It would be nice to report that “Dreams of a Final Theory” avoids this trap. It doesn’t. But while Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg gets bogged down in the middle, he sprints at the end toward a compelling plea for seeking “the final laws of nature.” What’s “final”? Think of a succession of childlike “whys.” Pick any question about the natural world-Weinberg likes why is chalk white? The first answer invokes the way light strikes chalk. Why does light interact with chalk that way? Because of the energies atoms absorb. Why do they absorb those energies? Because of quantized energy states (one of the laws of quantum mechanics). Why are energy states quantized? Because of subatomic particles and fields. Why does the world consist of fields and particles with those properties? “Sorry,” says Weinberg, “these questions are still unanswered.” The answer would be the final theory. What’s fascinating is that no matter what question you pick, from biology or chemistry or physics, you wind up with the same penultimate answer about particles and fields and the same unanswerable, final “why?” Elementary particle physics underlies all of nature.
“Dreams” is a no-apologies defense of such reductionism. Along the way, Weinberg pummels critics who see high-energy physics as a colossal waste of money and arrogant in its claim to be the one true science. “I do not understand how [seeking the final theory] cannot seem an important task to anyone who is curious about why the world is the way it is,” he fairly seethes.
So far, the best candidate for ultimate explanation is “string theory,” which says everything is made of “tiny one-dimensional rips in the smooth fabric of space.” Few physicists, let alone the rest of us, understand it. But Weinberg argues that it, or something like it, will reveal “the mind of God.” But maybe not the one we expected. “We will find no hint of any God who cares about [life or intelligence, value or morality],” he warns.
That may not seem like much of an admission, but physicists of late seem to be finding God in droves, promising that a final theory will reveal, as Einstein put it, whether “God had any choice in the creation of the world.” Even politicians have noticed these divine allusions. Today, physicists desperately want the feds to build the world’s biggest, most powerful accelerator-the Superconducting Super Collider. Promising that the SSC would find more subatomic particles wasn’t going to pry $11 billion from the Treasury. So the SSC’s sponsors hit on a lure only slightly less powerful than spreading SSC subcontracts to virtually every congressional district in the country (which inspired the term “quark barrel” politics). As Rep. Harris Fawell of Illinois asked Weinberg at a hearing, “Will this make us find God?” An SSC foe interjected, “If this machine does that I am going to come around to support it.”
Weinberg makes more modest claims for the SSC, which he supports and which has, so far, survived President Clinton’s budget cuts. But even if God’s mind isn’t in the laws of particle physics, by discovering a final theory we will realize a glorious sense of Aha, so that’s why the world is the way it is, and cannot be any other way.
