Dreams of a Final Theory

Plot

Dreams of a Final Theory tells the story of a great intellectual adventure of our time: the search for nature's final laws and the final answer to our questions about why nature is the way it is. Weinberg, the 1979 Nobel Prize-winner in physics, imagines the shape of a final theory and the effect its discovery would have on the human spirit. He gives a defence of reductionism (the impulse to trace explanations of natural phenomena to deeper and deeper levels) and examines the curious relevance of beauty and symmetry in scientific theories. Weinberg also narrates a personal account of the search for the laws of nature, and shares with us glimpses that scientists have had from time to time that there is something behind the blackboard, that there is a deeper truth foreshadowing a final theory.