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STEVEN WEINBERG, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 283. ISBN 0-674-00647-X. £17.95, $26.00 (hardback).
DOI: 10.1017/S0007087404436176
Like many great scientists twenty years or more past their Nobel Prize, Weinberg has decided to turn his intellectual attention to more general matters. In this collection of essays, between lamenting the loss of the Superconducting Super-Collider and defending Zionism, he takes on the 'cultural adversaries' of science, by whom he means Kuhn, Latour, the adherents to the Strong Programme and basically any historian or philosopher of science who does not share his realist, reductionist and generally conservative agenda.
Which means I should be okay! But although Weinberg and I are philosophically closer than perhaps either of us would find comfortable, the confusions contained here, the lack of philosophical understanding, the crude representation of the relevant history, all conspire to make me feel sympathetic to the adversaries he scorns. Here is his response to the classic example of Kuhnian incommensurability in one of the central essays in this volume, taken from the New York Review of Books:
in fact the term 'mass' today is most frequently understood as 'rest mass,' an intrinsic property of a body that is not changed...