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The Revolution That Didn't Happen STEVEN WEINBERG	7 (Back to page 1)
fundamental physics, it has several ad hoc features, including at least eighteen numerical constants, such as the mass and charge of the electron, that have to be arbitrarily adjusted to make the theory fit experiments. Also, the Standard Model does not incorporate gravitation. Theorists know that they need to find a more satisfying new theory, to which the Standard Model would be only a good approximation, and experimentalists are working very hard to find some new data that would disagree with some prediction of the Standard Model. The recent announcement from an underground experiment in Japan, that the particles called neutrinos have masses that would be forbidden in the original version of the Standard Model, provides a good example. This experiment is only the latest step in a search over many years for such masses, a search that has been guided in part by arguments that, whatever more satisfying theory turns out to be the next step beyond the Standard Model, this theory is likely to entail the existence of small neutrino masses. Kuhn overstated the degree to which we are hypnotized by our paradigms, and in particular he exaggerated the extent to which the discovery of anomalies during a period of normal science is inadvertent. He was quite wrong in saying that it is no part of the work of normal science to find new sorts of phenomena. Kuhn's view of scientific progress would leave us with a mystery: Why does anyone bother? If one scientific theory is only better than another in its ability to solve the problems that happen to be on our minds today, then why not save ourselves a lot of trouble by putting these problems out of our minds? We don't study elementary particles because they are intrinsically interesting, like people. They are not—if you have seen one electron, you've seen them all. What drives us onward in the work of science is precisely the sense that there are truths out there to be discovered, truths that once discovered will form a permanent part of human knowledge. It was not Kuhn's description of scientific revolutions that impressed me so much when I first read Structure in 1972, but rather his treatment of normal science. Kuhn showed that a period of normal science is not a time of stagnation, but an essential phase of scientific progress. This had become important to me personally in the early 1970s because of recent developments in both cosmology and elementary particle physics. Until the late 1960s cosmology had been in a state of terrible confusion. I remember when most astronomers and astrophysicists were partisans of some preferred cosmology, and considered anyone else's cosmology as mere dogma. Once at a dinner party in New York around 1970 I was sitting with the distinguished Swedish physicist Hannes Alfven, and took the opportunity to ask whether or not certain physical effects on which he was an expert would have occurred in the early universe. He asked me, "Is your question posed within the context of the Big Bang Theory?" and when I said yes, it was, he said that he didn't want to talk about it. The fractured state of cosmological discourse began to heal after the discovery in 1965 of the cosmic microwave background radiation, radiation that is left over from the time when the universe was about a million years old. This discovery forced everyone (or at least almost everyone) to think seriously about the early universe. At last measurements were being made that could confirm or refute our cosmological speculations, and very soon, in less than a decade, the Big Bang Theory was developed in its modern form and became widely accepted. In a treatise on gravitation and cosmology that I finished in 1971 I used the phrase

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