Science

Nobel Laureate Weinberg calls space station an “orbital turkey”

by William Atkins

Saturday, 22 September 2007

While calling NASA’s “manned” space flight programs (such as Space Station) worthless with regards to science, Steven Weinberg calls NASA’s “unmanned” space flight programs (such as Martian probes Spirit and Opportunity, and earth-orbiting observatory Hubble Telescope) very important to the advancement of science.

Science Discussions

Steven Weinberg stated at the Tuesday, September 18, 2007 Science Writers’ Workshop called “Dark Energy: A Decade of Discovery and Mystery” at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A., “The International Space Station is an orbital turkey. No important science has come out of it. I could almost say no science has come out of it. And I would go beyond that and say that the whole manned spaceflight program, which is so enormously expensive, has produced nothing of scientific value."

Weinberg gave a speech at the Workshop entitled "Why Physicists Worry about Dark Energy".

Please read the FoxNews article “Nobel Laureate Blasts NASA’s Manned Space Program”, which goes into more detail about Weinberg's comments about NASA.

U.S. physicist Steven Weinberg (1933--) won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979, along with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow, for their formulating work on the theory electroweak unification; that is, bringing together the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force into the electroweak force. Both forces use subatomic particles—electromagnetism at large distance swith the use of massless photons and the weak nuclear force at tiny distances with the use of large particles called bosons. The unification of both forces showed that photons and bosons are actually similar, related in structure, and, thus, in the same family of particles, even though they have distinct physical differences.

Photons are grouped within gauge bosons, within the major division called bosons (which also includes gluons, W and Z bosons, graviton, and Higgs boson).

The other major division is called fermions, with subheadings of quarks (with six “flavors”: up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top quarks) and leptons (with six “flavors”: electron, muon, tau, electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrinos).

Thus, all elementary particles are classified by scientists as either bosons or fermions.

Weinberg is a theoretical physicist, primarily in particle physics, at the University of Texas at Austin. It is a member of the Physics and Astronomy Departments at UT, performing studies in elementary particles and cosmology. Some of his published books include: Gravitation and Cosmology--Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity (1972); The Discovery of Subatomic Particles (1983, 2003); and Dreams of a Final Theory--The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (1993).

His Nobel Prize autobiography appears at Nobelprize.org.

The transcripts of a PBS interview given by Weinberg appear at: http://www.counterbalance.net/transcript/wein-body.html.

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