Dreams of a Final Theory by Steven Weinberg

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on here, but my degree was in Particle Physics.  You start to pick up the big names (if you didn’t know them already) as you learn the subject – Steven Weinberg is one such name.  His work on electroweak unification was a major part of the course.

You also start to pick up the details of previous experiments.  In my era, with the Large Hadron Collider just starting to take data, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) came up now and then.  This experiment that never was, was cancelled in 1993 due to budget problems.  It would have reached energies well beyond that of the LHC.

In 1992 Weinberg released this book, describing why he believed that a “final” theory of fundamental physics would exist, what it could look like, and justifying the funding of the SSC.  Although he did not win the debate on funding, the arguments in the book still stand – it’s surprising how up to date the book seems.  In the last 25 years, we have discovered the Top quark, flavour changes in neutrinos, the Higgs Boson, gravity waves, and pushes into the limits of Supersymmetry and Dark Matter.  Yet still something more is needed.

Weinberg’s arguments on the importance of spending on fundamental science, and on his field as the most fundamental of sciences, may not land for everyone, but he places them eloquently and (relatively) diplomatically.  His discussion on realism vs positivism is very interesting, it filled in some of the gaps from my very experimentally focused degree.  If you’ve ever heard someone refer to a theory as “beautiful”, this is as good a place as any to get an explanation of what they mean and why this matters.

After writing this I found another recent review of it in the Guardian.  From the early days of the LHC, but I think it too is still very valid.  https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/jul/08/dreams-final-theory-weinberg-review