Steven Weinberg died a few weeks ago.

A tribute over on sixty symbols

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9udJqqF_0Pc&ab_channel=SixtySymbols

I didn’t realise he was that old.

In search of nature’s laws
Steven Weinberg died on July 23rd
The theoretical physicist who united two of the known forces of the universe was 88

Jul 28th 2021

As he liked to tell it, there were three epiphanies in Steven Weinberg’s life. The first came in a wooden box. It was a chemistry set, passed on by a cousin who was tired of it. As he played with the chemicals in it, and found that each reacted differently because of atoms, a vast thought struck him: if he learned about atoms, he would know how the whole world worked.

The second epiphany came when, as a teenager, he paid a routine visit to his local library in New York. On the table was a book called “Heat”, open to a page of equations. Among them was the elegant, unknown swirl of an integral sign. It showed that with a mathematical formula, and a magic symbol, science could express something as rudimentary as the glow of a candle flame. His third awakening, when he was in his 20s and already a professor of physics, was the discovery that a mathematical theory could be applied to the whole dazzling array of stars and planets, dark space beyond them and, he concluded, everything.

All regularities in nature followed from a few simple laws. Not all were known yet; but they would be. In the end he was sure they would combine into a set of equations simple enough to put on a t-shirt, like Einstein’s E=mc2. It was just a matter of continually querying and searching. In the strange circumstance of finding himself conscious and intelligent on a rare patch of ordinary matter that was able to sustain life, doggedly asking questions was the least he could do.

His signal achievement was to discover, in the 1960s, a new level of simplicity in the universe. There were then four known universal forces—gravity and electromagnetism, both of which operate at large scales, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, both of which are appreciable only at small scales. Electromagnetism was explained by a quantum field theory; similar theories for the nuclear forces were eagerly being sought.

In quantum field theories, forces are mediated by particles called bosons; the boson involved in electromagnetism is the photon, the basic particle of light. He and others showed that a theory of the weak force required three bosons: the W+ and the W-, which carried electric charges, and the Z0, which did not. The W particles were at play in the observable universe; they were responsible for some sorts of radioactive decay. The Z was notional until, in 1973, researchers at cern, Europe’s great particle-physics lab, observed “neutral currents” between the particles they were knocking together. These had never been seen before, and could be explained only by the Z. In 1979 the Nobel prize duly followed.

In his understated way, he called his contribution “very satisfactory”. It was not just that the weak force and the electromagnetic force could be explained by similar tools. At high energies they were basically the same thing.

That triumph of unification increased his curiosity about the only point where such high energies were known to have existed: the Big Bang. In his book “The First Three Minutes”, in 1977, he described the immediate aftermath, to the point where the hyper-hot cosmic soup had cooled enough for atomic nuclei to form. He saw early on how deeply particle physics and cosmology were intertwined, and became fascinated by the idea of a universe dominated by unobservable dark energy and dark matter in which ordinary matter (“the stars and the planets and us”) was merely “a small contamination”. He longed for cern ’s Large Hadron Collider to find evidence of dark matter. It caused him lasting frustration that Congress in 1993 had cancelled the Superconducting Super Collider, which was to have been even bigger.

Whatever was found, he was sure it would fit into the simple scheme of nature’s laws. Quantum mechanics, however, troubled him. He worried that its determinism implied that the world was endlessly splitting, generating myriad parallel histories and universes in which the “constants” in nature would have different values. Goodbye to a unified theory of everything, if that were so.

Such a unified law would have given him satisfaction but, he knew, no comfort. Nature’s laws were impersonal, cold and devoid of purpose. Certainly there was no God-directed plan. As he wrote at the end of “The First Three Minutes”, the more the universe seemed comprehensible, the more it seemed pointless. No saying of his became more famous, but the next paragraph softened it: humans gave the universe their own point and purpose by the way they lived, by loving each other and by creating art.

He set the example by marrying Louise, his college sweetheart, devouring opera and theatre, revelling in the quirky liberalism of Austin, where he taught at the University of Texas for almost four decades, and looking for theories in physics that would carry the same sense of inevitability he found so beautiful in chamber music, or in poetry. He still thought of human existence as accidental and tragic, fundamentally. But from his own little island of warmth and love, art and science, he managed a wry smile.

What angered him most was the persistence of religion. It had not only obstructed and undermined science in the age of Galileo and Copernicus; it had also survived Darwin, whose theory of evolution had shocked it more sharply than anything physics did. And it was still there, an alternative theory of the world that corroded free inquiry. For even if the laws of nature could be reduced to one, scientists would still ask: Why? Why this theory, not another? Why in this universe, and not another?

There was, he reflected, no end to the chain of whys. So he did not stop asking or wondering. He liked to review and grade his predecessors, from the ancient Greeks onwards, chastising them for failing to use the data they had, but also sympathising with their lack of machines advanced enough to prove their ideas. The human tragedy was never to understand why things were as they were. Yet, for all that, he could echo Ptolemy: “I know that I am mortal and the creature of a day, but when I search out the massed wheeling circles of the stars, my feet no longer touch the Earth…I take my fill of ambrosia, the food of the gods.”

https://www.economist.com/obituary/2021/07/28/steven-weinberg-died-on-july-23rd

Witty Rejoinder said:

In search of nature’s laws
Steven Weinberg died on July 23rd
The theoretical physicist who united two of the known forces of the universe was 88

Jul 28th 2021

As he liked to tell it, there were three epiphanies in Steven Weinberg’s life. The first came in a wooden box. It was a chemistry set, passed on by a cousin who was tired of it. As he played with the chemicals in it, and found that each reacted differently because of atoms, a vast thought struck him: if he learned about atoms, he would know how the whole world worked.

The second epiphany came when, as a teenager, he paid a routine visit to his local library in New York. On the table was a book called “Heat”, open to a page of equations. Among them was the elegant, unknown swirl of an integral sign. It showed that with a mathematical formula, and a magic symbol, science could express something as rudimentary as the glow of a candle flame. His third awakening, when he was in his 20s and already a professor of physics, was the discovery that a mathematical theory could be applied to the whole dazzling array of stars and planets, dark space beyond them and, he concluded, everything.

All regularities in nature followed from a few simple laws. Not all were known yet; but they would be. In the end he was sure they would combine into a set of equations simple enough to put on a t-shirt, like Einstein’s E=mc2. It was just a matter of continually querying and searching. In the strange circumstance of finding himself conscious and intelligent on a rare patch of ordinary matter that was able to sustain life, doggedly asking questions was the least he could do.

His signal achievement was to discover, in the 1960s, a new level of simplicity in the universe. There were then four known universal forces—gravity and electromagnetism, both of which operate at large scales, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, both of which are appreciable only at small scales. Electromagnetism was explained by a quantum field theory; similar theories for the nuclear forces were eagerly being sought.

In quantum field theories, forces are mediated by particles called bosons; the boson involved in electromagnetism is the photon, the basic particle of light. He and others showed that a theory of the weak force required three bosons: the W+ and the W-, which carried electric charges, and the Z0, which did not. The W particles were at play in the observable universe; they were responsible for some sorts of radioactive decay. The Z was notional until, in 1973, researchers at cern, Europe’s great particle-physics lab, observed “neutral currents” between the particles they were knocking together. These had never been seen before, and could be explained only by the Z. In 1979 the Nobel prize duly followed.

In his understated way, he called his contribution “very satisfactory”. It was not just that the weak force and the electromagnetic force could be explained by similar tools. At high energies they were basically the same thing.

That triumph of unification increased his curiosity about the only point where such high energies were known to have existed: the Big Bang. In his book “The First Three Minutes”, in 1977, he described the immediate aftermath, to the point where the hyper-hot cosmic soup had cooled enough for atomic nuclei to form. He saw early on how deeply particle physics and cosmology were intertwined, and became fascinated by the idea of a universe dominated by unobservable dark energy and dark matter in which ordinary matter (“the stars and the planets and us”) was merely “a small contamination”. He longed for cern ’s Large Hadron Collider to find evidence of dark matter. It caused him lasting frustration that Congress in 1993 had cancelled the Superconducting Super Collider, which was to have been even bigger.

Whatever was found, he was sure it would fit into the simple scheme of nature’s laws. Quantum mechanics, however, troubled him. He worried that its determinism implied that the world was endlessly splitting, generating myriad parallel histories and universes in which the “constants” in nature would have different values. Goodbye to a unified theory of everything, if that were so.

Such a unified law would have given him satisfaction but, he knew, no comfort. Nature’s laws were impersonal, cold and devoid of purpose. Certainly there was no God-directed plan. As he wrote at the end of “The First Three Minutes”, the more the universe seemed comprehensible, the more it seemed pointless. No saying of his became more famous, but the next paragraph softened it: humans gave the universe their own point and purpose by the way they lived, by loving each other and by creating art.

He set the example by marrying Louise, his college sweetheart, devouring opera and theatre, revelling in the quirky liberalism of Austin, where he taught at the University of Texas for almost four decades, and looking for theories in physics that would carry the same sense of inevitability he found so beautiful in chamber music, or in poetry. He still thought of human existence as accidental and tragic, fundamentally. But from his own little island of warmth and love, art and science, he managed a wry smile.

What angered him most was the persistence of religion. It had not only obstructed and undermined science in the age of Galileo and Copernicus; it had also survived Darwin, whose theory of evolution had shocked it more sharply than anything physics did. And it was still there, an alternative theory of the world that corroded free inquiry. For even if the laws of nature could be reduced to one, scientists would still ask: Why? Why this theory, not another? Why in this universe, and not another?

There was, he reflected, no end to the chain of whys. So he did not stop asking or wondering. He liked to review and grade his predecessors, from the ancient Greeks onwards, chastising them for failing to use the data they had, but also sympathising with their lack of machines advanced enough to prove their ideas. The human tragedy was never to understand why things were as they were. Yet, for all that, he could echo Ptolemy: “I know that I am mortal and the creature of a day, but when I search out the massed wheeling circles of the stars, my feet no longer touch the Earth…I take my fill of ambrosia, the food of the gods.”

https://www.economist.com/obituary/2021/07/28/steven-weinberg-died-on-july-23rd

I was going pretty well at STEM until some fundamentalist maths teacher introduced the concept of the square root of minus 1 and I thought that’s it, these pricks are having a lend of me.

Peak Warming Man said:

I was going pretty well at STEM until some fundamentalist maths teacher introduced the concept of the square root of minus 1 and I thought that’s it, these pricks are having a lend of me.

I was going pretty well at mathematics until I found that university first year assumed that everybody already knew that e^iθ = cos(θ)+i sin(θ) so I instantly knew that I had a lot of catching up to do. I did catch up, eventually.

Thanks for summary, witty.

> He and others showed that a theory of the weak force required three bosons: the W+ and the W-, which carried electric charges, and the Z0, which did not.

> In his understated way, he called his contribution “very satisfactory”. It was not just that the weak force and the electromagnetic force could be explained by similar tools. At high energies they were basically the same thing.

> In his book “The First Three Minutes”, in 1977, he described the immediate aftermath of the big bang.

That work is still accepted. In a sense it was the last work in physics that is universally accepted. Still nobody has proved that quantum chromodynamics is free from self-contradiction, supersymmetry and string theory have fallen, and there are debates over exactly what happened in the time period before the time period Weinberg described in his book.

> He longed for cern ’s Large Hadron Collider to find evidence of dark matter. It caused him lasting frustration that Congress in 1993 had cancelled the Superconducting Super Collider, which was to have been even bigger.

Yeah. Didn’t we all.

Steven Weinberg

Summary of work
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bpwein.html

Steven Weinberg grew up in New York City, where his father worked as a court stenographer. His early interest in science was encouraged by his family and by his teachers at the Bronx High School of Science. One of his classmates there was Sheldon Glashow; about 25 years later they would share the Nobel Prize in physics.

By age 16, theoretical physics had grabbed Weinberg. He went to Cornell University (as did Glashow!), studied at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, and got his PhD from Princeton. He embarked on a career of research and teaching that took him to some of the best centers for physics research in the country: Columbia, Berkeley, MIT, and Harvard. He is now a professor in the physics and astronomy departments at the University of Texas at Austin. His scientific interests were always broad, but his most noted work has been in unified field theory. Four forces were believed to drive the laws of physics: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force (which holds an atom’s nucleus together), and the weak force (which breaks an atom apart, as in radioactivity). Around 1967, Weinberg theorized that the electromagnetic and the weak forces are the same at extremely high energy levels. This electroweak theory was confirmed by particle accelerator experiments in 1973. This was one giant step closer to physicists’ long-dreamed of goal of finding a single elegant equation to explain all the matter and forces in nature. Weinberg and others who worked on this theory, Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam, were awared the Nobel Prize in 1979.

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Weinberg

Steven Weinberg (/ˈwaɪnbɜːrɡ/; May 3, 1933 – July 23, 2021) was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.

He held the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of the Physics and Astronomy Departments. His research on elementary particles and physical cosmology was honored with numerous prizes and awards, including in 1979 the Nobel Prize in physics and 1991 the National Medal of Science. In 2004, he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society, with a citation that said he was “considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive in the world today.” He was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, Britain’s Royal Society, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Weinberg’s articles on various subjects occasionally appeared in The New York Review of Books and other periodicals. He served as a consultant at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, president of the Philosophical Society of Texas, and member of the Board of Editors of Daedalus magazine, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, the JASON group of defense consultants, and many other boards and committees.

What angered him most was the persistence of religion. It had not only obstructed and undermined science in the age of Galileo and Copernicus; it had also survived Darwin, whose theory of evolution had shocked it more sharply than anything physics did. And it was still there, an alternative theory of the world that corroded free inquiry. For even if the laws of nature could be reduced to one, scientists would still ask: Why? Why this theory, not another? Why in this universe, and not another?

Tau.Neutrino said:

What angered him most was the persistence of religion. It had not only obstructed and undermined science in the age of Galileo and Copernicus; it had also survived Darwin, whose theory of evolution had shocked it more sharply than anything physics did. And it was still there, an alternative theory of the world that corroded free inquiry. For even if the laws of nature could be reduced to one, scientists would still ask: Why? Why this theory, not another? Why in this universe, and not another?

Yes, the persistence of religion angers a lot of people, its been observed that religion affects observation, shifting peoples sense of reality into something that obscure and deceptive. Billions of people still pour billions of hours down the drain believing in nothing and being deceived by nothing. Why believe in something invisible and that cannot be proved by empirical study and validated as something that really exists, the universe itself exists as we are within it, so why superimpose something over it that doesn’t exist, why bother with something unknown?

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

What angered him most was the persistence of religion. It had not only obstructed and undermined science in the age of Galileo and Copernicus; it had also survived Darwin, whose theory of evolution had shocked it more sharply than anything physics did. And it was still there, an alternative theory of the world that corroded free inquiry. For even if the laws of nature could be reduced to one, scientists would still ask: Why? Why this theory, not another? Why in this universe, and not another?

Yes, the persistence of religion angers a lot of people, its been observed that religion affects observation, shifting peoples sense of reality into something that obscure and deceptive. Billions of people still pour billions of hours down the drain believing in nothing and being deceived by nothing. Why believe in something invisible and that cannot be proved by empirical study and validated as something that really exists, the universe itself exists as we are within it, so why superimpose something over it that doesn’t exist, why bother with something unknown?

What angers me as well about religion is the way religious people emotionally connect to their ideology then punish those who don’t follow the same ideology by abusing people rights and disregarding how other people feel about it.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

What angered him most was the persistence of religion. It had not only obstructed and undermined science in the age of Galileo and Copernicus; it had also survived Darwin, whose theory of evolution had shocked it more sharply than anything physics did. And it was still there, an alternative theory of the world that corroded free inquiry. For even if the laws of nature could be reduced to one, scientists would still ask: Why? Why this theory, not another? Why in this universe, and not another?

Yes, the persistence of religion angers a lot of people, its been observed that religion affects observation, shifting peoples sense of reality into something that obscure and deceptive. Billions of people still pour billions of hours down the drain believing in nothing and being deceived by nothing. Why believe in something invisible and that cannot be proved by empirical study and validated as something that really exists, the universe itself exists as we are within it, so why superimpose something over it that doesn’t exist, why bother with something unknown?

What angers me as well about religion is the way religious people emotionally connect to their ideology then punish those who don’t follow the same ideology by abusing people rights and disregarding how other people feel about it.

To be fair, not all religious people.