In February I announced the publication of physicist Steven Weinberg’s new book on the history of science, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, and included two excerpts he sent us to give an idea of the contents.
Now, for one day only, the Times Literary Supplement is offering a free look at its long (and laudatory) review of Weinberg’s book, a review written by Canadian philosopher John Leslie.
I’m only a few pages into Steve’s book, which is good but not by any means a light read. Do not read it before bedtime, as it demands full attention. Leslie, however, gives it high marks:
To Explain the World, [Weinberg’s] twelfth book, tells of the long, hard struggle to arrive at modern science, which started to take something like its present form only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book is a magnificent contribution to the history and philosophy of science.
Leslie’s review is really a mini-lesson in itself in the history of science, and is worth reading just for that. It falls down in only one bit, though, and that bit is about religion. First, Leslie seems to take issue with Weinberg’s famous statement, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” That statement, of course, has angered believers, who regularly mistake it as saying that there is no point to life. What Weinberg meant, of course, was that the more we understand about the universe, the less evidence we see for supernatural “design” or any meaning conferred by a deity. I’m sure Weinberg doesn’t see his own life as pointless!
Leslie apparently doesn’t like the pointlessness, and so he has to offer what comfort he can to religious people. Why, oh why, must philosophers regularly affirm, after religion takes a drubbing, “Look, believers, I’ve found you some consolation!” Michael Ruse, for example, regularly engages in this kind of shenanigan. And so Leslie assures worried religious readers that perhaps God lives in the interstices of our understanding, that is, in The Gaps:
Some items, though, in To Explain the World could give comfort to believers. Weinberg is certain that science will never explain every single law of nature. It can explain any one law only by pointing at some other, more fundamental law, as when we show why gases expand when heated: it’s that hotter particles strike their prison walls more violently. Further, he offers no answer to why the cosmos exists. Could God be the reason both for this and for nature’s laws? In the television series Closer to Truth, in episodes initially broadcast in 2008 and 2009, Weinberg stated: “Whatever our final theory of physics, we will be left facing an irreducible mystery. For perhaps there could have been nothing at all. Not even empty space, but just absolutely nothing. If you believe God is the creator, well, why is God that way? The religious person is left with a mystery which is no less than the mystery with which science leaves us”. Some philosophers, however, view the mystery of God as something on which they can throw light.
I don’t see how a believer can find much consolation in that. That would be the case only if you find consolation in the fact that science may never explain everything, as is certainly the case. Then, if you’re a diehard goddist, you can simply declare our igorance as God. As the great atheist Robert G. Ingersoll said, in one of my favorite quotes (which heads a section in Faith vs. Fact):
“No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.”
Further, Weinberg raises a question that forever eludes the theist: Why is God that way? (And “where did he/she/it come from?”). For the theist, God is just a label for ignorance, for it has no predictive value at all; if it did, we’d be able to infer evolution from scriptures alone. And different religions would converge on the same understanding of God, which of course they don’t.
Finally, maybe, as Leslie avers, “some philosophers view the mystery of God as something on which they can throw light,” but I don’t know what light has been shed, and believe me, I’ve looked.
And, at the very end, Leslie has a Theistic Alternative to Weinberg’s solution of the mystery of why “dark energy” is so weak:
Why is the dark energy so very weak, a property without which the universe would be utterly hostile to life? Weinberg suggests a solution. It is that “what we call the expanding universe is just a small part of a much larger ‘multiverse,’ containing many expanding parts like the one we observe, and that the constants of nature take different values in different parts of the multiverse”; “only a tiny minority of the subuniverses in the multiverse would have physical constants that allow the evolution of life”, but “of course any scientists will find themselves in a subuniverse belonging to this minority”.
That’s to say, what could be at work is Observational Selection, the fact that nobody can make observations inside subuniverses whose dark energies are too hostile. Still, we might instead be seeing Divine Selection of a life-friendly physical world.
What the bloody hell is “divine selection”? Does Leslie mean “divine creation”? To paraphrase Big Daddy, “Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of the numinous in this room?”
Perhaps it’s unfair to dwell on Leslie’s peroration about religion, which after all is only two paragraphs in a long review, but he chose to end this way, and I think the ending paints not a consoling picture for theists, but a bleak one. If you have to look for your God in science’s ignorance—indeed, to rejoice in that ignorance, as Leslie seems to—you’re in bad shape indeed!
Anyway, you have until tomorrow to read Leslie’s review. (By the way, I’m not sure whether Leslie’s a believer; a few places—one is here—suggest that he’s a pantheist.
h/t: Mark
I am 20 pages from the end of “To explain the world: the discovery of modern science”. The book is a history of science and the progress of doing science from before Aristotle to Newton.
What Leslie is pontificating (see what I did there) on is irrelevant to this book.
The review is good, but your comments verify what I suspected – God has nothing to do with it – irrelevant bullshit.
I’m not surprised at the nod to god in the review of Weinberg’s new book. Indeed it’s surprising to find any review of a science book in the TLS. There’s hardly room among all the religious book reviews they do. It is a literary journal, and in literature it does a pretty good job, but I find it strange that the editors pander so heavily to religion and are so neglectful of science, the greatest human achievement of the last 100 years.
I used to write regularly for them, reviewing science books, but I haven’t been asked for years. Others have also noticed their curious neglect of science.
subjunctive
“For perhaps there could have been nothing at all. Not even empty space, but just absolutely nothing.” Weinberg’s “absolutely nothing”, seems to me an insidious illusion; a thought-artifact of the human brain. There is no evidence, that I know of, other than thinking about it, for it to be possible. Yet it is often posited as a logical possibility, as it is by Weinberg. Am I nuts?
If you’re nuts, then so am I. To say that absolute nothingness — complete nonexistence — is a state of affairs that could have existed seems incoherent. Anything that exists, or could exist, seems by definition to be not nothing.
Most people think of “nothing” as what’s left on your plate after you’ve finished a good meal, or what you’re doing when you’re bored.
But, in the incoherent sense that philosophers try to make of it…”nothing” is better thought of as that which is north of the North Pole, or the remainder after division by zero. And, when you put it that way, it’s pretty obvious why “nothing” doesn’t actually exist, nor does it even make sense to suggest that it could.
b&
I don’t think so; I also see it as a somewhat contradictory concept (although so did Aristotle, with his ‘nature abhors a vacuum,’ and he was wrong about that).
In any event, reading the review it sounds like Weinberg’s point is that you get mystery any way you cut it, so ‘it leaves a mystery’ is a bad reason to reject or try and supplement science with religion.
Well, Aristotle was sort of right for the wrong reason. There are (gravitational) fields everywhere. These are a sort of matter. However, they are not baryonic, so they are somewhat unfamiliar.
I just finished Lawrence Krauss’s book “A Universe from Nothing.” A whole book dealing with the very issue in the quote from Weinberg. My head is still spinning from this book, and I need to read it again slowly and maybe I will have a slight understanding of it.
Infer quantum mechanics as well from a ‘great book’. Along A.C. Clark’s: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
If I could go back in time, and give a set of biology, physics, engineering, and chemistry books to ancient Greeks I would be considered a God.
Meaning and coherence are two different things in science. I will enjoy reading this book to see if Weinberg delineates these two. For example, it is not too relevant that Higg’s boson helps explain the origin of hadronic matter, but the physics that takes you to explain the Higg’s boson is strongly connected with the same principles of classical electrodynamics that help make touch screens in smart devices possible.
Science is cohesive, necessarily. Assuming it matters, it relative. Another example: most people today could care less a Mrad of radiation is what you would endure in a very short time on a moon of Jupiter. But the cohesiveness of science tells us that this is true regardless of whether we think that is important or not.
“God” is the darkness that retreats before the light of science.
b&
May I put in a plug for Jacob Bronowski?
Ascent of Man is the grandaddy of popular histories of science.
Still watchable and readable.
I don’t think any one point of view can capture all that is important about the history of science.
But I wish it were required in high school.
Agreed – I remember watching the series some time in the 70s, and reading the book a little later. I’ll have to do so again.
I downloaded the Bronowski videos several years ago, not having watched the series when it was broadcast. It is still available via Bttorrent sites kickass and piratebay.
Me too! The series + book remain the best introduction to the history of science that I have had the good fortune to see/read. I’ve often wondered if J. B.’s ‘Ascent’ was created as a response to Kenneth Clark’s ‘Civilisation’–a series that, however profound, had very little to say about science (and that little, perfunctory).
Though I’m reluctant to contradict “the preeminent theoretical physicist alive today”, I hope Weinberg is wrong about this. I leave open the possibility of a sort of Holmesian solution in which, once science has eliminated all the logically inconsistent formulations of a Final Theory, whatever remains turns out to be not just possible, but physically realized somewhere in the multiverse. That seems like an adequate explanation for the particular laws we observe in our local Hubble volume.
Alas, thanks to Gödel, we can be certain that our knowledge will always be incomplete in any sort of ultimate sense, even though we can certainly hope for completeness over much more limited domains. There will always remain unanswered questions…and, worse, there will be unanswered questions that we won’t even be able to figure out if they’re answerable or not.
Indeed, P =? NP shows every sign of being such….
b&
Maybe. Gödel holds for axiom-based arithmetical systems. I gather Gregory is thinking of the possibility that we might discover a set of fundamental principles that do not rely on other axioms.
I say “maybe” because you’re right, it seems pretty hard to fashion any set of rules or even talk about logical consistency or inconsistency without presuming the axiom P /= notP
The basic logic can be applied to all sorts of non-mathematical systems, and is the same as in Turing’s Halting Problem. Indeed, it’s also how we know there’re more irrational numbers than rational numbers; they’re all statements of the same basic fundamental principle.
As I’m perhaps too fond of observing, there are infinitely many conspiracy theories which cannot, even in principle, be absolutely ruled out. That fact alone is sufficient to render futile any quest for the “ultimate” nature of reality.
For those unfamiliar…P =? NP.
b&
I was going to say, thanks for the link; but having looked at it, now I’m not so sure…
Yeah… P =? NP is one of those that I still haven’t internalized all that well, myself, and typically need to brush up on every time it comes up….
b&
😀
I feel better, now.
One could give a complete physical description of Legos without being able to predict or describe everything that can be built of Legos.
I think we have a pretty good understanding of physics and chemistry without being able to predict all the properties of new compounds. Nor the ability to describe the steps necessary to build a simple replicator.
Could we even have a virtual chemistry that would obviate the need for laboratories? Perhaps I am a simpleton, but that question interests me. My tentative answer is no.
I suppose it depends on how you construe “laws of nature”. I agree that the ramifications of those laws in chemistry, biology, etc. are inexhaustible and for the most part computationally intractable. As Ben says, there are certainly true consequences of those laws that we can never prove to be true.
But I took Weinberg to be saying something different, namely that the bottommost level of physics rests on brute facts for which there can be no explanation; i.e. that’s just the way it is. I’m suggesting as an alternative than when we get that far, we may find that the bottommost level rests on logical necessity and mathematical consistency; there simply is no other way things could have been. This seems to be Tegmark’s view (although I could be misinterpreting him).
That is not what he is saying. He says we might not have the resources to get where we need to go or maybe even our species is not equipt to go there, but we are a long way from that place.
In theory, of course.
In practice…it is just barely within our abilities today to simulate protein folding — and doing so takes an insane amount of time compared with the nearly-instantaneous fraction of a second that it actually takes proteins to fold.
I don’t think anybody reading these words will live long enough to see arbitrary chemistry simulations, but we already live in a time when chemistry research simply can’t be meaningfully done without computers.
b&
If you include the analytical techniques applied to chemical research, computers have been pretty much indispensable for decades. Even synthetic organic bench chemists use spectroscopic measurements (most notably, NMR) that has required computers for signal processing (fast Fourier transforms to take measurements from the time domain to the frequency domain) since about the time I was an undergraduate 40 years ago.
But, as you say, working out reaction mechanisms for reactions in solution even using modern quantum chemistry is at the bleeding edge.
From what I undertand quantum chemistry also presupposes a lot of classical matters that are just “put in by hand”. The philosopher of chemistry E. Scerri’s book on the periodic table has some discussion of this (and a few ad hoc remarks are in Bunge’s 1982 paper on the “reduction of chemistry to physics”).
Given our current hypothesis of the origin of the universes in the multiverse, e.g. via discontinuities in the quantum vacuum, we are still left with the question of where the quantum vacuum came from. IMHO, the likelihood of explaining that one is quite small.
I read To Explain the World, and found it too hard to read. I’m halfway through Leonard Mlodinow’s The Upright Thinkers, which is also a history of science, and find it well written, informative and enjoyable. I also recommend Simon Singh’s 2004 book Big Bang, which is a remarkably interesting history of cosmology.
Weinberg appeared on CSPAN’s Book Notes last weekend, talked about “To Explain..”
W. was entertaining and slyly provocative as always. One take-away, in describing Descartes’ methodology as over-rated, Weinberg noted a long list of things Descartes got wrong. End of the list:”animals lack true consciousness” Weinberg said he’d known a few cats that would take issue…
Another amusing shtick was a riff on Isaac Newton as an “odd duck”. Most I’d heard, but what struck me was that Newton not only never left England, but never even saw the ocean “despite his interest in tides”.
The Book Notes are always repeated on CSPAN’s weekend programming, so anyone with basic cable can probably view the program.
Wow. What a meaty, fascinating review. Thanks for pointing me to it!
From the review article Leslie states “Weinberg insists that expert scientists can be religious.Later on same section Leslie declares “Even, he (Weinberg) thinks, when God is pictured very differently from the deity of biblical literalism who stopped the Sun moving for Joshua, belief in God remains a hindrance to understanding the universe. “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless”, he wrote in The First Three Minutes.”
So which is it? Weinberg thinks you can be religious and a top scientist a la a Francis Collins or that religious belief hinders a scientist’s abilities making him/her ‘less than exceptional’?
Good question. It is possible that for every Francis Collins there are a hundred could-have-beens.
Well, my PhD thesis adviser, who was a co-author of the famous Higgs paper on what came to be known as the Higgs boson, is a born again Christian, indicating that it is possible for a religion person to make a substantial contribution to science, although it ain’t easy.
Curious did he ever share or did you get a hint of his personal views on origins/cosmology or evolution?
I have Weinberg’s book; but it has not yet risen to the top of my pile.
That said, I just finished Oliver Sacks’ autobiography, On the Move, and I can highly recommend it.
Having just finished Weinberg’s book and 2 others, my reading list is now empty, intentionally. Waiting for “Faith versus Fact”.
Since I am travelling Friday, it would be nice to have my Kindle version of FvF, but I guess Tuesday will have to suffice.
Just finished reading the book yesterday. It’s great to have a book that’s not simply telling what happened and when, but about how that relates to our modern-day methods. It’s also refreshing to have someone highlight that mathematics has actually impeded scientific progress throughout history by putting absurd requirements onto what the practitioners did.
I read the book as soon as it came out. It is utterly fabulous. I am a physicist myself and have read previously a fair amount of the history Weinberg covers. (I was also fortunate to have met Weinberg while I was grad student at Harvard. I was a lowly 2nd year experimentalist and he graciously signed my copy of The First Three Minutes, a gift for my dad.)
Weinberg approaches western science in a fantastically clear and refreshing fashion, and makes good on his promise: “this is an irreverent history; I am not unwilling to criticize the methods and theories of the past from a modern viewpoint.” It’s as though he re-read all the original materials since Democtritus (which in many cases, he did). I can’t begin to recount all of the “aha!” moments I got going over old ground. This book will spawn a hundred theses. If I can find time I’ll expand on this a bit.
Professor – cats also make an appearance!
In one particularly fun “bull in a china shop” moment, Weinberg covers a litany of claims Descarte got wrong about the universe(the earth is prolate, a vacuum is impossible, …), and winds up with, “Finally, on the basis of observation of several lovable pet cats, I am convinced that Descarte was also wrong in saying that animals are machines without true consioucness.”
The final chapter on the unification of fields since the time of Newton is breathtaking.
BTW, if you want to see a particularly egregious review, check out Steve Shapin’s in the WSJ. A historian himself, he takes the provincial view of “see what car crash happens when you let a physicist write a book on the history of science.” Shame. I don’t think I’ve ever read a review that more willfully managed to miss the main point of a book.
I would quote Fermi in this regard. He is quoted as saying something to the effect that a scientist who have never been wrong hasn’t accomplished much. Newton was wrong about a strictly particle theory of light being able to explain diffraction. He was also wrong about whether chemical processes could turn lead into gold. Darwin was wrong about inheritance being an analog process when he had a copy of Mendel’s treatise showing that it was a digital process. Einstein was wrong about black holes and also about quantum mechanics.
Figures. Shapin is the sort of guy who will absolutely detest this sort of “traditional” history of science.
Weinberg’s book is novel because it includes the “so why were they wrong” stuff. This sort of thing is anathama to pomos (or there abouts) like Shapin, for example.
I’d put in a plug for John Gribbin’s “Science: A History”.
Given how fast things move, it may already be slightly out of date (published in 2002), but it’s ideal for the layman (layperson?)- very well-written and comprehensive.
Reading through the review, it’s disappointing that a good portion was devoted to the G-question, given Weinberg’s addressing of the question in the book is little more than a few throwaway lines.
I’ve read Weinberg’s book.
Some of it is “throw away” routine stuff, and very Whiggish. (I don’t think that’s a problem, but the Shapins of the world will.) Shapin is right one thing – it ends c. 1700. Not a bad thing, but Weinberg could have explained that better.)
Leslie doesn’t seem to be getting it – the “why is there something rather than nothing” is a pseudoproblem. I believe he owes his reader at least a mention of (say) Gruenbaum or Bunge who have pointed that out for *years*. Presumably he knows their work, esp. the former who has written very detailed articles on the subject.
Returning then to the book: it has attempts to show where matters went wrong for other thinkers, and that’s important in my view. It relates to one maxim I was told in philosophy classes. If you want to show someone mistaken, it can help (rhetorically) if you can show why they came to have thought the way they did. (For example, that they didn’t investigate bodies moving very fast …)
Bacon especially is important to mention as irrelevant. Here’s how you tell if someone thinks content of science is irrelevant for their meta-investigations (history of, philosophy of, whatever). If they think Bacon was important for the *discoveries made* rather than for social organization suggestions (and they are pretty illformed), they are likely ignorant of how science (now or 17th century) is actually done. Bacon’s methods are almost completely naive, but did given an idea for the Royal Society, so …
I do think Weinberg is a bit unfair to Descartes, but not by much.