What Is Science, Anyway?

A warning to all physics, math and chemistry concentrators who spend their days sweating over textbooks in Cabot Science Library—all that you’re learning is just what Western WASP culture has decided is right. If you were coming from somewhere else, or were the opposite sex, then those basic laws of physics, math and life might be completely different, as many scholars, including Stanley Fish and the late Thomas Kuhn, argue. In his new book, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and former Harvard professor Steven Weinberg takes on these critics, if not skillfully, at least thoroughly.

Critics have accused science of being “culturally biased,” arguing that our scientific “laws” would be different if, say, Einstein had been Chinese or Newton had been a woman. They argue that while an external reality might exist, the methods by which we judge it are dominated by a clique of scientists trained in the Western tradition, scientists who have taken it upon themselves to be the arbiters of “objective truth.”

The fight has dragged on, and here we have Steven Weinberg, one of the most celebrated scientists of the twentieth century, weighing in. And by “weighing in” I mean precisely what I say—aside from a few moments of genuine hilarity, the overall heaviness of his writing makes his work difficult reading. Which is not to say that the book is not interesting; it is, but it requires a dogged determination to finish and a willingness to deal with large amounts of irrelevancy.

Weinberg is at his best in three separate chapters: “Sokal’s Hoax,” “The Non-Revolution of Thomas Kuhn” and the wonderful conclusion “Looking for Peace in the Science Wars,” where he attacks head-on the complaints that science—particularly physics—is culturally biased. He points out that many people from other cultures have indeed contributed to the world of mathematics and physics: C.N. Yang, whose work with fundamental particles have formed the basis for the now widely-agreed upon Standard Model of physics, was Chinese. Weinberg demonstrates that there is no “elite” clique of head scientists by illustrating the lengthy process and mounds of evidence that changed his own view on the correctness of that Standard Model. He debunks claims that science changes with time and culture, arguing that the physics of today is the same physics of Maxwell or Einstein at the turn of the century, only more detailed. Though we have much more accurate explanations of physical phenomena, Newton’s laws of nature remain logical simplifications of them, and are indeed still the first things taught to high school students.

According to Weinberg, our accepted theory of physics is the way it is simply because it can be no other way. Science works by starting with a set of observations and developing a model that matches them and predicts new results. There are no “cultural biases” to these truths—an experiment either worked or it didn’t. Or as Weinberg puts it, “Nature cares little about what scientists prefer.” Only the Standard Model, despite its various weaknesses, comes close to explaining our world. Yet the question remains as to whether another theory would explain all the phenomena we’ve encountered, and we just haven’t found it yet. Weinberg counters that although there may be, for instance, ways of describing the laws of electromagnetism different from the standard Maxwell’s equations, “there is no valid alternative way of looking at the phenomena described by Maxwell’s equations that does not have Maxwell’s equations as a mathematical consequence.”

It would be nice if the clarity of these few quotes were reflected in the rest of the book, which is a compilation of essays, speeches and letters for publications such as Scientific American and The New York Review of Books. In an awful move that was the result of bad editing or, more likely, sheer laziness, Facing Up was left as a group of essays rather than a condensed work. The negative results of this are threefold: overwhelming repetition of the same basic facts; an even more substantial amount of completely irrelevant material; and absence of the actual essay or letters Weinberg is responding to, which often renders the author’s points utterly useless for lack of context. In fact, for those interested in the meat of author’s arguments, I advise skipping directly to Chapter 12: “Sokal’s Hoax,” unless one wants to read a circuitous recap of the history of physics.

Besides his lack of structure, Weinberg’s other main failing is that he seems to misunderstand many of the arguments against him. He dismisses them because they violate the axioms that he has chosen to live by. What exactly is “truth” and what does it mean “to know”? To Weinberg, truth is learned through observations, and we test theories by how they conform to those observations. To his critics, the very nature of who Weinberg is affects those observations, and thus they can’t be counted on to deliver the fundamental truth. That said, precise, specific and, above all, accurate examples of how cultures experience physical phenomena differently are hard to come by. In fact, it seems obvious that these arguments are dubious at best. As Alan Sokal, one of the main antagonists of the science-as-a-social-construct view, points out in an unpublished letter to the New York Times, “What could [science critic Andrew] Ross possibly mean? That the law of gravity is a social law that men and women can change? Anyone who believes that is invited to try changing the laws of gravity from the windows of my apartment: I live on the twenty-first floor.” It would have been nice if somewhere in his 277-page book Weinberg had been so direct.

Those looking for a discussion of these issues in medicine or economics, where cultural bias sounds more plausible, will be disappointed by Facing Up. Weinberg freely admits that he is a physicist and cannot discuss fields outside his realm of knowledge. We’re going to have to wait for a different treatise to answer that one, but Weinberg manages to give a pretty good, if muddled, one for physics.

FACING UP: SCIENCE AND ITS CULTURAL ADVERSARIES

by Steven Weinberg

Harvard University Press

270 pp., $26