Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries StevenWeinberg Harvard U. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001. $26.00 (283 pp.). ISBN 0-674-00647-X

It is almost unfair for me to be reviewing Facing Up, a collection of essays by Steven Weinberg, since I consider its author a very important scientist-intellectual. Furthermore, I admire his writing and agree with 99% of his opinions. Happily for this review, the 1% on which we differ is central to this collection and will be discussed at length later.

Facing Up consists of about 20 essays composed over a decade and a half for various occasions, each with a brief preface in which Weinberg describes the inception of the essay and occasionally the response that followed it. More than half of this 250-page book was written for The New York Review of Books, with the luxurious length and full airing of controversies typical of that publication. In fact, some of the chapters here are answers to published responses in that journal.

Aside from a few very brief personal essays (Weinberg’s opinions on Zionism, an account of the circumstances surrounding his greatest discovery), and one longish discussion of the present state of the science of cosmology, the topics upon which he chooses to divagate are fairly closely related. They define the progressive development of his own scientific philosophy—which for any theoretical scientist must relate to his personal philosophy as well.

Three main themes appear again and again: his own variety of reductionism (where I seem to have been nominated as a “cultural adversary”), his opposition to those who insist that science is socially constructed, and his insistence (to use his words upon being asked to join a dialogue on science and religion) that he is “all in favor of a dialogue … but not a constructive dialogue.”

In several of the essays Weinberg elaborates on a theme that was central to his earlier book, Dreams of a Final Theory (Pantheon, 1992). That book was written as an apologia—in terms of the centrality of elementary particle physics in the scientific world picture—for the enormous expense of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC).

In one of the essays in Facing Up, written for a Newton tricentenary event, he celebrates the standard model (and its possible successors) in physics as embodying the Newtonian ideal of discovering universal laws that apply always and everywhere. Here he sees the progress of science since Newton’s time as extending unification to more and more of the world around us, until, at present, we can segue into scientific explanations of all of the facts of nature. So far, one can hardly differ with him. In the earlier book, Dreams, he developed the scheme of imagining a chain of “why” questions that would lead from any phenomenon in the observable universe, and end up eventually at the universal laws that reveal the dynamics of the elementary quantum fields composing the universe. “Therefore,” he insists, the search for the laws of those elementary fields has some greater intellectual urgency (and may cost more money) than other sciences.

Another essay in Facing Up, “Nature Itself,” was written as his contribution to the final, overview chapter of the three-volume history, Twentieth Century Physics (AIP Press, 1995), edited by Laurie Brown, Abraham Pais, and Brian Pippard. The other contributors to that chapter were John Ziman and myself. In this concise essay he views the century as essentially a grand progress toward the standard model and the Big Bang cosmology, thus ignoring much of the historical material. To my surprise, I learned from the introductory remarks to that essay that he had asked to write it in case the uncontradicted opinions in my contribution might corrupt future readers. For my part, I attempted to make up for what I saw as a weakness of the history by tracing what had happened to the profession of physics in the century: status, funding, public acceptance, and comprehension. This is the part, I suppose, to which Weinberg refers in the above-mentioned remarks as “much good sense.” But a brief passage in my contribution pointed out that a problem with public comprehension is that the world we actually see, of human relations, stars, storms, and rocks, resembles not at all the quarks and leptons from which it is made, and, therefore, that there must be many layers of emergence of novel properties for which the standard model alone doesn’t afford an explanation. Perhaps provocatively, I called emergence the “God Principle,” in contrast to the phrase “God Particle” used by a particle colleague.

While Weinberg’s reductive arrows are very comforting, in that they give us confidence in our explanations, the structure of science is more web than tree. There are broad generalizations—irreversibility, broken symmetry, adaptive evolution are a few—that crossconnect the sciences and don’t necessarily involve the detailed nature of the underlying fields. Thus I don’t accept the opinion expressed by Weinberg in another essay, “Night Thoughts of a Quantum Physicist,” that there are “no freestanding principles of … biology or economics.” My view is closer to E. O. Wilson’s consilience than to Weinberg’s reductionism.

Another article discusses Weinberg’s testimony on the SSC before a Senate committee, ending with an amusing exchange with a committee member that illustrates the futility of such testimony. In a similar instance, when both of us testified on the SSC, my testimony criticized the claims of spinoff from particle research, such as magnetic resonance imaging. One of the senators came down among us later and thanked Steve profusely for the good that MRI diagnosis had done for a close relative.

With the essay titled “Night Thoughts…,” the author begins the assault on the idea that science is a social construction, not a description of reality. This is a second major theme of the book. In the course of covering it, he discusses science historian Thomas Kuhn’s seminal contribution to this aberration and comments on Alan Sokal’s famous hoax. Weinberg’s discussion of historical issues in science is a major value of this book, particularly with respect to his contention that Kuhn’s version of a scientific revolution is too extreme and too special even to describe the birth of quantum theory. There is by no means the complete disjunction of attitudes before and after a revolution that would allow the sociologists to claim that the two contradictory sets of scientific views are both right, each from its own internal points of view. This is an attitude that Kuhn did little to dispel, although privately he might disavow it. (Nonetheless, Kuhn was capable of “denying the existence of objective reality.”)

What Kuhn did was helpful to scientists themselves in understanding what they do and the role of the paradigmatic instance in changing the community’s mind. But I don’t think the radical extensions of his ideas have been of any value. These take many forms and are often disguised by protestations of belief in scientific fact. But all such protestors in the end insist that science is not an interconnected unity but a collection of separate fantasies produced by the canonical groups of DWM’s (dead white males). I would add, for my own part, that the admission that the sciences are interconnected at every level, not just through the underlying equations of physics, is a strong defense against such nonsense.

Weinberg’s discussion of Sokal’s send-up of sociological pretensions was characteristically eloquent and insightful. One piece ends with a typically pointed remark: “It seems to me that Derrida in context is even worse than Derrida out of context.” Enough said! (Jacques Derrida is credited with originating the theory of “deconstruction”.)

Building on a brief remark in his The First Three Minutes (Basic Books, 1977), Weinberg here continues in several articles the discussion of the role of religion in science and vice versa. In Facing Up, he calls “the preconceptions of philosophy” (it is clear from context that he includes religion as well)” … modern science’s chief adversary.” He makes it clear, in his lucid prose, that anyone, either as a Weinbergian reductionist or a Wilsonian consilient, who believes in modern science as a unified structure will be hard put to allow for revealed religion in his philosophy. However, there are scientists who maintain belief in a god who “set the dials” of the standard model so that we can exist: Wheeler’s “Anthropic Principle.” As Weinberg and other cosmologists remark, the reasoning behind even that is shaky, and such a god seems unlikely to have strong opinions about the behavior of beings very recently evolved on a tiny planet on the edge of one of the hundreds of billions of galaxies.

Facing Up was, minor plaints aside, a delight to read. It is satisfying to find one’s beliefs about the nature of science, and indeed of life, expressed with such clarity and eloquence.