Weinberg's career has gone from boy wonder to Nobel laureate
(Physics, 1979) to sage among particle physicists, combining
creative talents with a zeal to explain. In The First Three Minutes
(1977), he popularized Big Bang cosmology, in particular the
symmetry-breaking changes and events that can account for the
matter-fined universe around us. Now, 15 years later, he summarizes
how far theory has gone toward uniting gravity, electromagnetism,
and the weak and strong nuclear forces into a final theory. To
accomplish this summary requires a masterful backing-and-filling of
20th-century physics, spelling out the role of Einstein in 1905 and
1917, Einstein's dispute with Bohr, the Copenhagen interpretation,
the contributions of Heisenberg, Dirac, Schrodinger, and Feynman,
and so on down to the younger generation of string and superstring
theorists. This would be enough for a popularization, but Weinberg
has something else in mind. He discusses, from an insider's point
of view, the style of science, specifying concepts like beauty and
simplicity, and the context of science, describing the social
milieu that creates waves of belief (or disbelief) at given times.
Mirabile dictu, he also devotes a chapter to religion, seeing its
role as a consolation in the face of death - something science
cannot offer. But the underlying theme and not-at-all-hidden agenda
emphasizes that if we are going to make any headway toward a final
theory, it can come about only with the discovery of entities such
as the Higgs particle, using equipment like the Super Collider.
While Weinberg justifiably extols the explanatory power of
20th-century quantum mechanics, then, he leaves the reader with the
frustrating sense that politics, the recession, science-infighting,
or any combination thereof may thwart the logical next step. He
makes an eloquent case. (Kirkus Reviews)
The author's first book, "The First Three Minutes", was about the earliest moments of the universe. This book looks at the smallest and most elusive things making up that universe. It relates the story of this search, specifically the development of the Superconducting Supercollider.
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