sunday on saturday, and the rabbis over the centuries have created some restrictions that encourage you to keep a different kind of day. this was the turn lights on and off, use cars, used money. and let's -- unless there's an emergency were some was health or life is on the line. and so it should a day when i spent some time in a synagogue praying, but a lot of time with family, good food, a little bit of drink, and just relaxation. >> has the sabbath, or let me rephrase that. has your work life interfered with the sabbath in the past? >> i try not to let my work life interfered. one of the to i think one of the most compelling messages i have for the reader today, 2011, is how important and how difficult it is for me as the sabbath approaches on friday to turn off my cell phone and blackberry, but how liberating it is. but i will tell you that i never

to politics on the sabbath, but according to my understanding of my religious tradition, i carry out any governmental responsibilities that i have on the sabbath, if i can't delegate them. so i vote on the sabbath because i think it is too much on the line for me to miss a vote. i participated important national security meetings, or budget meetings because i think the well being of the community sometimes the life of a lot of people is on the line. but other than that i mostly enjoyed being at home, being with my family. >> senator joe lieberman, his newest book, "the gift of rest." >> and now, nobe nobel prize-wig physicist steven weinberg sat down with booktv to talk to his most recent book, "lake views." this interview, part of booktv's college series, was

recorded at the university of texas at austin. >> dr. steven weinberg is a professor of science at the universe of the texas. e. as a nobel prize winner in physics, the national medal of science winner, and he is also the author of this book, "lake views: this world and the universe." first of all, dr. weinberg, what is this picture on the front of your book? >> that's a picture of lake austin as seen from our boat dock. i do most of my work at home in an office overlooking the lake, and so i have, i have a certain feeling of connection with lake austin. >> so why would a nobel prize-winning physicist, science guy, put a lake on the front of his book? >> well, it is what i look at while i'm working, but also, you know, being a scientist,

especially theoretical physicists, it's a little unworldly, and the sounds of delay, especially in summer, the boats going up and down the lake, playing music, brings me back and little bit to the real world, the world of human affairs, which is i think healthy. >> well, -- >> that's what i was trying to do in this book, in many of the essays, to keep out of the ivory tower a bit and something to say about the real-world. >> let's peek back into the ivory tower. what's the purpose of studying physics? >> well, there are many reasons for doing it. it has enormous practical value, of course. not the kind of physics i do. that may at some future date bring some technological advances, but that's not why i

do it. and i can't imagine now what they might be. there's also, in addition to that kind of practical reason, there's a grand historical program of trying to uncover the laws of nature. that is, we think that there are fundamental principles that govern everything, which are at the root of all chains of explanations so that if you ask why is grass green, you can trace the answer back through a chain of explanation to some fundamental mathematical prince was but we don't have them yet. we have gone pretty far towards them. we have a very satisfying theory of all the particles that make up ordinary matter and all the forces that act on those particles called the standard model.

and it's amazingly comprehensive. it covers almost everything we know, aside from gravitation. but it's not the final answer, and so we try to take the next. >> is it important to know the final answer and? >> oh, it is to me. to some of us it has a transcendental imports. i become you could ask is it important to write symphonies or to preserve our environment. i think these things are important in themselves. the importance of learning the laws of nature is a little bit and vitiated by the fact that they are probably going to be expressed in mathematical terms that most people won't have the language to understand. but that changes with time also. you know, wayne newton's theory of gravitation and motion was

first developed, their only a handful of people in the world who are able to understand it. now, it's commonplace, something that everyone who goes into engineering or science learns quite early in their education. so these things do spread out into the site in general. and i think also apart from knowing the details, there's a great value to knowing what kind of world this is, that it's a world governed by in personal laws in which human beings play little, in fact, no essential role. i think that gives us a better understanding of our place in the scheme of things, and it helps to free us of some of the superstitions that have bedeviled the human race. >> such as?

>> well, i don't want to insult anyone, but the historian trevor roper has said that it was the scientific revolution of the 17th century that led to a sharp decline in burning witches in the 18th century. i think today, large parts of the world are obsessed with religious fanaticism. and i think the example of scientific knowledge, which is so difficult to win, about which we are always tempted is a good counter example to the certainty that people feel about their religious beliefs. >> but you also use the word transcendental in describing your research and your work. you see it as something that is transcendental. doesn't that have religious implications of? >> oh, i don't think so.

byte transcendental, i just think something that i think i mean something similar to what emerson meant by transcendental. that is, something that affects us deeply that goes to the roots of our feelings that is not directed at getting and spending. >> professor weinberg, one of the essays you have in "lake views" is what einstein was wrong about. what was einstein wrong about? >> oh, a number of things. i think one of the reasons i wrote that essay was to show the spirit of science, that even, we recognize that even the greatest of us, einstein was certainly the greatest scientist of the 20th century, one of the greatest of all times, could be wrong about things and that we are capable of pointing out. it's not einstein's work is not

a sacred text with which we are forbidden to depart from. he was wrong, i think, in rejecting one of his own ideas. that is, he had introduced a modification in his equations that govern gravitation, the general theory of relativity. it's a modification that is equivalent to saying that space is filled with an energy that affects the gravitational field everywhere in the universe. and it affects the way the universe is expanding, or not expanding. and he introduced it acts as a means of preventing the collapse of matter under its own gravitation. he wanted to have a static universe because that's what astronomers thought we had at that time it. this was 1917.

he then learned from astronomers that universe in fact is expanding. there's no need for that modification of general relativity, and he decided he was the biggest mistake of his life. his mistake was to think it was a mistake because, in fact, there is such an image in space but the so called dark energy, one of the articles in the book is about the dark energy. and it was discovered in 1998. and einstein would have been better to make his modification in general relativity and then sit back and wait for events. >> what is dark energy? >> i wish we knew. dark energy, we know about because it is something that produces a gravitational field that's unusual because it causes distant objects to rush apart from each other rather than the usual attraction force of

gravitation. it's an energy inherent in space itself. there's so much energy per quart of space, whether there's anything in that space or not. is very tiny. if you count it by the court. the amount of dark energy and the falling of the earth is about enough to fill a gas tank. it's the energy in the gasoline that would fill a gas tank. but there's a lot of space in in the universe. and it adds up and it was discovered in 1998, which was, this was discovered that was honored this year with the nobel prize to three of astronomers, which was discovered to be driving an accelerated expansion of the universe. that is, the expansion of universe is not only expanding, which we know for a long time, the expansion is not slowing down as you would think because

gravity pulling things together, but it's speeding up. and this we think can only be because of this dark energy. >> steven weinberg you won the nobel prize in physics in 1979 for what? >> a theory that unified two of the basic forces of nature. we know in broad terms of four basic forces as elektra magnetism is reasonably familiar to people, gravitation. we've known about that for a long time. and then to forces that only act inside the nucleus of the atom. the strong nuclear force that holds the particles together, and the weak nuclear force that causes them to change their nature. the theory that was honored, and i share the prize with two other people, was a theory that

unified two of these forces. the electromagnetic force and the weakening force. and the prize would not have been awarded at all except that made some new predictions which were then verified by experiment. >> you say you do most of your work from your home on lake austin. >> yes. >> do you teach, actively teach? >> yes. i teach, this term i'm teaching freshmen, a course on the history of science, which i think will turn into another book. and in the next term i will be teaching an advanced graduate course on advanced topics in quantum theory. so i go back and forth in as a longtime professor, what's it like to be with freshmen? is this a general science course or is this for science major? >> no, it's a course -- we have an elite program here called

plan to mac that students i think largely self-selected into but it's more demanded that this is one of the courses in plan to that is supposed to sing to are not and usually science students, some feeling for the way science is done and the kind of reasoning that goes into science. and so i do little elements, algebraic calculations on the board but it's mostly history and the history of the development of science from the early greeks to the scientific revolution of the 17th century. and then a little bit about what happened after that. >> with one of your biggest frustrations teaching freshman? and biggest choice because i don't feel too much frustration. every morning, i teach from 9:30-10:45. every morning, tuesdays and

thursdays, and every morning, every tuesday and thursday morning i have an adrenaline rush that i'm going to be on stage talking to these bright kids. i think it's all pleasure. i don't like marking. that's the thing i don't like. i wish that education could somehow be divorced from having to grade, give exams that are created. but i remember myself as an undergraduate, i don't know how much work i would have done if i wasn't going to work for a grade. so i think that's probably impossible. >> with one of the most common questions that your students ask you in the history of science work? >> well, it carries so much. i can't think of anything that -- well, they are very good at trying to put themselves in the frame of mind of the scientists of the past. which is difficult because

scientists of the past didn't know what we know, and even worse than that, they didn't think about what science is the way we think about it. for example, the role of mathematics in exploring the world was not understood. mathematics was regarded as something separate from physics, for example. very often you find, we should look at questions from the view of physics or mathematics. so students ask me what were they thinking of, how could they think that way, and it's hard to answer. you know, it's very hard to put yourself in the frame of mind of an aristotle, for example. who thought so different from us. one of the earlier books, where talk with steven weinberg at the university of texas about his book, "lake views: this world and the universe," published by harvard, but one of your earlier books is "the first three

minutes." what is that about? >> "the first three minutes" is about "the first three minutes," the first minutes of universe. of course, when you say that, it implies that the universe had a beginning. and at that time when the book was written we thought that there probably was a moment when the universe had this incident density, infinite temperature, something that marked the very beginning of time. that's what we found when we traced the history of the universe backward in time using our equation is to work like a movie running backward, to work out what happened in earlier and earlier times. these days, we think that there was a time very, very early when the temperature of the universe was enormously high, the density was enormously high, and my book

was written about the three minutes that followed that moment. but that moment may not have been the beginning. to are made in an earlier period, and, in fact, now we think we have some evidence that there was an earlier period, a period when the universe was expanding extraordinarily rapidly, and, which at the and produced the hot big bang with which i started my book, "the first three minutes." >> so, if somebody says to you, or do you ever say, in the beginning as when the universe began now? >> i've tried to avoid the question, because we really have pretty good confidence in our theories, good enough confidence to trace the history of the universe back to a time when the temperature was so high that even atomic nuclei couldn't hold

together. and we can work out what happened as the universe cooled, and what we find is we see in the universe today. so we know our theories are working. but if you go back earlier, much earlier, then our theories are no longer applicable. in particular, you get to a time when the temperature was so high that einstein's theory of general relativity breaks down. it just can't make sense. and then we just don't know. we don't know if there was a beginning. i have no, i have no confidence in talking about a beginning of the universe. but i have a lot of confidence, and not just me, but astrophysicists in general have a lot of confidence, and talking about a period that in that old book i call "the first three minutes," even if it wasn't really the first three. >> professor weinberg, if a student were to ask you does god exist, what would you answer?

and have you been asked that question before the? >> i have been asked that question, not usually by students. students regarded as will come it's not going to be on the exam. but people have asked me. i've had interviews about it. i think the idea of, well, it depends on what you mean by god, of course. einstein meant something like the laws of nature, which i do think exists. but if by god, you mean the god of traditional religion, that is a god that cares, have some kind of personality, some kind of intelligence, a god that cares about what human beings do, to meet the idea is silly. >> impersonal? the world is in personal? >> now, i think the world is governed by impersonal laws, and

we are just in that rare part of the world where life is possible and, of course, where else would we be? where else could we have evolved? it's a beautiful day outside today here in austin, and you can easily convince yourself that there must be some kind of the netherlands at work producing this lovely world we live in your but, you know, most of the universe is pretty awful, and there aren't any people there for the good reason that they could not have evolved there. so, i see no signs of benevolence in the world. i think we are the creatures, chance, evolution. and it's probably a good thing for the human race to grow up and realize that. >> and professor weinberg, you have written this book of essays for the non-science person, is that fair to see? >> yes.

they were written over the course of a decade and published in various periodicals, many of them in the new york review books. they are for non-science, nonscientists. they all are. and i hope that i succeeded in making them clear enough. i certainly tried. >> and then for another nonscientific question to you, is there life similar to what we have here on earth in your view somewhere else in the universe? >> the universe is pretty big. and i think the chances are very strong. but how, i me, it's a big unknown question. how likely is it that if you have a planet that is about the right distance from its stars so that water can be liquid on the surface and has a solid surface and has the right chemistry, how likely is it that life will get started there? nobody has the slightest idea.

we know the answer isn't zero. on me, there's some chance, and since the universe as so many planets, so many galaxies, each galaxy having so many stars, most stars having planets, i think the chances overwhelming that there is volume elsewhere in the universe. but whether that is life elsewhere in our galaxy, or in the in the neighborhood of our solar system, that's an entirely different question, i can't make an educated guess. >> is the speed of light the ultimate speed is still? >> well, yes and no. much of our thinking in physics is based on the relativity which requires a max must be which is also the speed of light. it's not just the speed of light, the speed of

gravitational waves and anything else that has can any other kind of particle or wave it has no mass. there is an experiment that was performed recently and announced in the press that suggests that perhaps the kind of particle, they can go a little faster than light. a lot of us are very skeptical. in fact, i think even the experimentalists who did the experiment are probably skeptical that that result is going to hold a. if it does hold up, it's a tiny excess over the speed of light. the neutrinos are observed, travel from one place to another place hundreds of miles away faster than the speed of light would admit, something like 60 billionths of a second. it's a very tiny effect.

my guess is it's going to go away and that we're going to find that speed of light really is the maximum. but it will be interesting. that would be quite a revolution inside. >> what is your background? how did you get interested in this, these topics? >> i had a cousin, an older cousin who, when i was quite, 10 or 12, i don't remember, i'm tired of his chemistry set. it was a can craft number five chemistry set. and i got it as a candidate and i got fascinated by chemistry and i started to read about chemistry. and i learned that chemicals behave the way they did because the properties of the adams they are made of, and then i learned it was something called physics that you needed to study in order to understand adams. and i somehow or another, it's a slippery slope. i got sucked into about time us

in high school i was sure i want to be a theoretical sciences. wonderful books written in the '30s and '40s on science or nonscientists by good working sciences like james jeans. and i read those books and i can't say that i was excited because i understood that i think i was excited because i didn't understand a lot of what i read, and it sounded so interesting, if only i could learn this stuff and understand it. so, my fate was sealed from high school on. >> when it comes to public policy, which you do touch on quite a few essays in "lake views," how has the u.s. done, in your view, when it comes to public policy, science funding, et cetera, science research? >> well, it did do very well for a long time. we were the world leaders in

many areas in elementary particle physics and astronomy, both ground-based and space a story. i think it's all slipping away now, that the first sign of it was the cancellation of an elementary particle accelerator for the supercollider. it was canceled in 1993. by a penny pinching congress after billions of dollars had been spent on. >> was this the location in illinois they were going? >> no, no. there is one in illinois. this is going to be built in texas, but my enthusiasm for it did not depend on that. i would've been enthusiastic where ever it was built. now, a less powerful accelerator is coming into, online in europe, large collider.

and that will reap some of the discoveries that would've already been made. but that's just one instance. now, we find that nasa is cutting way back on science programs, and congress is making it very difficult for things to continue at all. a committee in the house of representatives cut out all the spending for the next big space telescope that would replace the hubble space telescope, the james webb telescope. that may never be built. we may end this period great american achievement, and i think it's because of a small government, antitax mania that has afflicted a large part of the american people.

and i think it's a tragedy. but, of course, it's not a tragedy. it is limited to science, it affects education, it affects many things that are important, education and health, our infrastructure. i think our country is in the grips of obsession of cutting taxes and limiting the size of government, which i hope we outgrow. what about the end of the space shuttle program and president bush's call, former president bush's call to return to manned space exploration? >> well, one of the happy things that i see in recent years in the obama administration is cutting way back on manned spaceflight because manned spaceflight masquerades science and has nothing to do with science. but it is enormously expensive. and draws away from real