Posted: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:45 PM - 12,608 Readers

By: Alexandria Witze

Views of Lake Austin are inspirational enough to trigger profound musings about the history and future of the universe – at least if you're one of the country's pre-eminent theoretical physicists.

Those of us not fortunate enough to live in Austin or to have a Nobel Prize winner's brain can instead experience such thoughts through the new collection of essays by Steven Weinberg, a physics professor and éminence grise at the University of Texas at Austin. For many years he has written for the New York Review of Books, among other outlets, on topics ranging from space-based missile defense to the future of science. Lake Views is a collection of pieces dating to 2000; consequently some essays stand best as a time capsule, particularly when Weinberg takes issue with policies put forth by the administration of George W. Bush.

Yet many of the themes in Weinberg's work remain timeless. He is in his element at the interface between science and philosophy, such as musing what will happen when science reaches a "final theory" that explains all knowable phenomena. The answer? Well, it involves an extended riff including both nuclear-particle decay and Shakespeare, but Weinberg brilliantly illuminates why he thinks humanity can still find purpose in studying the universe through scientific methods.

Somewhat endearingly, Weinberg is able to admit that even his brainpower falls short, as when he confesses he can neither spell nor pronounce Caenorhabditis elegans, a worm used as a model organism in many biological studies.

Some of the essays might come off as too abstract for readers who don't particularly care about a given topic; in particular, a lengthy review of mathematics expert Stephen Wolfram's 2002 book, A New Kind of Science, requires a deep and abiding interest in cellular automata. (For the rest of us, that's a kind of modeling that studies how individual cells evolve through time depending on what the cells next to them are doing.)

In other pieces, though, Weinberg can, within several eloquent pages, distill the essence of why science is important. His 2003 commencement speech at Montreal's McGill University points out that while it isn't so important to know who was prime minister of Canada a century earlier, in 1903 Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy were at McGill figuring out how radioactivity worked – research that has profoundly shaped our knowledge of the natural world, including explaining why the Earth's core remains hot after billions of years.

Unlike nearly any writer living today, Weinberg interpolates science, philosophy and history into a rich and meaningful tapestry of our world.

Alexandra Witze is chief of correspondents for America for the science journal Nature.