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Third Thoughts

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A wise, personal, and wide-ranging meditation on science and society by the Nobel Prize–winning author of To Explain the World.

For more than four decades, one of the most captivating and celebrated science communicators of our time has challenged the public to think carefully about the foundations of nature and the inseparable entanglement of science and society. In Third Thoughts Steven Weinberg casts a wide net: from the cosmological to the personal, from astronomy, quantum mechanics, and the history of science to the limitations of current knowledge, the art of discovery, and the rewards of getting things wrong.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and author of the classic The First Three Minutes, Weinberg shares his views on some of the most fundamental and fascinating aspects of physics and the universe. But he does not seclude science behind disciplinary walls, or shy away from politics, taking on what he sees as the folly of manned spaceflight, the harms of inequality, and the importance of public goods. His point of view is rationalist, realist, reductionist, and devoutly secularist.

Weinberg is that great rarity, a prize-winning physicist who is entertaining and accessible. The essays in Third Thoughts, some of which appear here for the first time, will engage, provoke, and inform—and never lose sight of the human dimension of scientific discovery and its consequences for our endless drive to probe the workings of the cosmos.

Author: Weinberg Steven
Publisher: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Pages: 223
ISBN: 9780674975323
Cover: Hardback
Edition Number: 1
Release Year: 2018

Preface

I. Science History

1. The Uses of Astronomy

2. The Art of Discovery

3. From Rutherford to the LHC

4. Educators and Academics, Underground in Texas

5. The Rise of the Standard Models

6. Long Times and Short Times

7. Keeping an Eye on the Present—Whig History of Science

8. The Whig History of Science: An Exchange

II. Physics and Cosmology

9. What Is an Elementary Particle?

10. The Universe We Still Don’t Know

11. Varieties of Symmetry

12. The Higgs, and Beyond

13. Why the Higgs?

14. The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics

III. Public Matters

15. Obama Gets Space Funding Right

16. The Crisis of Big Science

17. Liberal Disappointment

18. Keep Loopholes Open

19. Against Manned Space Flight

20. Skeptics and Scientists

IV. Personal Matters

21. Change Course

22. Writing about Science

23. On Being Wrong

24. The Craft of Science, and the Craft of Art

25. New York to Austin, and Return

Sources

Index

Steven Weinberg is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin. His research has covered a broad range of topics in quantum field theory, elementary particle physics, and cosmology, and he has been honored with numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize in Physics, the National Medal of Science, and the Heinemann Prize in Mathematical Physics. The American Philosophical Society awarded him the Benjamin Franklin medal, with a citation that said he is 'considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive in the world today'. He is a member of several academies in the USA and abroad, including the US National Academy of Sciences and Britain's Royal Society.

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