Steven Weinberg will not vote for Obama

Steven Weinberg is a top theoretical physicist who remains immensely active.

Just yesterday, he released a new paper demonstrating that in scale-invariant theories, fields \(\psi_n\) transforming as \((j,0)\) or \((0,j)\) under the Lorentz group – symmetric spintensors with one kind of indices only – don't allow any interactions if the mass dimension obeys \(\Delta=j+1\).

(I took the picture in the Society of Fellows. Of course, I have taken many other pictures of Steven Weinberg in my life...)

But many more readers may be much more interested in his interesting new political stance. He is a left-wing Texas, one of the world's most famous atheist activists, a pro-Israel guy, but you might expect him to enthusiastically vote for Obama. You would be wrong:

Steven Weinberg on the election (The New York Review of Books, November 2012)

I won't unmask the point of his justification, except that conservatives shouldn't expect too much from his reasons. ;-)




But you're surely free to discuss it in the comments.

Of course, Weinberg's sentiment is just an example of the growing dissatisfaction with Barack Obama among life-long leftists. The reasons why they're dissatisfied are probably the same reasons why I think that Obama has been more or less OK, in comparison with some of the catastrophic predictions some pundits made four or five years ago.

After I watched the second presidential debate, I would say that the difference between both candidates is not too great.

Incidentally, Steven Weinberg wrote a new book – Lectures on Quantum Mechanics – that was written for grad students and professionals, contains some unusual stuff as well as problems, and will be out at the end of the year but you may pre-order it via the amazon.com link on the left to guarantee the price. Just a few years ago, I wouldn't believe I would ever say so, but I think that even a giant of Weinberg's caliber has recently said some softcore silly things about the foundations of quantum mechanics. I don't know anything about the content of the book but my guess is that it will focus on the technical, not philosophical, issues.