Steven Weinberg (1933.5.3–23 July 23, 2021), the most influential theoretical physicist of our time and nobel laureate in 1979, was not only a weighty physicist, but also an influential popular science writer. His popular science and science history works are classics in the popular science community, which can arouse the thinking and research of his contemporaries and even the next generation of physicists, and the scientific essays he publishes are also long-lasting. Last year, when Weinberg's essay collection Third Thoughts was published in the United States, we published an introduction by the famous popular science writer Mr. Lu Changhai (see Weinberg's last collection of essays, which is worth reading by every science enthusiast). In Lu Changhai's article, he specifically mentions Weinberg's two articles on the history of science in the book: "Keeping an Eye on the Present – Whig History of Science" and "The Whig History of Science: An Exchange." Because "both of these articles are closely related to Weinberg's work on the history of science, To Explain the World—because both were triggered by the latter." ...... The reaction to the book from the scientific historians was quite intense. ...... The two articles included in Third Thoughts deserve special mention because they are clearer, more exciting, more straightforward, and more tit-for-tat statements about this tit-for-tat. ”
This year, Third Thoughts has a Chinese translation, and we published the article "Keeping an Eye on the Present – Whig History of Science" to read and think with the friends of "Back to Simplicity". Welcome to express your views to the "Back to Park" public account message area, as of April 30, we will select 3 messages, each person will give away a book.
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This article is reprinted with permission from The Third Meditation (CITIC Publishing Group, February 2022) under the title added by the editors. Click "Read the original article" at the end of the article to purchase the book.
Written by Steven Weinberg
Translated by Qin Mai and Sun Zhengfan
I became interested in the history of science in 1972, when I wrote my first book, a graduate thesis on general relativity. [1] To clarify the motives of Einstein's hypothesis, I begin with a historical introduction and summarize the causes of these ideas: the history of non-Euclidean geometry, the history of gravitational theory, and the history of the principle of relativity.
The discussion of history in that book was almost entirely based on second-hand sources and published research articles, but I did a better job of writing the second book, a book on modern cosmology for the general reader, published in 1977. [2] To write the book, I also interviewed physicists and astronomers related to the discovery of microwave background radiation in 1965 to understand the difficulties they faced at the time. Cosmic microwave background radiation is the residual radiation of the early universe.
Later I decided to try to teach the history of physics to undergraduates. In the early 1980s, I taught a course at Harvard and then at the University of Texas on how humans discovered the makeup of atoms—electrons, protons, neutrons. These things make up another book. [3] Fascinated by history, my later papers on quantum field theory and quantum mechanics also began with an introduction to history. In addition to explaining where the ideas behind these theories come from, I also hope that students who use these theories will feel part of a grand historical tradition.
Much of this writing and teaching deals only with the modern history of physics and astronomy, from about the end of the 19th century to the present. And I feel more and more the need to dig deeper and understand the earlier times in the history of science, when the goals and standards of science have not yet become what they are now. In order to learn about earlier history, I offered to teach undergraduates courses on the history of physics and astronomy at the University of Texas. Based on the lecture notes of these courses, another book was produced, which was published in 2015. [4]
Although I pay sufficient attention in this book to the errors, failed beginnings, and even misdeeds in the history of science, it is generally a story of progress, from the first inefficient attempts of the ancient Greeks, to the precocious science of astronomers, mathematicians, and physicists during the Hellenistic period, and then through intermittent progress in medieval Islam and Christendom, until the flourishing of modern science in the scientific revolution. I know that this story of progress has become unflagging, and I have deliberately adopted an approach to the history of science that is often referred to as the "Whig explanation." So I'm not surprised when some historians — though they don't find obvious errors in the book — say they don't like the subject.
As a result of this confusion, when the American Physical Society held an academic conference in Baltimore in March 2016, it named a session: "Dialogue Author: Stephen Weinberg's Answers to the World." In December 2015, the New York Review of Books published a speech that I had written in advance, which is the following. The following is all a complete article:
The first person to describe and condemn the so-called "Whig interpretation of history" was the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield. In 1931, the young Butterfield declared in a book under the name that "studying the past, one eye, so to speak, the present, is the source of all the evil and sophistry in history". He heavily criticized some historians, including Lord Acton. These historians place the past under the moral appraisal of the modern, for example, they portray the Whigs Charles James Fox as the savior of British liberalism and see nothing else. It's not that Butterfield is personally reluctant to make moral judgments, he just doesn't think it's a historian's business. According to Butterfield, hui format historians who studied Catholicism and Protestantism in the 16th century "felt that something was still outstanding unless he could say which faction was righteous."
Later historians eagerly adopted Butterfield's accusations. To historians, being called a "Whig" is as frightening as being called a "sexist" or "Eurocentric." The history of science is not immune. The historian of science Bruce Hunt recalls that when he attended graduate school in the early 1980s, "Whigs" was a common disparaging term in the history of science. To avoid such accusations, people no longer tell stories of developmental progress or any "big picture" stories, but instead turn to the description of small events, strictly focused on a period of time and space.
Nevertheless, in the course of teaching courses in the history of physics and astronomy, and subsequently processing my lecture notes into a book, I began to think that whatever one might think of Whig history in other kinds of history has a place in the history of science. It is clear that it is not possible to say right or wrong in the history of art or fashion, nor in the history of religion, and whether it is possible in political history can be explored. But in the history of science, we can indeed say who is right. According to Butterfield, "One can never say the ultimate question, the subsequent events, or the passage of time that proves that Luther is right and the Pope is not, or that Pete is wrong and Charles James Fox is right." But we can say with complete confidence that the passage of time has proved that Copernicus was right about the solar system, that the Ptolemaic believers were wrong, that Newton was right, and that Descartes' followers were wrong.
Although the history of science thus has some peculiarities that make the Hui format interpretation useful, the idea of focusing on the present has also caused some professional historians a problem. Historians who have not worked in science may feel that they do not understand contemporary science as much as active scientists. On the other hand, scientists like me must admit that we cannot reach the level of mastery of historical materials by professional historians. So who should write the history of science? Historian or scientist? The answer is obvious to me: it can all be written.
I'm going to reveal that it's at stake for me, at least a book relationship. [6] The book I mention is based on my lecture at the University of Texas at Austin, in which I mentioned that "I will be close to the dangerous zone that contemporary historians have been very careful to avoid: judging the past by current standards." Book reviews are mostly positive, but a book review published in the Wall Street Journal (written by a professional historian) harshly criticized my focus on the present. The title of this book review is "Scientific Hui Format Explanation."
Now, the criticism of the Hui format by Butterfield and others is either irrelevant to the history of science or uncontroversial. Of course, we should not oversimplify or make moral judgments, such as describing some past scientists as flawless heroes or infallible geniuses, while others as villains or fools. For example, we must not hide that Galileo was completely wrong in a debate about comets with The Jesuit Professor Grachy, or that Newton tampered with his calculations to conform to observations of the Precession of the Earth's axis of rotation. In any case, we should use the current standards to consider ideas and practices, not to evaluate individuals. Most importantly, we can't assume that our predecessors thought in the way we thought, thinking that they were just missing some information.
"Studying the past, keeping one eye — so to speak — at the present" is Butterfield's warning to be careful of the present, which remains a serious challenge for historians of hui format science. In the 1968 guidelines for the history of science that focused on internal development, Thomas Kuhn argued that "a historian should, as far as possible (never quite, if he could not write history) as much as possible to let go of the science he knows." [7] Some sociologists, including the renowned Sociology of Scientific Knowledge Research Group at the University of Bath, who study the history of science as a social phenomenon, are more adamantly opposed to the use of current knowledge.
At the same time, there is no shortage of defenders of the Whigs in the history of science. In particular, former scientists such as Edward Harrison,[8] Nicholas Jardin,[9] and Ernst Meier[10] I think it's because scientists need this history of science—a history of science that focuses on current scientific knowledge. We don't see our work as merely an expression of an in-here and anteriose culture(such as parliamentary democracy or Morris dance). We believe that there is a process of explaining the world that can be traced back thousands of years, and our work is the latest stage in it. How we got to where we are today (though this understanding is still imperfect) is a rewarding story from which we can draw perspective and motivation.
Of course, history should not ignore historical figures who have influence and proven to be wrong, otherwise we will never understand the cost of getting things right. But stories make sense only if we recognize that some people are wrong and some are right, and that this can only be done through the lens of existing knowledge.
What's right or wrong? The history of the Hui format, which only rates a past scientist by mistake, is not too interesting. It seems to me more important to outline the slow and difficult progress that people have made over the centuries in learning how to understand the world: What kind of questions can we expect to answer? What kind of concepts can help us find these answers? How do we know if an answer is correct? We can identify which historical practices will put future scientists on the right path and which ancient problems and methods have to be abandoned. It took so much difficulty for people to gain the understanding they have now, and without taking that understanding into account, the answers to the above questions cannot be obtained.
To give an example of a glow-based judgment of the past, such as the ancient basic question, what kind of substance is the world made of? Many attribute this to Democritus of Abdella, who proposed around 400 BC that matter is made up of atoms moving through the void. One of the top universities in Greece today is named after Democritus. From a modern perspective, however, Democritus's wonderful conjectures about atoms do not represent any advances in the scientific method. In the fragments of many of Democritus's surviving writings, there is no description of any observations that can be inferred about atoms, and he or anyone else in the ancient world has been completely unable to use this idea to prove that matter is indeed composed of atoms. Although Democritus was right about matter, he was wrong in how he understood the world. At this point, he is not alone. None of those who preceded Aristotle seem to have understood that speculative theories about matter need to be confirmed by observation.
An evaluation of Aristotle is a good test of a person's attitude toward the history of science, since, in a narrow sense, Aristotle was the first scientist, and a large part of the history of science that followed was an answer to his doctrine. Aristotle argued that the Earth was spherical, not only because the shape theoretically allowed the most earth elements to approach the center of the universe, but also based on observations: during a lunar eclipse, the edge of the shadow that the Earth casts on the Moon is curved, and when a person travels south or north, the starry sky looks different. However, Aristotle's work shows that he did not understand that mathematics should be an important part of the study of nature. For example, he did not attempt to estimate the circumference of the Earth using night sky observations at different latitudes. His theory was that the planets moved on their respective celestial spheres, which in turn rotated under the domination of other celestial spheres, all of which were centered around the Earth. This theory only qualitatively corresponds to the observed motion of the planets, but not quantitatively. But that didn't raise concerns for him and his many followers.
In Hellenistic greece and later the Roman Empire, mathematics began to be constructively applied in science. Around 150 years later, Claudius Ptolemy finalized a mathematical theory of planetary apparent motion that was quite consistent with the observations. (In the simplest version of Ptolemaic theory, the planets move along a circle called the current wheel, and the center of the wheel moves along a larger earth-centered circle.) From existing knowledge, it is to be expected that this theory would be consistent with observations, since the apparent motion of the sun, moon, and planets predicted by the simplest version of Ptolemaic theory is the same as that predicted by the simplest version of later Copernican theory. In 1500, however, the debate continued between Ptolemy's followers, known as astronomers or mathematicians, and Aristotle's, known as physicists. Ptolemy was wrong about the actual motion in the solar system, but he was right when it came to the need for quantitative compliance observations.
One of the great achievements of the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries was the establishment of a modern relationship between mathematics and science. Mathematics was important to Pythagoras, but it was a form of digital mysticism; it was also important to Plato, but it was as a model for pure deductive science, which had been shown to be impossible to be effective. The modern relationship between mathematics and the natural sciences was spoken out by Huygens, who wrote in the preface to his 1690 work, The Theory of Light:
The arguments seen [in this book] do not reflect strong certainties like those in geometry, and the difference between the two is great, for geometrists prove their propositions with definite, indisputable principles, which here are tested by the conclusions they draw. The nature of these things does not allow for arguments in other ways.
It is worth mentioning that Huygens understood this, but that after entering the 17th century, this sentence still needs to be emphasized.
Experiments are artificially arranged scenarios that reveal the truth better than the scenarios we encounter in nature. But Aristotle felt no need to conduct experiments, probably because he believed that there was a major difference between nature and man-made, and that only the natural world was worth studying. He, like Plato, believed that it is possible to understand things only if they know their purpose. These ideas prevent them from learning how to understand the world.
This is the kind of judgment of Aristotle and his followers, which is often criticized by some historians for studying the past while focusing on the present. For example, the late David Lindbergh, a well-known historian of science, commented: "It is unfair and pointless to judge Aristotle in terms of the extent to which he foresaw modern science (as if his goal were to answer our questions, not his own). [11] He also said in the second edition of the same book: "The proper evaluation of a philosophical system or scientific theory is not the extent to which it foresees modern thought, but the degree of success it has in dealing with the philosophical and scientific problems of the time." ”
In my opinion, this is nonsense. The goal of science is not to answer the popular questions of a certain era, but to understand the world. We do not know in advance what kind of understanding is possible and satisfactory, and this understanding is part of scientific work. Some questions, such as "What is the world made of?", are good questions, but they are too early to ask. No one could make any progress in answering this question until the advent of precise measurements of chemical mass at the end of the 18th century. Similarly, hendrick Lorentz and other theoretical physicists in the early 20th century tried to understand the structure of newly discovered electrons prematurely: no one could make any progress on the structure of electrons before the advent of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. Other questions, such as "Where is the natural location of fire" or "What is the purpose of the moon?", are inherently bad questions that move us away from true understanding. A large part of the history of science is actually learning what kind of questions should be asked and what kinds of questions should not be asked.
I'm not arguing that Whig history is the only interesting history of science. Even Whig historians may be interested in exploring the influence of popular culture on the development of science, or the influence of science on culture, without worrying about the role these developments played in the march toward modern science. Democritus's atomism, for example, demonstrated how the world might work without God's intervention, and thus had a profound impact on the philosopher Epicurus of the Hellenistic period a century later, and the Roman poet Lucretius much later. The impact of this theory does not depend on whether it is well-founded by modern standards, and the facts are indeed insufficient. Similarly, you can feel the impact of the scientific revolution on popular culture in the work of the poet Andrew Marvel. (I am particularly reminded of his poem "The Definition of Love.") The converse effects are there. Sociologist Robert Merton claimed that Protestant doctrine played an important role in promoting the great scientific progress of England in the 17th century. I don't know if that's the case, but it's really interesting.
But even here, there are still some elements of glow format. In Hellenistic Greece and 17th-century England, if not something that brought science in its current direction, why would a historian of science focus on the intellectual environment of those periods? The history of science is not just a story about the fashion of knowledge, fashion comes one after another without direction, and the history of science is a progress towards the truth. Although this progress was rejected by Thomas Kuhn, scientists working on the front lines have a real feeling about it. So Whig history is not only one of several interesting scientific histories. The centuries of progress in modern science is a great story, as important and interesting as anything else in the history of human civilization.
Butterfield himself seems to have realized the plausibility of Whig's ideas in the history of science. In 1948, in his Cambridge lecture on the history of science, he gave the scientific revolution great historical importance, which he would never give to the Glorious Revolution in England, beloved by the Whigs. [12] I found his account of the Scientific Revolution to be entirely in the Hui format, as did others, including A. Rupert Hall, one of Butterfield's students. [13] Much earlier, in the Whig Interpretation of History, Butterfield had shown that he would accept the Hui format interpretation of history in some cases. If morality, he notes, is "an absolute that is equally valid at all times and places," then historians "will want to observe the increasingly awakened consciousness of humanity about the moral order, or they will gradually discover its story." Although Butterfield was a devout Christian Methodist, he did not believe that history or religion or anything else revealed to us the absolute moral order. [14] But he did not doubt the existence of natural laws that were valid in all space and time. It is this story that the Whig scholars of physics want to tell—the growing awareness of the laws of nature, but to tell this story, one has to focus on the knowledge of the natural world at the moment.
exegesis
[1] Steven Weinberg, Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity (New York: Wiley, 1972).
[2] Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 1977; updated ed., 1988).
[3] Steven Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles (New York: Scientific American Library, 1983; rev. ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
[4] Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).
[5] Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931; republished, New York: W. W. Norton, 1965). In this article, I will follow Butterfield's custom of capitalizing "Whig" when referring to political parties and lowercase when referring to academic tendencies. (Chinese Simplified version uses the distinction between "Whig Party" and "Hui Format".) --Translator's Note)
[6] The book is The Answer to the World.
[7] T. Kuhn, “The History of Science,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 14 (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 76.
[8] E. H. Harrison, “Whigs, Prigs, and Historians of Science,” Nature 329, no. 213 (September 1987).
[9] N. Jardine, “Whigs and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and the Historiography of Science,” Journal of the History of Science 41, no. 125 (2003).
[10] E. Mayr,“ When Is Historiography Whiggish?,” Journal of the History of Ideas 51, no. 2 (1990): 301-309.
[11] David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Modern Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
[12] These lectures were collected in 1950 by Herbert Butterfield in The Origins of Modern Science, rev.ed. ( New York: Free Press, 1957)。
[13] See A. R. Hall, "On Whiggism," History of Science 21, no. 45 (1983) at the end of the article.
[14] For Butterfield's religious views, see M. Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)。
Special mention
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