At last, respite! Finally there comes a writer who does not evoke God when writing a book on physics for general public, finally I get to read someone who brings out his point with little or no historical bullshit or brings in no orientalism or mysticism when dealing with the interference pattern!!

     Maybe if I were a reputed critic working for Times in 1993, I might have started my critique in the above manner for Steven Weinberg’s ‘dreams of a final theory’.

Well, I my short, stupid life I have read my share of books, but this is the first guy who openly, unashamedly and unabashedly favors reductionism and firmly believes that ‘NO GUT (GRAND UNIFIED THEORY), NO GLORY’.

Right from a bee’s sting to black hole, from the recoil of a gun to oxygen’s spectral lines, from a piece of a chalk to dinosaurs- everything, can necessarily come under the ambit of the Unified Theory. Maybe the laws derived regarding the objects fore mentioned might not be calculated if we spend all the resources existing on earth, but Quantum Mechanics permeates every branch of anything concerning matter or energy for a simple reason everything is matter or energy (or anti matter or dark matter!).

This book had come at a crucial time when American Congressmen were mulling to scrap the project of Super Conducting Super Collider (in fact it did…), but Mr. Weinberg has put forward his points in a much passionate manner why that should not be done.

The laws so far determined by the Quantum Mechanics have passed the acid test of stringent experimental facts, the fact that it isn’t applied to large world phenomenon, is not that it is impossible or that it cannot, it’s just that its improbable.

Mr. Steven Weinberg envisions (and has also contributed much in that vision!), a theory that is so logically isolated that if we were to make the slightest change in the theory, the can of worms of infinities would open up without any hope of canceling each other out- thus giving logically absurd solutions. He along with Abdus Salam has been able to produce just such a theory combining Electromagnetism and the Weak Force-The Electroweak Theory. The Final theory should be beautiful, logically isolated, with symmetries.

As he paces forward in his arguments, it is brought to our notice that the Final Theory may be the one given by String Theory, but that too is not without its usual set of problems. The basic problem is that there are large number of string theories which are logically isolated!! There is a thing called Cosmological Constant which first arose in Einstein’s General Relativity- which changes the belief systems of scientists in a way that wasn’t imagined. There could be different universes with different set of constants, with different wave functions and the only reason we exist in this particular universe is due to the favorable circumstances provided by such constants.

But Mr. Weinberg is not ready to give up to this Anthropic viewpoint, he hopes to find (or for the theory to be found in his lifetime!) the Unified Theory that can explain the presence of such constants. Maybe he would.

Lastly- he has blatantly and incontrovertibly proved the existence of interested God unnecessary.

Neither are we at the cosmic centre stage nor are we in any manner being helped by an interested God who answers our prayer, after reading this book, he had managed to convince me that we are just pawns in this larger game of life, Big Bang and GUT as such ( even big bang is a pawn of Mega Universe). Maybe lurking behind historical fluctuations and utter complexity, we may find a fundamental theory that needs no other theory to explain it, in the bubble dance of sizzling hot particles which have been accelerated 99.99% the speed of Light at the Large Hadron Collider!!