he notes,
and has
been “confirmed by the discovery of relics of the early universe.” The most significant confirming evidence came
from the 1965 discovery of microwave radiation and, later, the
spectrocscopic
measurement of various isotopes of the lightest elements in
interstellar
matter. In ten years time, the Big Bang
evolved from a controversial theory to one generally accepted by
astrophysisists.
Weinberg writes that his
understanding of the
origins of the universe leaves little room for miracles or for a
designing
intelligence—at least any one that “has some special concern with life,
in
particular human life.” The human mind,
so central to most religious persons’ belief in God, is to Weinberg
much like
next week’s weather—a difficult-to-predict product “of impersonal laws
acting
over billions of years.” He sides with
fellow physicist Richard Feynman who once said of the universe, “The
theory
that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for
good and
evil seems inadequate.”
Weinberg has a ready explanation for
those to point
to what seems to be evidence of conscious design, such as the
just-right
radioactive state of carbon or the very low energy density of empty
space (the
small “cosmological constant”). Without
these and other unlikely conditions, the design proponents observe,
life would
be impossible. Weinberg asks why should
we be surprised to find perfect conditions for life: “In all other
parts of the
universe” where perfect conditions do not exist, “there is no one to
raise the
question.” To Weinberg, these sorts of
arguments about design are like someone exclaiming, “Isn’t it wonderful
that
God put us here on earth, where there’s water and air and surface
gravity and
the temperature is so comfortable, rather than some horrid place, like
Mercury
or Pluto?” The only thing that would
convince Weinstein of the reality of intelligent design is “a miracle
or two”—but
he hasn’t seen any yet and doesn’t expect to.
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As one reads the
words of
William Jennings Bryan in his closing speech in the Scopes trial, the
last
speech the Great Commoner ever wrote, the realization comes: Bryan
doesn’t care
whether evolution is true or not. What
worries
Along with turning
man loose in
an uncaring universe,
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Weinberg predicts that the biggest
impact of
advances in physics will be cultural, not technological.
He looks forward to the day when people
comprehend “that nature is governed by impersonal laws, laws that do
not give
any special status to life, and yet laws that humans are able to
discover and
understand.”