Reviews & Previews
Steven Weinberg looks back at rise of scientific method
Prominent physicist’s new book illustrates the difficulty of developing modern science
To Explain the World
Steven Weinberg
HarperCollins, $28.99
Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg is a legend of 20th century physics, one of the chief architects of the mathematical structure that describes nature’s particles and forces. It’s the confluence of predictions based on that math and the experimental observations confirming them that gives modern physics its preeminence as a way of knowing how the world works.
Science wasn’t always like that. In ancient and medieval times, philosophical reasoning attempted to explain the heavens and the Earth, but the connection to experimental method was missing,
