The Best Guest I Never Had: An Elegy for Steven Weinberg ​(#203)

This episode is sort of "fan fiction" conversation with a dead man who will cast a shadow over physics, philosophy, and theology for decades to come: Steven Weinberg, co-recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize. Long before audiobooks and podcasts were a thing, in 1992 I took a night train from Cleveland to Buffalo to Binghamton to meet my girlfriend. To while away the hours, I brought with me Weingberg's epochal popular science book, "The First Three Minutes". A few months later, as a graduation present, I received from Lawrence Krauss, CWRU's incoming physics department chairman, "Dreams of a Final Theory".

“Weinberg” is the most mentioned name in my The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast notebook where I keep thoughts on possible/upcoming guests. I never got to host him on my show. I did try, most recently in February 2021. For a long time, I held off, insecure in my ability to bring anything new to the table.

Weinberg was a brilliant scientist but as I show, had overly simplistic thoughts on religion and practitioners. Often he claimed science, at its best, SHOULD make religion less plausible.

Using quotes drawn from his many interviews and lectures, including one in his own voice, I bring you this slightly combative interview with a very complex individual.

For the record, Stephen Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow, and Abdus Salam shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for his work on Electroweak Symmetry Breaking or the, so-called, ‘Standard Model for particle physics’. He also made many contributions to both particle physics and cosmology. With respect to the latter, the question addressed is whether or why our universe is fine-tuned for our existence. Past guest, Lenny Susskind explained that Weinberg calculated that if the cosmological constant was just a little different, our universe would cease to exist. This paper is behind a paywall, but see a public lecture (with advanced math): https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Weinberg/Weinberg3.html.

Weinberg believed the Anthropic Principle may be appropriated by cosmologists committed to nontheism, and refers to that Principle as a "turning point" in modern science because applying it to the string landscape "may explain how the constants of nature that we observe can take values suitable for life without being fine-tuned by a benevolent creator". 

I cover some of Steven’s ‘greatest hits’ including:

• "I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute … it may be the most important contribution that we can make." 
• "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
• "In our universe we are tuned into the frequency that corresponds to physical reality. But there are an infinite number of parallel realities coexisting with us in the same room, although we cannot tune into them." 
• And my personal ‘favorite’:"It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors?"

So, let me know what you think of this episode. Should I do more solo episodes like this, or make this my one and only 😀?

Resources: 

• Stephen C. Meyer “Weinberg and the Twilight of the Godless Universe”
• Dan Falk: “Learning to Live in Weinberg’s ‘Pointless Universe’ “
• Find more quotes from Weinberg here:

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