To explain the world The discovery of modern science

STEVEN WEINBERG DOESN'T think much of Plato or Pythagoras. Nor does he hold René Descartes or Francis Bacon in especially high regard. But in his new book on the origins of science, "To Explain the World," Weinberg casts particular aspersions on science historians themselves. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Weinberg has set out to write a broad historical overview that can explain how humanity invented science. But he finds that historians disdain nearly everything that excites him. They mistrust overarching narratives and notions of progress. Some dispute the very idea of a scientific revolution. Above all, they argue that we can't cherry-pick winners and losers based on what later scientists believed to be true. They insist on judging people in the context of their own times. Weinberg rejects all that. He's perfectly happy judging the past by today's standards. After all, scientists can't well overlook the fact that some theories work and some don't. And it's this willingness to ignore pieties that makes "To Explain the World" so refreshing. Much of the history is standard fare, however well written. But every 15 or 20 pages, the old lion rouses himself and roars in defense of Whig history. The book has virtually nothing to say about biology or chemistry, focusing instead on physics and astronomy. That's partly because those fields proved more important to early science - and probably because Weinberg knows those fields so well. (Indeed, almost too well: The astronomy chapters especially get pretty dense. After reading them, I was half-afraid to peek at the "technical notes" in the appendix - what horrors must be buried there!) The book begins with the ancient Greeks - from Thales to Aristotle - sometimes described as early scientists, but Weinberg classifies them as poets instead. They chose their words "for aesthetic effect," he writes, not clear communication, and they made no serious attempt to justify their theories with evidence. This echoes Bertrand Russell's famous jab at Aristotle, who claimed that women had fewer teeth than men. He could have avoided this mistake, Russell noted, "by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted." Weinberg thinks more highly of the Hellenistic Greeks of the fourth through the first centuries B.C. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, who erected grand metaphysical schemes that attempted to encompass all of reality, they were more modest. They took on smaller, more tractable problems like calculating the size of the Earth, moon and sun - and made real progress. After Greece, the book takes a very cursory tour of non-Western science. Weinberg argues that while "the West borrowed much scientific knowledge from elsewhere - geometry from Egypt, astronomical data from Babylon, the techniques of arithmetic from Babylon and India," it alone developed scientific methods, like building hypotheses and testing them with experiments. Moreover, while China gave the world wonderful technologies, including the magnetic compass, Weinberg draws a hard line between technology and science proper - an unpopular stance nowadays. He does make an exception for Arab scientists, who made important advances in optics, astronomy and medicine. The Arab scientist Ibn al-Nafis, for instance, first determined that blood from the heart enters the lungs and returns to the heart after absorbing air. After this detour, the action returns to Europe, and Weinberg resumes sorting out the saved from the damned. He can be quite wry doing so. Historians praise René Descartes's philosophical contributions, especially his prescriptions for avoiding errors when thinking about nature. But Weinberg is characteristically skeptical: "For someone who claimed to have found the true method for seeking reliable knowledge, it is remarkable how wrong Descartes was about so many aspects of nature." Weinberg does find much to admire in a few near contemporaries of Descartes: Galileo and Isaac Newton. It's not that these two didn't have wrong or even kooky ideas (Newton spent much of his life hunting through the Bible for coded messages about the apocalypse). But they developed important new approaches. Galileo experimented aggressively, rolling balls down ramps, for instance, to test different theories about falling objects, trials Weinberg calls "a distant ancestor of today's particle accelerators, with which we artificially create particles found nowhere in nature." In outlining his theory of gravity, Newton developed simple equations that, mirabile dictu, applied just as readily to planets circling stars as to apples falling from trees - an incredible range of phenomena. "By comparison," Weinberg writes, "all past successes of physical theory were parochial." Despite the sparring, Weinberg deserves credit for at least engaging with historians; too many practicing scientists are ignorant of history. And Weinberg provides several nice examples of how history can illuminate modern science. In the late 1500s, the astronomer Johannes Kepler wanted to know why each planet in our solar system orbited the sun at the distance it did. He eventually created a model with giant cubes, pyramids and other shapes hovering in space, with each figure nested inside the next like Russian dolls. Planets then orbited on spheres crammed between them. Inevitably the whole scheme fell apart. Most scientists today believe there's no deep reason the planets orbit at the distances they do. It's random, an accident - news that would have crushed Kepler. Scientists of today may face similar disappointments. Certain numbers, called constants of nature, come up over and over in studying physics, and many physicists want to know the reason those numbers have the values they do. Why is gravity as strong as it is? Why do electrons have one specific mass and charge and not another? Scientists haven't made much progress here, and Weinberg suggests that perhaps there isn't any deep reason. Perhaps we live in one of many universes, each of which has constants with essentially random values. The universe is the way it is just because. It's a prospect that would have horrified Newton, and probably depresses any number of modern scientists. It amounts to abandoning the search for deeper meaning. As Weinberg wrote in his book "The First Three Minutes," "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." But "To Explain the World" ultimately undercuts such nihilism. It tells a rich, meaningful tale about the emergence of science, and evokes a sense of "how difficult was the discovery of modern science, how far from obvious are its practices and standards." Maybe the universe at large is pointless and random, but we still have the triumph of science, Weinberg reminds us, this "extraordinary story, one of the most interesting in human history." SAM KEAN'S latest book is "The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons."

*Starred Review* 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 works and why it matters.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2015 Booklist

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 ideas-justice, love, strife-to 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. (Feb.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.