[Steven Weinberg] And as the years went by
he gave up alcohol. But he belonged to
a sect, the Ahmadi, I think that's what it's called.
I'm probably not pronouncing it correctly.
That has been officially declared heretic
in Pakistan, his home country.
And as a result for many years he wasn't
allowed back into Pakistan.
But he was quite religious about that. I mean...
I regard all religion with a...
certain sense of bemusement.
And the Ahmadi sect seemed even
a little bit more peculiar than
the other branches of Islam.
But he was quite serious about it.
He had two wives.
-One of whom, an Oxford don. [Richard Dawkins] I know her. Yes.
[Weinberg] And the other a very conventional
Pakistani woman who lives in London.
And they both came to the Nobel Prize in 1979
and they alternated appearances
-at the official events. [Dawkins] (laughter)
He, it's interesting, because although he was quite
devout as a Muslim, he deplored
the anti-scientific attitude that he found
-in the world of Islam. [Dawkins] Yes
[Weinberg] He told me that he had tried
to get the states of the Persian Gulf,
which are very oil rich, like Dubai
and so on, Bahrain...
He tried to get them to put money into
building universities that would
include a component of basic science.
And he said that they were very resistant to that.
That they wanted to go into technology.
They were enthusiastic about technology,
but they did not want to do fundamental science.
They thought that was corrosive to religious belief.
[Dawkins] Probably rightly so. [Weinberg] Yes I suspect that.
[Dawkins] He didn't think that then? He didn't think it was... [Weinberg] No. No. His point of view was that
of many well meaning physicists I know
in America who think, oh there's no problem
-science and religion can happily coexist. [Dawkins] Yes.
[Weinberg] I think in fact, although its a slow process
and there are many exceptions, that
in the long run science is eating the lunch of religion.
[Dawkins] Yeah. I think so too.
[Weinberg] And that we already have seen
a great weakening of religious belief.
It's obvious in Europe.
I think it's also true in America.
I think Americans believe in religion,
I mean, on the average.
They believe that religion is good for you.
And when you ask them, what they actually believe
about the afterlife, or about how are you saved?
They'll likely tell you "You know, well
it isn't so important what you believe.
The important thing is to live a good life.
[Dawkins] Yes. Yes. Me too. [Weinberg] I've heard that so many times.
[Weinberg] So I think, you know if I really cared about religion
and I looked at the state of religion in America,
I think I would cry.
Religion is a mile wide and an inch deep.
It doesn't go very far.
[Dawkins] It doesn't make me cry. I makes me laugh.
We are running out of time, so can we resume after?
I began by saying I felt humble as a biologist, and
One of the reasons is the sheer mysteriousness
of physics, which I suppose is nowhere
more true than in fundamental particle physics.
As a biologist I try to come to terms with
why it is so hard to understand
and I'm wondering what you think of this, that
something about, well, natural selection equipped our
brains to control medium sized bodies
which is moving at medium speeds
in roughly 2 dimensions, well in 3 dimensions,
and therefore, things like multidimensionality,
things like particles mysteriously going through
two slits or one, depending on it anybody
is looking at them, the slightly less
mysterious aspect of relativity,
our brains were never equipped to understand
that kind of thing because we didn't need to.
But if had been denizens of interstellar space
traveling at near the speed of light
relatively it would be second nature to us
and if we had been the size of fundamental particles
we wouldn't find mysterious the things that,
that I at least find mysterious.
Do you find them mysterious?
Or do you cope with them in your own mind?
[Weinberg] I think you are exactly right about
why they seem mysterious.
We cope with them using mathematics.
We have mathematical formulations of
quantum mechanics that are perfectly satisfactory.
We know how to calculate things.
A course in physics is a series of problems
the student has to learn how to calculate
the energy levels of the hydrogen atom,
the classic problem that convinced people
that they were on the right track during the
development of quantum mechanics.
Occasionally we lose our sense of strangeness
because the mathematics become so familiar
to us. I think there are things
that are truly strange and that
even though we can deal with them mathematically,
we shouldn't lost the sense of strangeness.
Not relativity which no longer seems
to me paradoxical or weird,
but quantum mechanics is really strange.
The interpretation of quantum mechanics
that developed in the early 1930s
under the leadership of Neils Bohr
in Copenhagen. The Copenhagen interpretation
I think is fundamentally flawed.
It divides the world into physical systems and observers.
And that can't be right. Observers are parts of the world.
They have to be described by the same
quantum mechanical language as everything else.
The first person who thought seriously about
that and tries to develop an
alternative way of looking at quantum
mechanics was a graduate student at Princeton...Everette.
[Dawkins] Hugh Everette. Yeah [Weinberg] Hugh Everette. But his solution
[Weinberg] to the problem is in a way even weirder.
There is something call the wave function
which evolves in a completely deterministic way.
And there is a wave function of the universe
which governs everything including
all our observers and their apparatus
and the physics journals in which they publish their results.
And all that happens during a measurement
and subsequent publication is all
described in the evolution of the wave function.
But if you believe that then you really
have to believe that since,
in an experiment we can have a particle
which has neither a definite spin this way
or this way, but is a superposition of the two,
when the spin is measured it's either
this way or this way,
one or the other with different probabilities.
In Everette's interpretation, both are realized.
The universe splits into a world
in which the electron is spinning this way
and the observer sees it spinning this way,
and another world where it is spinning this way
and the observer sees it spinning that way.
And this happens not only in phsics
buildings but continually throughout the
universe so that the wave function
of the universe is infinitely more complicated
than we normally think of the universe itself as being.
It contains components for every possible
history of the things in it.
Now that's so weird that it's hard
to think in those terms.
[Dawkins] It seems to me to be ever so slightly
less weird that the Copenhagen interpretation.
[Weinberg] It's less weird in the sense...
[Dawkins] It's just hideously uneconomical.
[Weinberg] Yeah. Well I would say the Copenhagen
interpretation is just hopeless because
the split between observers and...
observers can't be different from
electrons and spins and so forth...