Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist's Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature

by Steven Weinberg

Condensed matter physicists will doubtless eventually solve the problem of high-temperature superconductivity without any direct help from elementary particle physicists, and, when elementary particle physicists understand the origin of mass, it will very likely be without direct inputs from condensed matter physics. The difference between these two problems is that, when condensed matter physicists finally explain high-temperature superconductivity—whatever brilliant new ideas have to be invented along the way—in the end the explanation will take the form of a mathematical demonstration that deduces the existence of this phenomenon from known properties of electrons, photons, and atomic nuclei; in contrast, when particle physicists finally understand the origin of mass in the standard model the explanation will be based on aspects of the standard model about which we are today quite uncertain, and which we cannot learn (though we may guess) without new data from facilities like the Super Collider. Elementary particle physics thus represents a frontier of our knowledge in a way that condensed matter physics does not.