Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg Still Dreams of Final Theory

One might think that success in science requires seeing through your own bullshit as well as the bullshit of others. But in my experience, this quality is quite rare. I’ve met only a few scientists who seem immune to wishful thinking. Francis Crick was one. Steven Weinberg is another.

Weinberg won a Nobel Prize in 1979 for helping to show that electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force are different aspects of an underlying electroweak force. Weinberg is also a graceful writer, with a sophisticated grasp of history and philosophy. In his 1993 book Dreams of a Final Theory, he extolled particle physics as the culmination of “the ancient search for those principles that cannot be explained in terms of deeper principles.” He predicted that “the convergence of explanations down to simpler and simpler principles will eventually come to an end in a final theory.”