Steven Weinberg is a thinker of immense breadth and depth, a "scientific intellectual" of a kind that has become all too rare. One of the world's leading theoretical physicists, he shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on the unification of electromagnetism with the weak force responsible for radioactivity. By then, he had already made his first foray into popular-science writing, discussing cosmology – not his primary specialty – in The First Three Minutes. In 2001 he extended his reach, setting out his trenchant views on subjects ranging from physics to the culture wars in a book of essays called Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries.
Now, in his latest collection of essays, Lake Views: This World and the Universe, Weinberg has gone even further afield, writing again about physics but also more generally about science and philosophy, about defence and space policy, and about politics and (lack of) religion. Each of the essays dissects one of these subjects with the same logic, clarity and single-mindedness that his colleagues appreciate in Weinberg's research papers.
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