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

by Steven Weinberg

It seems to have been an easy step from these useful historical and sociological observations to the radical position that the content of the scientific theories that become accepted is what it is because of the social and historical setting in which the theories are negotiated. (The elaboration of this position is sometimes known as the strong program in the sociology of science.) This attack on the objectivity of scientific knowledge is made explicit and even brought into the title of a book by Andrew Pickering: Constructing Quarks. In his final chapter, he comes to the conclusion: “And, given their extensive training in sophisticated mathematical techniques, the preponderance of mathematics in particle physicists’ accounts of reality is no more hard to explain than the fondness of ethnic groups for their native language. On the view advocated in this chapter, there is no obligation upon anyone framing a view of the world to take account of what twentieth-century science has to say.” Pickering describes in detail a great change of emphasis in high-energy experimental physics that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Instead of a commonsense (Pickering’s term) approach of concentrating on the most conspicuous phenomena in collisions of high-energy particles (i.e., the fragmentation of the particles into great numbers of other particles going mostly in the original direction of the particle beams), experimentalists instead began to do experiments suggested by theo...