explained why he thought that contemporary physics might be on the verge of discovering just such a theory. He even confessed to some sadness at the prospect, writing that “with the discovery of a final theory we may regret that nature has become more ordinary, less full of wonder and mystery.”
Just how much cosmic mystery did Weinberg think the final theory would leave as a residue? He was quite explicit in denying that it could explain literally everything. For example, Weinberg did not think that science could ever explain the existence of moral truths, owing to the logical gap between the scientific is and the ethical ought. But could science explain the existence of the world? Could it account for the triumph of Something over Nothing?
I was eager to put such questions to Weinberg. In fact, I was eager to meet him, period. There was no other living physicist I regarded with such awe. And there was no other physicist (with the exception of Freeman Dyson) who had such a gift for putting his ideas in lapidary form. Besides, Weinberg seemed to be an extraordinary-looking fellow, judging from descriptions of him I had seen in the press. “With his crab-apple cheeks, vaguely Asian eyes, and silver hair still tinged with red, Steven Weinberg resembles a large, dignified elf,” one journalist wrote of him after an encounter. “He would make an excellent Oberon, king of the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
So, feeling rather like Nick Bottom myself, I got in touch with Weinberg. He teaches at the University of Texas in Austin, having come there in 1982 after previously holding the Higgins Chair of Physics at Harvard. I proposed making a pilgrimage to Austin to talk to him about the mystery of existence. He responded graciously to this threatened imposition on his time. “If you are coming all the way down here from New York, I’ll even buy you lunch,” he wrote in an e-mail. The universe, I thought, was not the only free lunch.
The prospect of visiting Austin for the first time was an added allurement to me. From what I had heard of the place, I pictured it as a wondrous bastion of avant-garde culture and bohemian living in an otherwise medievally backward state. It even seemed to be theologically progressive. When I had asked Weinberg, who has inveighed against religion (“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”), how he could be happy in a Baptist hotbed like Texas, he assured me that, far from being uniformly fundamentalist, some of the Baptist congregations there were so liberal as to be indistinguishable from Unitarians. And I was impressed by Austin’s reputation as the live-music capital of the world, even if indie rock was not exactly my dish.
So I eagerly booked a flight to Austin and made a reservation at the Intercontinental Hotel for what promised to be an intellectually stimulating and altogether delightful weekend—not realizing that my plans were about to be destroyed by a little eruption of le néant into my life.
Interlude
Nausea
It was early afternoon on Saturday when my plane touched down at the Austin airport. For a late-spring day, the heat and humidity were surprising, and even in my linen suit, elegantly rumpled as always, I felt a little uncomfortable.
On the way downtown I noticed a lot of activity in the streets. It seemed that some sort of outdoor music festival was getting under way.
After checking into my hotel, I went for a stroll around the old downtown. By now the music festival was in full swing. Rockabilly garage bands blared away on every block; beery throngs pressed in and out of bars; meat sizzled on grills in the middle of the closed-off streets. The noise was intense. So were the smells.
Making my way through the cacophonous crush under the hot sun, I pretended that I was Roquentin, the existential hero of Sartre’s novel Nausea. I tried to summon up the disgust he would feel at the surfeit of Being that overflowed the streets of Austin—at its sticky thickness, its grossness, its absurd contingency. Whence did it all spring? How did the ignoble mess around me triumph over pristine Nothingness? Roquentin, overwhelmed by the gelatinous slither of existence that environed him in his lonely wanderings through Bouville, was moved to shout, “Filth! What rotten filth!” I might have done the same, but my epiphany