Facing Up Science and its Cultural Adversaries

About this book

Each of these essays, which span 15 years, struggles in one way or another with the necessity of facing up to the discovery that the laws of nature are impersonal, with no hint of a special status for human beings.

Contents

Preface 1. Science as a Liberal Art 2. Newtonianism, Reductionism, and the Art of Congressional Testimony 3. Newton's Dream 4. Confronting O'Brien 5. The Heritage of Galileo 6. Nature Itself 7. The Boundaries of Scientific Knowledge 8. The Methods of Science... and Those by Which We Live 9. Night Thoughts of a Quantum Physicist 10. Reductionism Redux 11. Physics and History 12. Sokal's Hoax 13. Science and Sokal's Hoax: An Exchange 14. Before the Big Bang 15. Zionism and Its Adversaries 16. The Red Camaro 17. The Non-Revolution of Thomas Kuhn 18. T. S. Kuhn's Non-Revolution: An Exchange 19. The Great Reduction: Physics in the Twentieth Century 20. A Designer Universe? 21. "A Designer Universe?": An Exchange 22. Five and a Half Utopias 23. Looking for Peace in the Science Wars Sources Index

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Biography

Steven Weinberg, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Texas, is the author of many books, including The Quantum Theory of Fields, and, for general readers, The First Three Minutes and Dreams of a Final Theory. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 and The National Medal of Science in 1991.