To Explain the World

February 2, 2015
With his usual scholarly aplomb, Weinberg (The First Three Minutes), a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, leads readers on a tour of early scientific theory, from the ancient Greeks to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. Weinberg begins around 500 B.C. with philosopher Heraclitus, whose infinite "ordered" cosmos made of "ever-living Fire" typifies an early Greek focus on aesthetics rather than observation and verification. Pythagoras brought mathematical rigor and logic to the field, while Aristotle's ideas about motion became scientific bedrock throughout Arab advances of the Middle Ages and held sway until Copernicus, Galileo, and the subsequent Scientific Revolution. Throughout, Weinberg stresses a need for humans to "outgrow" a "holistic" (as in one that considers humanistic concerns) approach to nature, and stop attaching religion and other abstract ideasâjustice, love, strifeâto our scientific understanding. Science students will particularly appreciate the clarity and detail of Weinberg's "Technical Notes" at the back of the book, which delve more deeply into selected topics. Accessible and smoothly-written, Weinberg offers new insights on what has become familiar territory for pop-science readers. Illus.

Starred review from February 15, 2015
Winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering investigations of leptons and bosons, Weinberg here advances keen insights not into subatomic particles but rather into the intellectual structure of science itself. To learn what it means to do science, readers travel the long historical path connecting the ancient Pythagoreans, who relied on a poetic imagination to find geometric harmonies in the heavens, with the modern genius Isaac Newton, who demonstrated how empirically verified mathematics actually does expose the laws governing the cosmos. In traversing this long path, readers recognize the early brilliance of Greek thinkers such as Aristarchus and Archimedes, and they marvel at the medieval ingenuity of Christian and Islamic astronomers, such as Buridan and al-Zarqali. But breaking the grip of an earth-centered philosophy required the radical breakthrough achieved by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and finally Newton. In the work of these men, Weinberg sees a true revolution, not merely an extrapolation from earlier methods of inquiry. Only the Newtonian revolution made possible Maxwell's electromagnetism, Einstein's relativity, and Heisenberg's quantum mechanics. Weinberg limns the decisive influence of Newton's triumph even in the biological work of Darwin and his heirs. A compelling reminder of how science worksand why it matters.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

January 15, 2015
Histories of science celebrate great thinkers of the past. In this ingenious account, theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Weinberg (Chair in Science/Univ. of Texas; Lectures on Quantum Mechanics, 2012, etc.) celebrates generously but gives equal emphasis to why they often missed the mark.Many people assume that pre-Enlightenment societies were ignorant, but they didn't think so. In ancient China, Greece, Rome and the medieval world, wise men observed, thought deeply, and pronounced on a wide variety of subjects, sometimes correctly, usually not. They not only didn't know what they didn't know; they also didn't know how to learn it. They often mixed metaphysics and reality. The work of Aristotle, the quintessential ancient scientist, was suffused with teleology, the belief that everything has a purpose. Thus, objects fall because their natural place is the center of the universe. Much early science was actually philosophy, but since nothing in the laws of nature "corresponds to ideas of goodness, justice, love, or strife...we cannot rely on philosophy as a reliable guide to scientific understanding." Despite today's scientific orthodoxy, we also should not rely solely on observation and experiments. Copernicus and Kepler argued for a heliocentric solar system based on mathematical simplicity, not accuracy, and prediction of planetary movements was no better than Ptolemy's. Unlike some academics, the author has a keen understanding of the precise details of his subject, and he makes good use of them throughout the book. "Some historians of science make a shibboleth of not referring to present scientific knowledge in studying the science of the past," he writes. "I will instead make a point of using present knowledge to clarify past science." While Weinberg confines most mathematics to a 95-page appendix, readers will strain to comprehend some of the lengthy nuts-and-bolts explanations, but those who persist will come away with a stimulating view of how humans learn from nature.

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