139. STEVEN WEINBERG

We return again to Bill Moyers who was able to get extraordinary people to sit at his table for interviews. In 1988 for public television, Moyers traveled the country interviewing a diverse group of thoughtful people about the ideas that shape our future. Doubleday published the interviews as A World of Ideas, which was edited by Betty Sue Flowers. Three decades later, I find insights from those interviews to be illuminating in our quest for a life that is lived to the potential for which we are ordained.

This week’s triptych from A World of Ideas begins with selections from the interview with Nobel Prize for Physics winner, Professor Steven Weinberg, who, after considering the theory of the Big Bang, “groped” with the question: “Why is there something instead of nothing?” This post is a gleaning from that interview.

Weinberg: “We now have a theory of elementary particles, which is more fundamental than the ordinary quantum mechanics of atoms and radiation. It’s sometimes called the standard model, which is a way of saying we all believe it and use it without being absolutely sure of anything. And then you ask, ‘Why is that true?’… I want to help to trace these chains of ‘why’ down to their roots.”

“We can take fossils that we find in the universe now — particles, radiation, the chemical composition of the stars — and use these as clues to trace the history back to the first three minutes or the first one hundredth of a second. Cosmologists generally feel that we understand the history of the universe pretty well from the first one hundredth of a second on.”

“Now, that’s just tracing the history back. It doesn’t answer the question why the universe started at all. … In the beginning of the phase of the universe that we now find ourselves in, there was an explosion, and the explosion involved conditions of temperature and density so extreme that we find it impossible to trace the history back before. … There wasn’t any surface, there was no boundary to the universe. We’re not at the center, we’re not at the edge, it’s just everywhere.”

Moyers: “What’s the most arresting insight you’ve gained into the universe?”

Weinberg: “It has to do with the simplicity of nature. The simplicity of nature is often expressed in terms of principles of symmetry, the symmetries of the laws of nature. For example, there’s nothing in the laws of nature to distinguish north from east. All directions are the same as far as the laws of nature are concerned. … These principles of symmetry have been known for a long time. They’re very powerful because they dictate the form of the laws of nature. They’re probably the deepest things we know about physics.”

“A friend of mine in physics, John Wheeler, says that when we finally learn the underlying laws of nature, they will be so simple and beautiful that we will wonder why they weren’t obvious from the beginning.”

PS: Moyers later interviewed another physicist, Chen Ning Yang, who won his Nobel Prize for Physics for overturning the long-held theory about symmetry in elementary particles. In that interview, Yang stated this about the underlying structure of the universe: “The underlying structure is built on some very simple principles which are characterized by a deeper, more sophisticated concept of symmetry.”

Q: What makes you feel better, the expanse of the universe or the simplicity of nature?