Monthly Archives: October 2015

Monday, 28 September 2015 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Steven Weinberg, UT Physics Department

“Keeping an Eye on the Present”

How does the history of science look through the eyes of a working scientist?
In his most recent book, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern
Science (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven
Weinberg says that “Today’s research can be aided and illuminated by a
knowledge of the past”; more pointedly, he argues that our current scientific
knowledge can shed useful light on past scientific efforts. Weinberg’s aim, he says, is not just to recount a sequence of scientific advances, but to shed light on “how we came to learn how to learn about the world.”

To Explain the World has already stirred up considerable controversy, in large
part because in it Weinberg comes close, as he says, “to the dangerous ground
that is most carefully avoided by contemporary historians, of judging the past
by the standards of the present,” and so of practicing what is often attacked
as “whig history.” In “Keeping an Eye on the Present,” he will offer what he calls “a gentle defense of the whig interpretation of the history of science.”

Bruce Hunt of the UT History Department will respond to Professor Weinberg’s talk and start off the discussion.
————————————-
Steven Weinberg is widely regarded as the most distinguished theoretical physicist in the world today. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in
1979, and since 1982 he has been the Josey Regental Professor of Science at
the University of Texas and the head of the Theory Group in the Department of Physics. He has written over 350 scientific papers and fifteen books, including standard works on general relativity and on quantum field theory. He is also noted essayist and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His most recent book, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, was published by HarperCollins earlier this year.