Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries

Rating:
Summary: 'Fessing up
Review: Echoing 'Dreams of a Final Theory', this collection is perhaps an answer to the critics and a declaration of non-repentance for stubborn reductionism. One wonders, how many string theorists does it take to produce a final theory? With the same question for screwing in a lightbulb and for an eschatological vision of the 'end times of theory'. Ay, there's the rub. We can preach the reductionist religion, but how do we know if the things that don't reduce are better off not being explained by a 'transient state of theory'?
Judging the brouhaha over mere quibbles from the 'science wars', the age of Big Science is not ready for either the Spenglerian 'end of science', Buddhist 'irrationalists', Darwinian heretics, or resurgent Romanticism. In fact, overconfidence reigns: science cannot explain consciousness, has no claim on a science of society, and can't seem to realize the nature of its failure to produce a serious theory of evolution. Time to fess up, reductionism is a great idea, but it has failed its first great test. It may be time to deprive Science of its founder, who was, as a matter of fact, the very type of irrationalist now the object of scorn. Newton was the real founder of the geisteswissenschaften and the age of Big Science doesn't deserve him for a mascot.

Rating:
Summary: Good collection of essays
Review: FACING UP brings together a number of talks and papers by Steven Weinberg that have been scattered here and there up until now. For anyone who has followed Weinberg for a while, there is nothing new here except for brief (on the order of a few paragraphs) introductions to each of the pieces; however, the essays are quite good, and well worth a second reading. Weinberg's primary concerns are to defend reductionism and scientific realism (in the senses both that science means to describe the real world, and that science in fact makes progress towards the one true description), and, in at least one brilliant essay, to argue that physics points in the opposite direction as religion. The quality of philosophical thought in the essays is not exceptionally deep, but Weinberg does offer the reader what I think is a healthy dose of common sense.

Rating:
Summary: A showdown with the enemies of science
Review: This is a collection of essays, speeches, and reviews written by Steven Weinberg during 1987-2000. This inevitably means that there is a fair amount of repetition if you read the whole book. On the other hand all are clear and well written as usually is the case with Weinberg. They are also carefully argued and persuasive. The topics that Weinberg dwells on are the reasons why the superconducting supercollider should have been built, why reductionism is good (and what it is), scientific method and history, Thomas Kuhn's paradigm change view of scientific revolutions, Sokal's hoax, and the postmodernist views of science. Weinberg argues that the only real revolution in the history of science is that brought about by Newton when Aristotelian physics was crushed. After that science has evolved in such a way that new theories have included the older ones as limiting cases. The ideas that scientific knowledge should be social constructions are carefully shown to be nonsense. The book is enjoyable and does not avoid controversy. Weinberg states in the book that: "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion". This has, of course made many angry, but Weinberg indicate by several examples from history how this, in fact, is so. Buy it and read it!