Steven Weinberg

From Philosopedia

Weinberg, Steven (3 May 1933– )

In Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (1992), Weinberg illustrates as he did in The First Three Minutes (1977) that he is an author worthy of being called one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists.

Weinberg finds no place for God, or for a reconciliation between science and religion. “The more we refine our understanding of God to make the concept plausible,” he wrote, “the more it seems pointless.” For him, science has demystified to the point where the “retreat of religion from the ground occupied by science is almost complete.” Further, he holds that “though we shall find beauty in the final laws of nature, we will find no special status for life or intelligence.” Weinberg attacks the religious conservatives for standing in the way of scientific inquiry, but also he criticizes religious liberals for reducing theology to vacuousness in attempting to reconcile religion with science.

In The New York Review of Books (12 June 1997), Weinberg made some salient points:

• The Milky Way is not something out there, far from us - rather, we are in it. It is our galaxy: a flat disk of about a hundred billion stars, almost a hundred thousand light years across, within which our own solar system is orbiting, two thirds of the way out from the center. What we see in the sky as the Milky Way is the combined light of the many stars that are in our line of sight when we look out along the plane of the disk, almost all of them too far away to be seen separately. Staring at the Milky way and not being able to make out individual stars in it gave me a chilling sense of how big it is, and I found myself holding on tightly to the arms of my lawn chair. . . . Here is the account that is now accepted by almost all working cosmologists. About 10 to 15 billion years ago, the contents of the universe were so crowded together that there could be no galaxies or stars or even atoms or atomic nuclei. There were only particles of matter and antimatter and light, uniformly filling all space. No definite starting temperature is known, but our calculations tell us that the contents of the universe must once have had a temperature of at least a thousand trillion degrees centigrade. At such temperatures, particles of matter and antimatter were continually converting into light, and being created again from light. Meanwhile, the particles were also rapidly rushing apart, just as the galaxies are now. This expansion caused a fast cooling of the particles, in the same way that a refrigerator is cooled by the expansion of the freon gas in its coils. After a few seconds, the temperature of the matter, antimatter, and light had dropped to about ten billion degrees. Light no longer had enough energy to turn into matter and antimatter. Almost all matter and antimatter particles annihilated each other, but (for reasons that are somewhat mysterious) there was a slight excess of matter particles—electrons, protons, and neutrons—which could find no antimatter particles to annihilate them, and they therefore survived this great extinction. After three more minutes of expansion the leftover matter became cold enough (about a billion degrees) for protons and neutrons to bind together into the nuclei of the lightest elements: hydrogen, helium, and lithium. . . . No one is certain what happened before the big bang, or even if the question has any meaning. When they thought about it at all, most physicists and astronomers supposed until recently that the universe started in an instant of infinite temperature and density at which time itself began, so that questions about what happened before the big bang are meaningless, like questions about what happens at temperatures below absolute zero. Some theologians welcome this view, presumably because it bears a resemblance to scriptural accounts of creation. Moses Maimonides taught that “the foundation of our faith is the belief that God created the Universe from nothing; that time did not exist previously, but was created. . . . " Saint Augustine thought the same. But opinions among cosmologists have been shifting lately, toward a more complicated and far-reaching picture of the origin of the universe. (He then reviewed books by Timothy Ferris, Alan H. Guth, and Martin Reese, all three of which he said “give clear introductions to the standard big-bang theory and to the physical theories used by cosmologists.”)

In Washington, D.C., in a 1999 debate with John Polkinghorne that was held in the same National Museum of Natural History auditorium as a famous 1920 debate on the size of the universe between Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Weinberg deplored any science-and-religion trend—it “could help to give religion a kind of legitimacy it shouldn’t have.” “With or without religion,” he said, “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.”

In 1979 Weinberg shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Abdus Salam and Lee Glashow.

In 1996, he was elected a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. In 1999, for his plain speaking by public figures on the subject of religion, he was presented with the “Emperor Has No Clothes” statuette by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. As to his predictions about what will be the physicists’ “wave of the future,” Weinberg cited Brian Greene’s projections about the “string theory” as being “the only game in town.”

"Without God," an article in The New York Review of Books (25 September 2008) further develops his views:

• Let's grant that science and religion are not incompatible - there re after all some (though not many) excellent scientists, like Charles Townes and Francis Collins, who have strong religious beliefs. Still, I think that between science and religion there is, if not an incompatibility, at least what the philosopher Susan Haack has called a tension, that has been gradually weakening serious religious belief, especially in the West, where science has been most advanced. Here I would like to trace out some of the sources of this tension, and then offer a few remarks about the very difficult question raised by the consequent decline of belief, the question of how it will be possible to live without God.

(See entry for Christian de Duve.)

{CA; CE; E; New York, 1 February 1999; Carey Goldberg, The New York Times, 20 April 1999}