Lake Views: This World and the Universe

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Harvard University Press, 2009 - Biography & Autobiography - 259 pages

Just as Henry David Thoreau “traveled a great deal in Concord,” Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg sees much of the world from the window of his study overlooking Lake Austin. In Lake Views Weinberg, considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive today, continues the wide-ranging reflections that have also earned him a reputation as, in the words of New York Times reporter James Glanz, “a powerful writer of prose that can illuminate—and sting.”

This collection presents Weinberg’s views on topics ranging from problems of cosmology to assorted world issues—military, political, and religious. Even as he moves beyond the bounds of science, each essay reflects his experience as a theoretical physicist. And as in the celebrated Facing Up, the essays express a viewpoint that is rationalist, reductionist, realist, and secular. A new introduction precedes each essay, explaining how it came to be written and bringing it up to date where necessary.

As an essayist, Weinberg insists on seeing things as they are, without despair and with good humor. Sure to provoke his readers—postmodern cultural critics, enthusiasts for manned space flight or missile defense, economic conservatives, sociologists of science, anti-Zionists, and religious zealots—this book nonetheless offers the pleasure of a sustained encounter with one of the most interesting scientific minds of our time.

 

Contents

Waiting for a Final Theory
1
Can Science Explain Everything? Anything?
6
Peace at Last in the Science Wars
24
The Future of Science and the Universe
28
Dark Energy
47
How Great Equations Survive
52
On Missile Defense
59
The Growing Nuclear Danger
80
Four Golden Lessons
146
The Wrong Stuff
150
A Turning Point?
168
About Oppenheimer
172
Einsteins Search for Unification
178
Einsteins Mistakes
186
Living in the Multiverse
196
A Deadly Certitude
210

Is the Universe a Computer?
96
Foreword to A Century of Nature
113
Ambling toward Apocalypse
116
What Price Glory?
123
Israel and the Liberals
226
Sources
247
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About the author (2009)

Steven Weinberg is Josey-Welch Foundation Chair in Science and Regental Professor at the University of Texas, Austin, and is the author of many books. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 and the National Medal of Science in 1991.

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