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The Revolution That Didn't Happen
STEVEN WEINBERG
10
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conflicts among philosophers. Fortunately we need not allow philosophers to dictate how philosophical arguments are to be applied in the history of science, or in scientific research itself, any more than we would allow scientists to decide by themselves how scientific discoveries are to be used in technology or medicine.

I remarked in a recent article in The New York Review of Books that for me as a physicist the laws of nature are real in the same sense (whatever that is) as the rocks on the ground.7 A few months after the publication of my article I was attacked for this remark by Richard Rorty. He accused me of thinking that as a physicist I can easily clear up questions about reality and truth that have engaged philosophers for millennia. But that is not my position. I know that it is terribly hard to say precisely what we mean when we use words like "real" and "true." That is why, when I said that the laws of nature and the rocks on the ground are real in the same sense, I added in parentheses "whatever that is." I respect the efforts of philosophers to clarify these concepts, but I'm sure that even Kuhn and Rorty have used words like "truth" and "reality" in everyday life, and had no trouble with them. I don't see any reason why we cannot also use them in some of our statements about the history of science. Certainly philosophers can do us a great service in their attempts to clarify what we mean by truth and reality. But for Kuhn to say that as a philosopher he has trouble understanding what is meant by truth or reality proves nothing beyond the fact that he has trouble understanding what is meant by truth or reality.



Finally, I would like to describe my own idea of scientific progress. As I said, Kuhn uses the metaphor of Darwinian evolution: undirected improvement, but not improvement toward anything. Kuhn's metaphor is not bad, if we make one change in it: the progress of physical science looks like evolution running backward. Just as humans and other mammal species can trace their origins back to some kind of furry creature hiding from the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period, and that furry creature and the dinosaurs and all life on Earth presumably can be traced back to what Pooh-Bah in The Mikado called "a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule," in the same way we have seen the science of optics and the science of electricity and magnetism merge together in Maxwell's time into what we now call electrodynamics, and in recent years we have seen electrodynamics and the theories of other forces in nature merge into the modern Standard Model of elementary particles. We hope that in the next great step forward in physics we shall see the theory of gravitation and all of the different branches of elementary particle physics flow together into a single unified theory. This is what we are working for and what we spend the taxpayers' money for. And when we have discovered this theory, it will be part of a true description of reality.
7 "Sokal's Hoax," The New York Review, August 8, 1996. (back)

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