Steven Weinberg is arguably the preeminent theoretical physicist alive today, and that, in the present age of remarkable progress in that field, says a lot. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow, for their work which unites two of the four elementary forces in the universe, the electromagnatic and the weak forces, a significant step on the theoretical journey toward a theory of everything.
(The unification of these two forces with the strong force is beyond experimental capabilities at the present time, and the unification of these three with gravity is probably beyond earth-bound experimentation forever. The only theoretical framework that unites all four is the so-called M-theory, which, for the time being, remains exactly that, a theory).
Steven Weinberg, to put it mildly, is no fool. Thomas Dorsett, however, occasionally comes close to that appellation; not very bright, he knows his place. It would be presumptuous of him to criticize Weinberg, so he requests his inner core, Ramanatom, the, figuratively speaking, impersonal personal inner core of us all, to speak whole truths to half-truths.
The title of this essay, Even Weinbergs Nod, is based on the ancient proverb, Even Homer Nods, meaning even geniuses goof up occasionally. Ramanatom will now discuss two famous philosophical quotes of Weinberg that, according to Dorsett as well as to HimHerIt, are light-years off the mark.
First Quote: The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless...The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
Did you really expect to see a Smiley Face beyond Arcturus, Mr. Weinberg?
The quote is from Steven Weinberg's book, The First Three Minutes, A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, which first appeared in 1977 and was updated in 1993. (Books on physics need to be updated frequently, since there is so much progress being made. Most valuable popular books on cosmology antedate the discovery of the Higgs boson and the graviton, for instance). It is a fascinating book, one that Thomas Dorsett read with interest a few years after it appeared. (It has remained in his basement for many, many minutes--a long time, at least in comparison with a human lifespan--and will be dusted off and reread, if found).
It is difficult to argue with a genius. Ramanatom, however, effortlessly brushes the first quote into the dustpan of inner history.
Repeatedly trying to find something that's not there while time after time expecting a different result is farcical indeed. The Kingdom of God is within you, said a wise man long ago. He was right. Meaning is not found in outer space, but in inner space.
The condign response to the unfathomable is awe, wonder, fascination, hardly pointless reactions. It is indeed wondrous that the cosmos is so vast; Dorsett has read that if the visible universe were reduced to the size of an atom, the actual universe would be larger than the visible one! Does that make consciousness any less wondrous? I think not, for consciousness is primary. As the great sage Ramana Maharshi pointed out, consciousness plus science equals science; stones, as far as we can tell, are oblivious to the latest finding from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.
Yes, the universe is large, but consciousness, which contains science and is more than science, is in a very real sense even larger. The near infinities of science fit nicely, as it were, between the ears. It fits nowhere else.
Searching for meaning in the cosmos is like the proverbial thirsty fish searching for water while swimming in it.
Tragedy is indeed part of the human condition; the best tragedies, however, are also cathartic. Physics is what lifts human life above the level of farce? No, Mr. Weinberg, life even without physics is no farce.
You are not going to find a version of the Nicomachean Ethics by analyzing nebulae. You will find the source of morality in only one place: in naught "but (in the) internal difference, where the meanings are," (Emily Dickinson).
Transcending--while not destroying--the phenomenal (s)elf by acts of love of wisdom is not pointless. An unobserved electron is pointless, not you or I.
Second Quote: Frederick Douglas told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil, but for good people to do evil--that takes religion.
Ramanatom is going to let Thomas Dorsett field this one, it's that easy.
This quote might seem reasonable to some, but it is very wrong, just as the Newtonian belief, which still seems correct to some, that inches and seconds are absolutes, the relativity of which has been proven beyond doubt by Einstein.
Replace "religion" with fanaticism, fascism, greed, hate, or delusion and the quote would make sense. Need I mention the horrors caused by Mao and Stalin, who were both avowed atheists? What about Hitler? He was ready to hang priests who disobeyed him; far worse was his persecution of the Jews, hardly the policy of a man who was even remotely religious.
Perhaps Mr. Weinberg is confusing religion with various types of fundamentalism. As a Jew, for instance, I would hardly recommend a fellow Jew to request a cup of sugar from an Ayatollah Khomeini. Any version of 'hate your neighbor and idolize yourself' is hardly what religion is about.
What is it about? According to Max Müller, the great philologist of the nineteenth century, the root of religion, the Latin religio, means nothing more than "reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety." Close, but I think the Latin comes closer: religio, to reconnect, seems to me to denote a desire to reconnect with truth. This truth, the source of morality and of deepening wonder--Gandhi referred to it as satyagraha while Martin Luther King referred to it as soul force--can be viewed theistically or non-theistically. Something found inside oneself can be designated as one's God, for as Paul Tillich taught us, God is whatever one considers to be one's ultimate concern. I must admit I am fonder of the Eastern approach, where one finds a great Silence within oneself, a Silence that bids us to accept life as it is, to accept ourselves as we are, and to strive to do good, and has no need of talk about God.
I also contend that after the Enlightenment, it is impossible for a reasonable person to interpret any example of mythology, however revered, literally. No, I do not find the universe smiling at us in the form, as it were, of a twinkling star; we should be beyond that by now.
One of the best formulations of the essence of religion was stated long ago by Hillel: don't do anything to another that you wouldn't like to be done to yourself. This is the essence of the Torah; all the rest is commentary.
Did Frederick Douglas's master follow this form of the Golden Rule? The command to love our neighbor as ourselves is found in the Torah as well as in the Old Testament. The talmudic interpretation is very clear: included within the definition of "neighbor" is the stranger, the foreigner. The command is thus beyond race, gender or status; it transcends all these categories. Did Mark Twain's mother follow the advice of truth, heard by her inner ears, despite what her outer ears heard in church?
What about Gandhi, what about Martin Luther King, what about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel--What about good God- or good Silence-fearing people everywhere? You really nodded on this one Mr. Weinberg!
That crimes against humanity can be done in the name of religion is, of course, beyond all doubt. But as Calvin taught, the mind is a factory of idols. The degree that greed, hate and delusion can trump their opposites while even sometimes intensifying the self-righteousness of the greedy, hateful and delusioned is equally beyond all doubt.
I am a poet. When I think of poetry I think of Shakespeare, not of Crabs Johnson, the fictive poet laureate of Ellicott City, Maryland. Similarly, when I think of religion, I think of truly great religious men and women, who reconnected with truth and acted accordingly, not of Pat Robinson nor of Franklin Graham, who, it seems to me, worship delusion rather than truth. If, among a hundred poems, one is found to be outstanding, shouldn't one focus on that?
As I was once fond of saying, a good guru is hard to find, you always get the other kind. Does that mean there are no teachers of wisdom? That humankind has sunk so far into the valley of death does not mean that one can't look up and start climbing.
The misuse of religion, like the misuse of politics, does not mean that politics and religion are not essential or basically good. We cannot get by without them. When rooted in a form of the Golden Rule, both of these human endeavors--they are basically one--are what (almost) guarantees that the long arc of history tends toward righteousness.
You certainly deserved the Nobel Prize for physics, Mr. Weinberg. My response to your achievements in that field is a very humble Wow! My response to your views on religion, is, however, Oh, come now! You should know better.
I repeat: you really nodded on this one, Mr. Weinberg!
(The unification of these two forces with the strong force is beyond experimental capabilities at the present time, and the unification of these three with gravity is probably beyond earth-bound experimentation forever. The only theoretical framework that unites all four is the so-called M-theory, which, for the time being, remains exactly that, a theory).
Steven Weinberg, to put it mildly, is no fool. Thomas Dorsett, however, occasionally comes close to that appellation; not very bright, he knows his place. It would be presumptuous of him to criticize Weinberg, so he requests his inner core, Ramanatom, the, figuratively speaking, impersonal personal inner core of us all, to speak whole truths to half-truths.
The title of this essay, Even Weinbergs Nod, is based on the ancient proverb, Even Homer Nods, meaning even geniuses goof up occasionally. Ramanatom will now discuss two famous philosophical quotes of Weinberg that, according to Dorsett as well as to HimHerIt, are light-years off the mark.
First Quote: The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless...The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
Did you really expect to see a Smiley Face beyond Arcturus, Mr. Weinberg?
The quote is from Steven Weinberg's book, The First Three Minutes, A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, which first appeared in 1977 and was updated in 1993. (Books on physics need to be updated frequently, since there is so much progress being made. Most valuable popular books on cosmology antedate the discovery of the Higgs boson and the graviton, for instance). It is a fascinating book, one that Thomas Dorsett read with interest a few years after it appeared. (It has remained in his basement for many, many minutes--a long time, at least in comparison with a human lifespan--and will be dusted off and reread, if found).
It is difficult to argue with a genius. Ramanatom, however, effortlessly brushes the first quote into the dustpan of inner history.
Repeatedly trying to find something that's not there while time after time expecting a different result is farcical indeed. The Kingdom of God is within you, said a wise man long ago. He was right. Meaning is not found in outer space, but in inner space.
The condign response to the unfathomable is awe, wonder, fascination, hardly pointless reactions. It is indeed wondrous that the cosmos is so vast; Dorsett has read that if the visible universe were reduced to the size of an atom, the actual universe would be larger than the visible one! Does that make consciousness any less wondrous? I think not, for consciousness is primary. As the great sage Ramana Maharshi pointed out, consciousness plus science equals science; stones, as far as we can tell, are oblivious to the latest finding from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.
Yes, the universe is large, but consciousness, which contains science and is more than science, is in a very real sense even larger. The near infinities of science fit nicely, as it were, between the ears. It fits nowhere else.
Searching for meaning in the cosmos is like the proverbial thirsty fish searching for water while swimming in it.
Tragedy is indeed part of the human condition; the best tragedies, however, are also cathartic. Physics is what lifts human life above the level of farce? No, Mr. Weinberg, life even without physics is no farce.
You are not going to find a version of the Nicomachean Ethics by analyzing nebulae. You will find the source of morality in only one place: in naught "but (in the) internal difference, where the meanings are," (Emily Dickinson).
Transcending--while not destroying--the phenomenal (s)elf by acts of love of wisdom is not pointless. An unobserved electron is pointless, not you or I.
Second Quote: Frederick Douglas told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil, but for good people to do evil--that takes religion.
Ramanatom is going to let Thomas Dorsett field this one, it's that easy.
This quote might seem reasonable to some, but it is very wrong, just as the Newtonian belief, which still seems correct to some, that inches and seconds are absolutes, the relativity of which has been proven beyond doubt by Einstein.
Replace "religion" with fanaticism, fascism, greed, hate, or delusion and the quote would make sense. Need I mention the horrors caused by Mao and Stalin, who were both avowed atheists? What about Hitler? He was ready to hang priests who disobeyed him; far worse was his persecution of the Jews, hardly the policy of a man who was even remotely religious.
Perhaps Mr. Weinberg is confusing religion with various types of fundamentalism. As a Jew, for instance, I would hardly recommend a fellow Jew to request a cup of sugar from an Ayatollah Khomeini. Any version of 'hate your neighbor and idolize yourself' is hardly what religion is about.
What is it about? According to Max Müller, the great philologist of the nineteenth century, the root of religion, the Latin religio, means nothing more than "reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety." Close, but I think the Latin comes closer: religio, to reconnect, seems to me to denote a desire to reconnect with truth. This truth, the source of morality and of deepening wonder--Gandhi referred to it as satyagraha while Martin Luther King referred to it as soul force--can be viewed theistically or non-theistically. Something found inside oneself can be designated as one's God, for as Paul Tillich taught us, God is whatever one considers to be one's ultimate concern. I must admit I am fonder of the Eastern approach, where one finds a great Silence within oneself, a Silence that bids us to accept life as it is, to accept ourselves as we are, and to strive to do good, and has no need of talk about God.
I also contend that after the Enlightenment, it is impossible for a reasonable person to interpret any example of mythology, however revered, literally. No, I do not find the universe smiling at us in the form, as it were, of a twinkling star; we should be beyond that by now.
One of the best formulations of the essence of religion was stated long ago by Hillel: don't do anything to another that you wouldn't like to be done to yourself. This is the essence of the Torah; all the rest is commentary.
Did Frederick Douglas's master follow this form of the Golden Rule? The command to love our neighbor as ourselves is found in the Torah as well as in the Old Testament. The talmudic interpretation is very clear: included within the definition of "neighbor" is the stranger, the foreigner. The command is thus beyond race, gender or status; it transcends all these categories. Did Mark Twain's mother follow the advice of truth, heard by her inner ears, despite what her outer ears heard in church?
What about Gandhi, what about Martin Luther King, what about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel--What about good God- or good Silence-fearing people everywhere? You really nodded on this one Mr. Weinberg!
That crimes against humanity can be done in the name of religion is, of course, beyond all doubt. But as Calvin taught, the mind is a factory of idols. The degree that greed, hate and delusion can trump their opposites while even sometimes intensifying the self-righteousness of the greedy, hateful and delusioned is equally beyond all doubt.
I am a poet. When I think of poetry I think of Shakespeare, not of Crabs Johnson, the fictive poet laureate of Ellicott City, Maryland. Similarly, when I think of religion, I think of truly great religious men and women, who reconnected with truth and acted accordingly, not of Pat Robinson nor of Franklin Graham, who, it seems to me, worship delusion rather than truth. If, among a hundred poems, one is found to be outstanding, shouldn't one focus on that?
As I was once fond of saying, a good guru is hard to find, you always get the other kind. Does that mean there are no teachers of wisdom? That humankind has sunk so far into the valley of death does not mean that one can't look up and start climbing.
The misuse of religion, like the misuse of politics, does not mean that politics and religion are not essential or basically good. We cannot get by without them. When rooted in a form of the Golden Rule, both of these human endeavors--they are basically one--are what (almost) guarantees that the long arc of history tends toward righteousness.
You certainly deserved the Nobel Prize for physics, Mr. Weinberg. My response to your achievements in that field is a very humble Wow! My response to your views on religion, is, however, Oh, come now! You should know better.
I repeat: you really nodded on this one, Mr. Weinberg!
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