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The limits of theory.-

Publication: First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life
Publication Date: 01-AUG-02 		Format: Online - approximately 1231 words
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Full Article Title: The limits of theory.-(book review)

Article Excerpt
FACING UP: SCIENCE AND ITS CULTURAL ADVERSARIES. By STEVEN WEINBERG. Harvard University Press. 283 pp. $26.

WHILE HIS PROFESSIONAL WORK is primarily in elementary particle physics, Steven Weinberg became widely known to the general public with the publication of a book on cosmology, The First Three Minutes (1977), which presented a lucid and fascinating story of the early development of the universe with style and elegance. His new book, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries, which consists of a collection of twenty-three equally well-written essays, documents the personal commitment of the author to promoting and defending his scientific views. Weinberg captures the interest of his readers by combining balanced judgments and modest claims about current scientific theory with a passionate defense of reductionism.

While Weinberg defends reductionism, he is careful to distinguish it both from what he calls "positivism," which he understands to be a narrow empiricism, and from "petty reductionism," which seeks to reduce everything to elementary particles. The reductionism Weinberg advocates is the program of reductive explanation of physical phenomena by recourse to ever more fundamental and simple laws that...

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