17 - Comments

Summary

Comments by Laurie M. Brown

I shall assume that I was invited to contribute to this symposium-workshop as an historian of recent physics; any ‘philosophical’ inferences will be unintended. In order to comment on Steve Weinberg's talk, I expected to have the text a few weeks in advance, which did not happen; but Steve kindly supplied a list of some writings on which he would base his talk:

1. Chapter 1 of the recently published (1995) first volume of ‘The Quantum Theory of Fields’ (QFT).

2. The well-known article in Daedalus (1977) called ‘The search for unity: Notes for a history of quantum field theory.’

3. ‘The ultimate structure of matter,’ in A Passion for Physics - Essays in Honor of Geoffrey Chew (1985).

4. The (1993) book ‘Dreams of a Final Theory,’ especially Chapters 5 and 8.

5. ‘Night thoughts of a quantum physicist,’ Bull Amer. Acad. Arts and Sciences 69, No. 3, p. 51 (1995).

6. ‘Nature itself,’ an essay in Chapter 27 of Twentieth Century Physics, a recently (1995) published compendium. The same chapter has parallel essays by Philip Anderson and John Ziman.

7. ‘Conference summary,’ in Proc. XXVI Intern. Conf. on High Energy Physics (AIP 1993).

In general, I did not detect appreciable differences in the writings I consulted, which extend from 1977 to 1995, over nearly two decades. This may say something about the progress (or lack thereof) in fundamental physics during that time interval.