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Lake Views: This World and the Universe: Difference between revisions
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Lake Views: This World and the Universe (view source)
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So it is an odd chair from which to find a practitioner making lofty declarations. Even Weinberg concedes that the outlook for convergence to one final theory is considerably less certain now than it was when he wrote it. Kind of makes you wonder why he didn’t trouble to update (or just omit) the offending article. | So it is an odd chair from which to find a practitioner making lofty declarations. Even Weinberg concedes that the outlook for convergence to one final theory is considerably less certain now than it was when he wrote it. Kind of makes you wonder why he didn’t trouble to update (or just omit) the offending article. | ||
All this hubris could be forgiven if there were insightful content elsewhere, but there isn’t much. Weinberg includes an essay about the history of military technology (intended as yet another assault on the missile defence issue). This is about as close as Weinberg gets to having anything new to say. But even this (largely concerned with whether the stirrup — which permitted a horseman to charge with a | All this hubris could be forgiven if there were insightful content elsewhere, but there isn’t much. Weinberg includes an essay about the history of military technology (intended as yet another assault on the missile defence issue). This is about as close as Weinberg gets to having anything new to say. But even this (largely concerned with whether the stirrup — which permitted a horseman to charge with a “couched” lance — really was the game-changer its proponents claimed) seems to me to fail badly for selection bias. “Because the stirrup was an exaggerated innovation, ergo so is (in this case) missile defence”. | ||
Now Weinberg is persuasive that missile defence is a waste of money (which isn’t exactly hard), but this argument about stirrups doesn’t help him. For every stirrup there's a horse, rifle, canon or nuke, which really was a game changer. (There will, of course, be countless “stirrups” which have faded from history's pages for precisely the same reasons of selection bias, of course: rather like extra dimensions curling tinily into unseen universes). | Now Weinberg is persuasive that missile defence is a waste of money (which isn’t exactly hard), but this argument about stirrups doesn’t help him. For every stirrup there's a horse, rifle, canon or nuke, which really was a game changer. (There will, of course, be countless “stirrups” which have faded from history's pages for precisely the same reasons of selection bias, of course: rather like extra dimensions curling tinily into unseen universes). | ||