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Dreams Of A Final Theory
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From Library Journal
In his celebrated book The First Three Minutes (Basic, 1977; 1988, reprint) Nobel laureate Weinberg wrote the ominous and oft-quoted remark "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless." This book can be seen as his response to that remark after 15 years of reflection and scientific progress. Weinberg writes with great hope and clarity about the possibility that science can find a universal theory uniting the laws of nature into a single statement that is mathematically, philosophically, and aesthetically complete. His writing is technical in places, and some of the first-person narratives come off as less than humble, but overall Weinberg offers excellent insights on how such a theory could be realized and what it would mean. Especially engaging are his chapters, "Beautiful Theories" and "What About God?" Other books have been written on this subject (e.g., Paul Davies's Superforce , LJ 11/15/84; John Barrow's Theories of Everything , Oxford Univ. Pr., 1991; and Barry Parker's Search for a Supertheory , Plenum, 1987), but Weinberg's is likely to have the highest demand. Highly recommended.
- Gregg Sapp, Montana State Univ. Libs.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.
- Gregg Sapp, Montana State Univ. Libs.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.
Kurzbeschreibung
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist and bestselling author of The First Three Minutes describes the grand quest for a unifying theory of nature--one that can explain events as disparate as the cohesion inside the atom and the gravitational tug between the sun and Earth.
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The century now coming to a close has seen in physics a dazzling expansion of the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Lesen Sie die erste Seite
Buchdeckel | Copyright | Inhaltsverzeichnis | Auszug | Stichwortverzeichnis | Rückseite
The century now coming to a close has seen in physics a dazzling expansion of the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Lesen Sie die erste Seite
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Format:Taschenbuch
Steven Weinberg is one of twentieth century's greatest theoretical physicists. He is one of the codiscoverers of the Electroweak Theory, an important piece of the puzzle that describes all of the fundamental forces of nature. He is also a very prolific writer, with several important textbooks and a few books that aim to popularize Physics and make it accessible to the general audience. The theme of this book is the long standing problem in Physics, and that is the one of unification of all forces under a single set of laws. Weinberg is as big of an authority on this subject as they come, as he has contributed and worked on various aspects of unification throughout his professional career. In this book he tries to explain what exactly is meant by "Final Theory." He is equally critical of opponents of this approach to science who deride it as overly reductionist, as he is of those who think that the discovery of final laws will in some way be the end of science. In some sense he is staking a middle ground between these two extremes.
This book was written in the years when the prospect of building the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was still tenable. SSC was supposed to be the largest particle collider in the world, and had it became operational it would have provided new data and insights into the mysteries of fundamental Physics. Or so we believed. Weinberg was one of the most prominent scientific proponents of this project, and he testified often in US Congress in its favor. Many of those encounters with politicians are discussed in this book. They provide a valuable and fascinating insight into how "big science" gets done. For one thing, scientific viability and value of any given project is only one of the important criteria that are considered when the pricetag for a project exceeds the entire budget of a small country. In the end SSC did not get the funding, and for better or worse our search for the ultimate laws of nature has since been almost exclusively a theoretical endeavor. This may change with the advent of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, which is supposed to start taking data any moment now.
Throughout this book Weinberg touches on many philosophical themes, which in some sense is inevitable when one discusses such a vast topic as the ultimate theory of nature. Weinberg is rather dismissive of philosophical and religious considerations. This may be respectable insofar as his intellectual honesty is concerned, and we as readers at least know where he is coming from. However, the vast majority of people hope to understand the questions of the ultimate meaning in broadly philosophical terms, and it would be useful if scientists who are the most invested in the search for the final theory would at least try to present that search in some more accessible categories. Especially if they hope to have the general public on board when it comes to funding exceptionally large scientific projects.
This book was written in the years when the prospect of building the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was still tenable. SSC was supposed to be the largest particle collider in the world, and had it became operational it would have provided new data and insights into the mysteries of fundamental Physics. Or so we believed. Weinberg was one of the most prominent scientific proponents of this project, and he testified often in US Congress in its favor. Many of those encounters with politicians are discussed in this book. They provide a valuable and fascinating insight into how "big science" gets done. For one thing, scientific viability and value of any given project is only one of the important criteria that are considered when the pricetag for a project exceeds the entire budget of a small country. In the end SSC did not get the funding, and for better or worse our search for the ultimate laws of nature has since been almost exclusively a theoretical endeavor. This may change with the advent of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, which is supposed to start taking data any moment now.
Throughout this book Weinberg touches on many philosophical themes, which in some sense is inevitable when one discusses such a vast topic as the ultimate theory of nature. Weinberg is rather dismissive of philosophical and religious considerations. This may be respectable insofar as his intellectual honesty is concerned, and we as readers at least know where he is coming from. However, the vast majority of people hope to understand the questions of the ultimate meaning in broadly philosophical terms, and it would be useful if scientists who are the most invested in the search for the final theory would at least try to present that search in some more accessible categories. Especially if they hope to have the general public on board when it comes to funding exceptionally large scientific projects.
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Format:Taschenbuch
I find this book extremely stimulating and from that perspective this book couldn't be much better. I admire the way the author shared his understanding of theoretical physics with a lay person.
Although, the book suffers from some more or less serious imperfections. Maybe the greatest of them is that too many questions are opened and not adequately discussed. By this I don't think of questions that the physics sets itself, but the questions that put the physics in perspective with other aspects of human being. For example, correlation between mathematics and physics is given a great meaning through so called unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, but the author explanation of it was too simple and unprecise. Then philosophy. The chapter Against philosophy is, I think, one big contradiction. The author attacs some philosophical standing-points although he makes it clear that these very standing-points were in some points in time the motor of development of physics. Even the author's work, as explained in the first chapter, is in a way driven by one philosophical standing-point. Also, from the authors elaboration it is obvious that the problem is not a standing-point itself, but rather unreadyness of some physicists to give up on it when a standing-points become ineffective. How come then that some standing-points are good and some are not?
I am aware that careful elaboration of all the relevant questions would give too much complexity to the book ment to be popular. And this wouldn't matter if only I haven't got the feeling that most of this questions were brought up and answered in such a way for the reason of convincing us (or somebody more important) in necessity of the SCC project. Not that I think it is not all right to do that, it is just that it unnecessarily burdens this all in all beautiful book.
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As far as the Physics itself is concerned this book seems quite up to the job. After all what else do you expect from a Nobel Prize winner? I enjoyed Weinberg's descriptions of general relativity, quantum mechanics, quantum field theory etc and the importance of symmetry principles in all of these things. But when it came to more philosophical topics such as why mathematics seems to be so well suited describing nature he says little of significance. He just keeps harping on how our sense of "beauty" or whatever guides us to mathematical theories. The discussion is so vague that it would have been better if had stuck to the purely physical questions. I don't think Weinberg addresses philosophical questions very well. I guess that is not surprising since he had one chapter devoted solely to showing that philosophy is mostly useless in the practice of Physics. That may well be true mostly but consider Einstein's theories of relativity. In such cases there is not much difference between Physics and Philosophy. One has to be good at both. Unfortunately Weinberg seriously lacks ability in the latter.
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