To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg (PDF)

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A masterful commentary on the history of science from the Greeks to modern times, by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg—a thought-provoking and important book by one of the most distinguished scientists and intellectuals of our time.In this rich, irreverent, and compelling history, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg takes us across centuries from ancient Miletus to medieval Baghdad and Oxford, from Plato’s Academy and the Museum of Alexandria to the cathedral school of Chartres and the Royal Society of London. He shows that the scientists of ancient and medieval times not only did not understand what we understand about the world—they did not understand what there is to understand, or how to understand it. Yet over the centuries, through the struggle to solve such mysteries as the curious backward movement of the planets and the rise and fall of the tides, the modern discipline of science eventually emerged. Along the way, Weinberg examines historic clashes and collaborations between science and the competing spheres of religion, technology, poetry, mathematics, and philosophy.An illuminating exploration of the way we consider and analyze the world around us, To Explain the World is a sweeping, ambitious account of how difficult it was to discover the goals and methods of modern science, and the impact of this discovery on human knowledge and development.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “A thoughtful history.” — The New Yorker“The long march toward the modern scientific method is well-trodden territory for historians of science, but in tackling this familiar topic, Steven Weinberg offers a thoughtful, supplementary viewpoint.” — The Washington Post“Steven Weinberg, the world’s preeminent physicist, provides a masterful journey through humankind’s scientific coming of age. With its refreshing candor and lyrical prose, To Explain the World is a delightful celebration of our passionate drive for understanding.” — Brian Greene“This book transmutes the base metal of a mere history of science into pure gold — into a magisterial celebration of a long and heroic struggle, still incomplete, to understand nature. Only a committed scientist of Steven Weinberg’s brilliance, experience and breadth of insight could have accomplished this.” — Ian McEwan“Refreshing and well-written. . . . To Explain the World tells a rich, meaningful tale about the emergence of science.” — The New York Times Book Review“Fascinating. . . . A sweeping narrative of the progression of ideas. . . . Weinberg masterfully explains how the emergence of the modern scientific method, the mechanism by which we interrogate the world and devise well-supported explanations we can be confident in, is itself a discovery.” — Lewis Dartnell, The Telegraph“Weinberg exemplifies a growing tendency in popular science writing to offer the matter of science and not just a superficial reading. It gives the book a bracing intellectuality. . . . This is a great book, a necessary book for our time.” — The Independent“A refreshing contrast to other tomes on the topic. . . . With To Explain the World, Weinberg reminds us to be humble not only about what we know, but how we know it. It’s a nuance, but an important one.” — The Guardian“I am amazed by what Steven Weinberg has done in this book. It is a unique and highly civilizing guide, obviously the result of years of wide-ranging scholarship, even with strategic humor.” — Gerald Holton“Weinberg is a fine writer and communicator about ideas beyond his own field. . . . He has clearly carried out extensive scholarly investigation for the book, and it works as history. But what makes it stand out is his perspective as a top scientist working today.” — Financial Times“Weinberg has combined his credentials with his knowledge of the history of science to examine a fascinating issue: how attempts to explain the world have changed over time. . . . He writes simply and clearly, and includes many telling insights.” — BBC Focus“Weinberg writes with clarity and wit. . . . His reasoning can be fascinating — and eye-opening. . . . Weinberg is one of our greatest defeners of scientific thought, and his wit is a welcome salve in this authoritative history.” — The Austin American-Statesman“An ingenious account. . . . The author has a keen understanding of the precise details of his subject. . . . Readers will come away with a stimulating view of how humans learn from nature.” — Kirkus“Weinberg advances keen insights. . . into the intellectual structure of science. . . . A compelling reminder of how science works — and why it matters.” — Booklist (starred review)“With his usual scholarly aplomb, Weinberg leads readers on a tour of early scientific theory, from the ancient Greeks to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. . . . Accessible and smoothly written, Weinberg’s book offers new insights on what has become familiar territory for pop-science readers. — Publishers Weekly“Entertaining. . . . The book should make any history of science buff’s reading list. . . . Weinberg gets it right.” — Forbes“A bravura performance. Writing with grace and verve, Weinberg explains complex conceptual nuances with admirable clarity.” — Physics Today“The book is a magnificent contribution to the history and philosophy of science. It tells an exciting story. Why on earth did good science take so long to arrive?. . . . Weinberg writes with great verve and clarity.” — The Times Literary Supplement From the Back Cover “Refreshing and well-written . . . tells a rich, meaningful tale about the emergence of science.”—New York Times Book Review“A masterful journey through humankind’s scientific coming-of-age . . . a delightful celebration of our passionate drive for understanding.”—Brian GreeneIn this rich, irreverent, and compelling history, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg takes us across centuries, from ancient Miletus to medieval Baghdad and Oxford, from Plato’s Academy and the Museum of Alexandria to the cathedral school of Chartres and the Royal Society of London. He shows that the scientists of ancient and medieval times not only did not understand what we now know about the world but also did not understand what there is to understand, nor how to understand it.Yet over the centuries, through the struggle to solve such mysteries as the curious backward movement of the planets or the rise and fall of the tides, the modern discipline of science eventually emerged. Along the way, Weinberg examines historic clashes and collaborations between science and the competing spheres of religion, technology, poetry, mathematics, and philosophy.To Explain the World is an illuminating exploration of how we have come to consider and analyze the world around us.“A thoughtful history.”—The New Yorker About the Author Steven Weinberg is a theoretical physicist and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, the National Medal of Science, the Lewis Thomas Prize for the Scientist as Poet, and numerous honorary degrees and other awards. He is a member of the National Academy of Science, the Royal Society of London, the American Philosophical Society, and other academies. A longtime contributor to the New York Review of Books, he is also the author of The First Three Minutes, Dreams of a Final Theory, Facing Up, and Lake Views, as well as leading treatises on theoretical physics. He holds the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Did you know that Dr. Steven Weinberg, the author of this book, along with getting the Nobel Prize, also received the Lewis Thomas Prize for Scientist as Poet? He did.Reading some of Dr. Weinberg’s earlier writing left me with the impression that he is an intelligent fellow who is capable of looking at more than one side of an issue and is likely to arrive at conclusions that are reasonable, if not necessarily likely to garner universal agreement. Reading an excerpt from this book, I was struck by the line “As great as is the progress that has been made in the methods of science, we may today be repeating some of the errors of the past.” Uh-oh, I thought, better find out about that, I don’t want to be going all Ptolemy on anybody without realizing it.Dr. Weinberg starts off by considering what the ancient Greeks had to say about the natural world. He begins with Thales, who said “Everything is water,” which is remembered as the first physical Theory of Everything. Dr. Weinberg seems to think that this theory wasn’t too bad for a first try, but, personally, I think Heraclitus’s “Everything is fire” has more pizzazz. We then visit with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Democritus, all bright fellows, to be sure, but, when they turned to science, “none of them attempted to verify or even . . . seriously to justify their speculations.” This point seems a bit exaggerated. Aristotle’s argument that if the Earth moved, then a ball thrown straight up in the air would not come straight down to where it was thrown, sounds to me like an attempt to support a conclusion. A kindergarten–level experiment would have sufficed to cast doubt on Aristotle’s thinking, but the classical philosophers’ method of investigation was not experimentation but discussion and argument. Philosophy was compared to a wrestling match, with the expectation that shaky ideas would be beaten down and the strongest and therefore best philosophy would come out on top.The successors to the classical Greeks, the technicians, mathematicians and scientists of the Hellenistic era, had a better handle on things. Dr. Weinberg admires Hero and thinks the world of Archimedes, but he devotes more pages to Ptolemy’s “Almagest,” which was a standard astronomy text for more than a thousand years, but today is seen as THE science botch of all time, and a lesson to us all.Dr. Weinberg then discusses Arab and European scholarship in the Middle Ages. Much of the sophistication of Greece and Rome was gone, and religious leaders felt that, if there was to be such a thing as thinking, every bit of it should be concerned with holy writ and the wisdom of the saints. Questioning was out. But there was still astronomy, needed to make the calendars that told you when it was a holy day, and astronomy kept men thinking about the natural order. And there was Aristotle, and Aristotle, for all Dr. Weinberg’s critical opinion of him, got men to thinking about thinking, and logical thinking at that.Dr. Weinberg then comes to the Scientific Revolution, which he considers as beginning with Copernicus. Galileo’s experiments on falling bodies – which demonstrated that Aristotle’s not-experiment-based ideas in this area were wrong – are Dr. Weinberg’s starting point for modern experimental science. The book that Galileo wrote about these experiments had to be smuggled out of Italy and published in London, since, by that time, the Church had arrested and tortured Galileo, forcing him to recant his teaching that the Earth moves (which, it was argued, was in conflict with a few sentences in the Old Testament that talk about the sun moving across the sky and do not say that it was the spinning of the Earth that made it appear that the sun was moving in the heavens) and sentenced him to permanent house arrest, and banned his books, and forbade him to publish anything ever again. As Darwin also could have told you, being a scientist is not for wimps.The idea of experimental science took hold: “No longer were natural philosophers relying on nature to reveal its principles to casual observers.” Experimental science was rolling along pretty well by the time Isaac Newton arrived on the scene. “Newton’s achievements provided the paradigm that all subsequent science has followed.” Newton was The Man.Dr. Weinberg’s short-list of the greatest scientists of all time reads “Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein,” all world changers and earth shakers.Dr. Weinberg points out that while it is perfectly possible for a person to be both very religious and very scientific (Newton was such a one), “It was essential for the discovery of science that religious ideas be divorced from the study of nature. Once one invokes the supernatural, anything can be explained, and no explanation can be verified.” So, scientists run into trouble with established religions. Along with the church’s pounding down of Galileo, we are told about Anaxagoras, who had to flee Athens after teaching that the sun is not a god but a physical object, and Hypatia, who was literally torn to pieces by a mob of good Christians for the unforgivable crimes of being a scientist, a mathematician, and, at the same time, a woman, a pagan, and hot. Dr. Weinberg also mentions fellow Nobel Prize winner Abdus Salaam, a devout Moslem, who, when he attempted to promote scientific research in the Islamic Middle East, was told that, for the Faithful, the study of science would be “culturally corrosive.” Whether Islam would benefit from cultural corrosion of this sort I will leave to the internet’s “comment” pages.Particular pleasures:Philosophers, natural and un-, have, figuratively speaking, been beating each other over the head with inflated pig bladders since day one. It’s a tradition that Dr. Weinberg gleefully joins in this book. Aristotle takes a drubbing throughout, but the chapter in which Dr. Weinberg disrespects Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, was, by itself, worth the price of admission.Disappointments:Dr. Weinberg never does say which errors of the past are the ones that we might be repeating today. I guess we will just have to keep our guard up and hope for the best.I had a half-formed hope that Dr. Weinberg, in this book subtitled “The Discovery of Modern Science,” would spell out just what was achieved, providing an explicit, concise, lucid, perhaps even poetic, description of, and users guide for, the scientific method, preferably one suitable for copying and pasting into every single internet discussion of evolution and global warming.Dr. Weinberg did not do this. He seems happiest with a description of science as a rudderless chaos that sometimes manages to produce results in spite of itself, or as “a tangle of deduction, induction, and guesswork.” “We learn how to do science, not by making rules about how to do science, but from the experience of doing science.”I have a tiny little small suspicion that Dr. Weinberg talks about science in this way in order to allow string theory to be classified as “science” rather than as “mathematical pastime.” But his description allows the most uninformed cranks in the universe to have as much right as anyone to claim that their conclusions are scientific, “Oh, yeah, we got a HUGE tangle of induction, deduction, reduction, convection and guesswork going on here ALL the time.”No one should be led to suppose that science is whatever you happen to think, or something indefinable and unteachable. Putting it into practice requires discipline, desire and effort, but, despite all the long ages it took to formulate, the scientific method is not conceptually difficult. The basics can be explained, in detail, in an hour or two, after which the reasonably bright and attentive listener can perform a good approximation of thinking and acting like a scientist (Readers who feel they may need more information before saying “aye,” “nay,” or “eh” on this point are invited to read the technical footnote, below).Ah, well, even if Dr. Weinberg had included a most excellent Junior Woodchuck’s guide to the scientific method in his book, I probably would have found myself disagreeing with him on several points. I will give his book 4.5 stars, to show that there are no hard feelings. End of book review.Technical footnote:The last third of To Explain the World is headed “Technical Notes.” This section is all math, designed to give the reader an idea of how the investigators mentioned in the book arrived at their results. It is not actually necessary to read this section in order to appreciate the book, but don’t let it scare you. When it is time to put, say, a cosine, to work, Dr. Weinberg explains what a cosine is, rather than assuming, as most writers will, that you took trig in high school, and, due to being some sort of mutant or something, actually remember it.In a similar spirit, for the benefit of readers who had the proper response (“show me”) to the apparently controversial claim that the process of doing science can be defined and taught, for discussion I offer this sketch/outline of a description of that method by which science is done. The complete description would include consideration of:ObservationWonder or PuzzlementSpeculation – Here it is pointed out that no one needs to teach you how to speculate, speculation is a built-in feature of the human brain. Let it rip, let your brain make up its little stories that explain what you observed or suggest what might be done. Do not mistake any one of these stories for the truth, or anything like it, until it is supported by a considerable amount of reproducible physical evidence and can be shown to conflict with none,Literature Search – Meant to be exhaustive. If you are investigating, say, the emerald ash borer, then, before you start making scientific pronouncements about the emerald ash borer you should know as much about the emerald ash borer as anyone in the world, including the emerald ash borer’s mom. If, on the other hand, your goal is to make pseudoscientific statements about the emerald ash borer on the internet or in congress, then you are free to remain utterly ignorant,HypothesisInvestigation – If you are doing experimental science you may be designing and doing experiments to obtain reproducible physical evidence relevant to the viability of a hypothesis, or you may be doing things to see if they work, or you may be trying things to see what happens. If you are doing descriptive science you may be doing dissections, going on an expedition or spending time with a telescope. If you are doing theoretical science you may be doing calculations that, if they look promising, will require experimental and observational support.Conclusion – in the case of experimental science the likely conclusions are “the evidence supports the hypothesis” or “the evidence does not support the hypothesis” but “Wow, didn’t expect THAT!” is also possible.PublicationConfrontation – All of your colleagues who are competent in your area are required to point out every weakness in your knowledge, method, results, reasoning and conclusions. You are not allowed to reply “Bite me.” It’s all for the good. If you don’t have an appreciable number of exceptionally bright and well-informed people telling the world where you went wrong, then probably no one is paying any attention to you. Remember that every scientific conclusion, even one that won the Nobel Prize, comes with the unspoken qualifier “until we know better,”followed byMore Research – of courseAll of this is carried on in the presence of a strong, continuous, conscious awareness that your basic tool is a limited, fallible, delusion-prone human brain, and, at any stage, from observation and speculation onward, you are most probably wrong. The goal is reliable inference, reliable conclusions, reliable description, with the hope that we will know things tomorrow that we don’t know today, we will understand things tomorrow that we don’t understand today, and we will be able to do things tomorrow that we can’t do today. Some people think it is fun.

⭐Steven Weinberg says there was a scientific revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. To his credit, he provides enough information to support a contrary theory. I agree with the theory that modern science began in the thirteenth century when the Catholic Church condemned the Aristotelian idea that vacuums are impossible. Before that, the scientific achievements in ancient and non-Western civilizations were sporadic and not sustained. The following quote supports this theory:”After the era of translation and the conflict over the reception of Aristotle, creative scientific work began at last in Europe in the fourteenth century.” (2079)What happened in the 14th century in the West is that scientific knowledge progressed in a continuous way with one scientist building upon the achievements of other scientists. The author gives a clue as to why this happened:”Robert Merton supposed that Protestantism created social attitudes favorable to science and promoted a combination of rationalism and empiricism and a belief in an understandable order in nature–attitudes and beliefs that he found in the actual behavior of Protestant scientists.”(3977)Science developed in the West, and not in the other civilizations, because scientists believed God created the universe from nothing. This means the universe has an “understandable order in nature,” which inspires humans to try to understand the universe. The idea that vacuums are impossible implies that God did not create the universe because God has infinite power and could have created vacuums. Weinberg discusses the Condemnation of 1277, as it is called, but thinks it hindered the development of scientific knowledge.In my opinion, Steven Weinberg is suffering from cognitive dissonance because his atheism conflicts with the reality that so many people believe in God. The following quote indicates that he is obsessed with religion because he feels a need to express his lack of faith in God in a book about science and history:”It is not that the modern scientist makes a decision from the start that there are no supernatural persons. That happens to be my view, but there are good scientists who are seriously religious.” (789)The following quote shows that Weinberg’s mental and emotional suffering inhibits him from being rational:”Or we may encounter phenomena that in principle cannot be brought into a unified framework for all science. For instance, although we may well come to understand the processes in the brain responsible for consciousness, it is hard to see how we will ever describe conscious feelings themselves in physical terms.” (4199)There is an equally irrational quotation from Carl Sagan as recalled by Sean Carroll in a TV interview on the PBS Newshour. Dr. Carroll posted the video on his blog on March 14, 2014, with the title “A Great Time for Reason and Science.” This is the quote:”We are a collection of atoms and particles like the rest of the universe, but we have the power to theorize, to gather data, and to understand this universe.” The phrase “brain responsible for consciousness” is a reference to the conscious knowledge of humans as opposed to the sense knowledge of animals. Science is a method of inquiry arising from sense observations. For example: Why is the sky blue? Knowing the sky is blue means more than that light is entering your eye and a signal is going to your brain. It means an awareness of this. Humans ask the question: What is this awareness? This is not a scientific question because it does not arise from our senses. The question arises because we can make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge. It is a metaphysical question.Humans have had a lot of success in answering scientific questions, as this book explains. One can reasonably say there are no mysteries in science, only questions not yet answered. There is very little success answering metaphysical questions and the word mystery is necessary. Concerning consciousness, that word can be avoided by saying, “The sky is manifesting its blueness, and humans are open to that manifestation.” There is no evidence that human consciousness is a brain process. There is, of course, evidence that the sense knowledge of animals is a brain process.On the subject of consciousness, Steven Weinberg, Sean Carroll, and Carl Sagan have a blind spot. However, the following quote reveals that Weinberg did not go to a Catholic college:”For Descartes the only certain fact is that he exists, deduced from the observation that he is thinking about it. ….He (Rene Descartes) gives several arguments (all unconvincing) for the existence of God, but rejects the authority of organized religion.” (3162)”He was wrong in saying that the pineal gland is the seat of a soul responsible for human consciousness.”(3181)Descartes did not “deduce” that he existed. His quote, “I think, therefore I am,” expressed a common metaphysical experience that we all have. We know that we exist, not because we can see ourselves, but because we can turn into ourselves and catch ourselves in the act of our own existence.Descartes was trying to explain free will by saying there is a spiritual “little man” located behind the eyes that controls the body like a stagecoach driver controls a team of horses. This nonsense is called dualism and conflicts with the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas who said that unity is a transcendental property of being. A stagecoach driver and team of horses is not a being, it is many beings.Descartes arguments for God’s existence were probably based on the famous “five ways” of Aquinas and the “prime mover” argument of Aristotle. The best argument for God’s existence is called the cosmological argument for historical reasons only. It is based on the metaphysics of Aquinas and the observation that we have free will. Free will means we possess a center of action that makes us unified with respect to ourselves but different from other humans. In other words, humans are finite beings. A finite being can’t be the reason for its own existence because it can’t limit itself. Assuming or hoping that the universe is intelligible, means an infinite being exists and caused the universe of finite beings. In Western religions, we call the infinite being God.Body and soul are the metaphysical principles of matter and form applied to humans. All humans are equal because we are all members of the same class or category of beings. The soul is the metaphysical principle or incomplete being that makes us humans, and the body is what makes us different from each other.We can comprehend what a human being is because we know everything we do and everything that happens to us. However, we can’t define or explicate what a human is. We can only say that humans are embodied spirits. Another way of expressing this is to say the human soul is spiritual. To sum up, physics professors Weinberg, Carroll, and Sagan don’t know what they are talking about.Astronomical discoveries in the 1960s and later prove the universe began to exist 14 billion years ago. This raises the scientific question: What caused the Big Bang? There is no scientific answer to this question, and many people think this “gap” is evidence of God’s existence. My understanding is that the Big Bang is evidence God does not exist because it is evidence that the universe is not intelligible. The Big Bang, however, a reason to believe in the Bible because the Bible says in a number of places that God created the universe from nothing.There are four other gaps like this: What caused prokaryotes to appear on Earth 3.6 billion years ago? What caused mammals to evolve from prokaryotes? What caused the fine-tuning of the physical constants to enabled biological life? What caused the second law of thermodynamics to be suspended when life began and evolved into mammals?One can call these five arguments for God’s existence pseudoscience. Atheists respond to this pseudoscience with pseudoscience that is more egregiously wrong. Atheists are trying to fight fire with fire, or anxiety is inhibiting them from thinking rationally and behaving honestly. This is the pseudoscientific response to the five god-of-gaps arguments:1) The Big Bang was caused by a vacuum fluctuation.2) Life on Earth came from another galaxy.3) Evolution was caused by natural selection.4) There are other many other universes where the constants are different.5) The second law of thermodynamics only applies to closed systems.Weinberg promotes #3 and #4 in his book. For evolution, I recommend that he read these scholarly works:

⭐, by Alan Bennett;

⭐, by James A. Shapiro; and

⭐by Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart. Concerning the multiverse theory, I suggest that he put on his thinking cap.Weinberg and Carroll are guilty by association of promoting #5 because they are American physicists. The American Journal of Physics published an article titled “Entropy and evolution” (Am. J. Phys., Vol. 76, No. 11, November 2008) saying evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics and giving the results of an absurd calculation. The article disgraces every physicist in the United States.There is another example of pseudoscience in his book that does not reflect badly on Weinberg’s character because it is found in physics textbooks on quantum mechanics. In fact, I may be the one who is guilty of pseudoscience.”Instead of calculating the trajectories of a planet or a particle, one calculates the evolution of waves of probability, whose intensity at any position and time tells us the probability of finding the planet or particle then and there.” (3896)Weinberg is referring to the Born statistical interpretation of the Shrödinger function. There is a lot of evidence that the Shrödinger function is a wave, but there is no evidence it is a probability wave. I give my arguments in an ezinearticle.com article titled “The Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics.”

⭐With its emphasis on how we came to learn about the world, this is fascinating and, at times, really elegant. Some of his technical notes are beautiful and incredibly satisfying, particularly in some early examples where the maths available at the time was very limited. But with some others, the technical notes can begin to look like less satisfactory fudges. He is excellent on Galileo and Newton, but is less satisfactory when the scientific fields broaden and deepen. The real weakness in the book is his overemphasis on such a limited view of “The World”. For all the importance of the lysis of fundamental particles and of astrophysics, a more wholehearted, if necessarily brief, overview of the breadth of modern science would have brought more balance to the end of the book.

⭐An excellent account of the progress of science from Early Greece to the present day.

⭐Interesting, need to read it again

⭐This is an excellent book by one of great living scientists today. Weinberg in his usual masterly style explains lucidly in detail how modern science emerged in the 16th and 17 th century Europe, in what ways it differs from ancient and medieval science. Though numerous books on the subject exist, this is a truly exceptional book. I believe this book should be prescribed reading for all student and teachers of science at all levels.

⭐Very readable history of physics…excellent chapters on the Greeks, detailed descriptions of the struggle with the orbits of the planets, really good on Descartes, Galileo and Newton. It is somewhat hurried on the reduction of biology to physics but that does not take away anything from the magnificent effort the author has made. The most remarkable aspect of the book is its detailed presentation of theories in a simple, understandable language and its careful coverage of figures like Hero, Archimedes and Ptolemy.

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