Originally published 18 December 2001
Nobel prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg is perhaps best known to the general public as author of a scrappy remark near the end of his 1977 best-selling book, The First Three Minutes. He wrote: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
It’s one of those remarks everyone loves to hate because everyone likes to think the universe has a point.
The biggest problem in the world today is not that the universe might not have a point, but that too many people think they know what the point is. The terrorists who smashed planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon thought they knew the point. And heaven knows we have our share of homegrown fundamentalists who think they know the point.
Knowing the point can be consoling, I suppose; it can also be dangerous to those who profess to know a different point, or who don’t know the point at all.
And what about Steven Weinberg’s point — that the universe appears to be pointless?
Weinberg is a smart fellow; if you can write a book about what happened during the first three minutes of the universe’s existence 15 billion years ago, you have to know a lot of physics — quantum physics and general relativity. In a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, Weinberg tells us what is likely to happen at the other end of time, a million trillion years from now, when the galaxies evaporate and stars cease to shine. That sort of thing takes lots of smarts.
In this newest essay, Weinberg still professes to believe that humans are within reach of grasping the fundamental plan of the universe, something he first proposed in his 1992 book, Dreams of a Final Theory. The plan probably will involve mysterious mathematical entities called superstrings, he guesses, which we have all heard about but which only a few hundred people in the world fully understand.
And he is still convinced that, although we may come to know the foundational laws of nature, those laws appear to be quite impersonal, “not showing any sign of concern for human beings.”
Now, a Nobel Prize in physics doesn’t make you a good philosopher, but Weinberg is correct when he says that science provides no evidence of a point to the universe. Science has been fabulously successful at figuring out how the world works — it has made the galaxies visible and deciphered the secrets of DNA — and nowhere does it invoke purpose. Nowhere does it make reference to the meaning of human life. In fact, the scientific method works so well precisely because it eschews purpose.
If purpose and meaning were all we used to explain the world, we would still be living in the Stone Age.
But science cannot take the full rap for suggesting that the universe is pointless, Weinberg says. Shakespeare’s Prospero said it, too, in The Tempest.
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind.
Rationalists since the dawn of time have purported to see a world of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
No wonder, then, that there is such a tension between science and religion, reason and faith.
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson think they know the point when they blame gays and feminists for the attacks on America. Osama bin Laden thinks he knows the point when he calls for jihad against the West. Everywhere in the world today where there is intolerance and violence, it is practiced by people who are sure they know the point.
Steven Weinberg doesn’t think there is a point, but his view of the world is benign. “We can decide for ourselves which of our inherited values to hold onto, such as loving each other, and which to abandon, such as the subordination of women,” he writes in the New York Review of Books. His views are not unlike those of the highest spirits of all religions who have looked for meaning in tolerance and love.
Biology, too, suggests that we are all one under the skin, and that the well-being of our species might be enhanced by global altruism and ecological sensitivity.
Whether or not the universe has a point, it certainly seems inclined to construct islands of complexity in a sea of increasing disorder. Humans are the most complex things we know about in the universe, and the only creature we know about who wonders whether the universe has a point. With conscious awareness comes — mysteriously and apparently unbidden — a sense of moral responsibility, for each other and for the entire ecosystem of the planet.
And when you think about it, maybe that’s the point: Peace on Earth, good will toward men.
