If you're thinking of purchasing Ramtha, be prepared for everything in your life to change (I believe for the better, but that's just my opinion). Once you pick it up, you won't be able to put it down, and after, you'll never have the same unconsciousness again. You'll be more awake; more aware (for some people, that's not a good thing). If you are a universal truth junkey, like myself, then Ramtha will fit in perfectly with your collection of other spiritual reads. If you are a novice, then I have one question for you... Did you see the movie, The Matrix? Remember when Keaneau Reeves took the blue pill? That's what this book is... the blue pill. Before you buy, make sure you're ready to peek behind the curtains of "life."

I was shocked to see no reviews of Ramtha. I read this a few years ago. He is one of my favorite teachers. Determine for yourself if you think you might be interested in reading Ramtha.

"Do you know what "the" truth is? That there is none. There being none means that everything is."-From Chapter 12, which is entitled "Nothing But Truth".

"You are the only creation that is directly of God. Everything else you have created by thinking and feeling it into being."-From Chapter 8, which is entitled "Creation and Evolution".

"The more you love yourself, the more your brain is opened up. Then you are becoming more than your body. You are becoming that which holds you together."-From Chapter 19, which is entitled "Opening the Mind".

"You have the ability to know all that is, for everything there is to know is in the Great Consciousness of God, and the Mind of God beats like a heart to pump it to you."-From Chapter 17, which is entitled "The Science of Knowing."

As a seeker of Spiritual Truth and a Medium/Teacher who conducts workshops on Sp. Enlightenment; I have found RAMTHA closest to my heart. When given a copy a few years ago, it 'shook me to my roots'. It was as though I had experienced a look into my own life and yes, 'I tingled from head to toe'. RAMTHA has been a constant companion on our (my wife Beatrice and I) travels. I have quoted excerpts from these pages so eloquently written and, like arrows shot from the bow of a marksman, most have struck the target. It has been a wonderful experience to see how these words have struck home to my students. IT HAS MADE THEM THINK. IT HAS MADE THEM BECOME MORE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR OWN ACTIONS. I thoroughly recommend it The best answer for any query about the book must surely be "Try it for yourself - life is individual, not all are ready for it".

If the two first volumes of "The Quantum Theory of Fields" were considered masterpieces in a modern and original presentation of the basics of quantum field theory and its penetration in the recent development of particle physics, with the machinery of spontaneously broken gauge theories, the new volume embraces the wide subject of supersymmetry in Weinberg's typical style, which always means a self-contained treatment of the subject, from its foundations and motivations, to its most recent application as a possible scenario for new physics beyond the Standard Model.

A complete review is published in CERN Courier, May 2000

Great book, contains a lot of material, will be useful to many as a reference on supersymmetry for years to come. Highly Recommended!

This book has some of the most exquisite expositions on the theoretical aspects of quantum field theory that you are ever likely to run into, i.e. Weinberg's name is literally stamped on every page for brilliance. There are topics treated here that are not likely to be found anywhere else, for instance Batalin-Vilkovisky Quantization. Weinberg's treatment of the proof of renormalizability is compact and yet very readable. And his chapter on anomalies is simply speaking the authortiative treatment. This book is a must have for anyone interested in the more theoretical aspects of Field Theory. Though I would recommed a few months with Peskin & Schroeder, and volume 1 of Weinberg to get the full flavour of Weinberg's treatment.

This is another gem of a book by Weinberg. The discussion is fairly modern at places (for instance nice discussion of BRST, BV Formalism, RG and Anomalies), but could have been more modern and compact in certain other places (like chiral lagrangians, standard model etc.). However, even those parts are a pleasure to read. It is just that some other aspects could have been discussed (as I hope he does in the third volume), such as SUSY, especially QFT dualities. Anyway, an excellent book!

This is an incredibly uplifting book that brought a magical enlightenment to my daily life. My friend who has suffered from 30 years of depression was cured after reading the wonderful wisdoms this book inspires to all who read it. If you are on a spiritual journey and yearn to know what life is really all about, look no further, this book will certainly make your heart sing!

As with Weinberg's first volume, this text can be difficult to follow due to dense notation and, at times, a somewhat overly general approach. However, it is well worth the effort. Weinberg provides extraordinary insight, and he offers a unique perspective in his presentation.

A superb reference book, and one that those with some grounding in quantum field theory can learn many good things from. However, I believe students trying to learn what many consider a difficult subject will have a tough go of it. Being so brilliant, Weinberg may have trouble (not so rare in physics)teaching at the level of the students, rather than from the level of the accomplished. Nevertheless, this is a book everyone in the field should have on his/her bookshelf.

For those who are receptive to its charms, this book is simply indispensible to any high energy physicist. This book is not terribly "intuitive"(in the sense that things are derived heuristically just to the point that the result seeems plausible), nor does it take a purely mathematical standpoint, emphasizing the unbending rigour of all proofs. Instead, it offers something far, far more valuable to any physicist; namely it offers truly profound physical insight into the fundamental principles of nature. This book is so chock full of brilliant profound ideas that it seems as if Weinberg put into this book almost all of the insights he has had over the course of his long, productive, and Nobel Prize winning career. He offers a truly logical presentation of particle physics, starting from the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics (superposition principle especially) and the principle of invariance under the Poincare group modulo time and spatial inversion, as well as the principle that distant measurements do not affect each other, and derives, with a minimum of simplifying assumption, the whole, wonderful edifice of quantum field theory. This set of volumes contains almost all that we know about QFT, but somehow, magically, it is not encyclopedic; it is instead refreshingly original and, as I have said before, truly profound. Also, unlike many other QFT texts, it very clearly points out how the assumptions of the theory could be weakened, and also gives an indication of what sorts of theories come from these modified assumptions. The whole book is simply fascinating, but I found the chapter on general renormalization theory particularly enlightening, especially the section on "nonrenormlizable" theories. I learned, in a particularly clear, inspiring way, that these theories are not any more or less renormalizable than standard model theories, when all terms alowed by symmetry are included in the Lagrangian. Although these theories might seem as if they have little power of prediction (after all, there are an infinite number of parameters to the theory), but in fact Weinberg argues that the nonrenormalizalbe interactions are strongly suppressed at low momenta, so it is possible for low energies to create an effective perturbation theory, which yield in this regime astonishingly precise prediction. On the other hand, Weinberg is quick to point out that for large enough energies, this perturbation expansion simply does not make sense, and that THIS is the reason why quantum gravity based on the Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian makes no sense for energies at the scale of unification.
Although this book is truly wonderful, I would not recommend reading it as an introduction to QFT. This book is simply too intense and profound for the uninitiated. Instead, I would recommend as a first introduction Ryder's fine text, which yields enough insights to give the reader a taste of the ideas behing QFT but not so many that the reader is overwhelmed at first, followed by Peskin-Schroeder, which gives the student all of the tools that he/she will need for almost any QFT calculation.

Weinberg shows not only his mastery of the subject but also his skills as a teacher. The book is easy to understand provided one has mastered relativity and quantum mechanics. It would be an excellent complement for anyone who has read Bjorken/Drell or Peskin/Schroeder. In my opinion, a true understanding of quantum field theory can only be gained if one reads Bjorken/Drell, then Peskin/Schroeder and then finally Weinberg. In his book Weinberg is sort of recombining the best of Bjorken/Drell and Peskin/Schroeder and brings understanding to a new level. It is in a sense like with having read quantum mechanics by say Messiah and then reading Landau. Reading Landau first is not a good idea, but doing it after Messiah is. The same thing applies for Weinberg but for a different reason. His insight is more sparking that way.

This is a seriously old-fashioned and out of date book. It was published around 1972 and EVEN THEN was knocked out of contention by the massively superior Misner, Thorne & Wheeler treatise and by Hawking and Ellis' "Large Scale Structure of S.T." - both published at the same time. Weinberg is by nature a quantum theorist and is here writing outside his home territory and it shows. The laborious tensorial notation is unintuitive, dense and reminiscent of fifties textbooks. The treatment is stale and uninspiring (Eddington's "Mathematical Theory of R." written in 1922 has more sparkle!). Add to this Robert M. Wald's classic 1985 GR book (Univ. Chicago Press) and Weinberg's treatment simply isn't in the running. Do not rush into buying on other recommendations without comparing it with Misner etc., Hawking etc. and Wald.

After a completing graduate school, I decided it was time to learn GR on my own. I got Weinberg's book, and, at first reading, I was put off by it--there are effectively no diagrams, no problems, and no pedagogy. So on to Misner, Thorne, Wheeler. Well these kings have no clothes: MTW contains almost no clean, declarative sentences and could be reduced to 1/4 its size with straightforward editing. So I bought B. F. Schutz's book read it, and and went back to Weinberg's book. With both in hand, I am acquiring a satisfying understanding of GR. And I now realize that Weinberg's book is a masterpiece. As in all his texts, Weinberg's passion is to expose the underlying logic of the physics. All follows from the Equivalnce Princple, and this view gives his book a logic coherency that other's lack. (Try seeing where the Equivalence principle fits in Schutz's presentation.) One criticism: I believe that Weinberg was writing a text for his peers to set them straight about GR; he neglected students. It would have been great if he could have included a mathematical appendix or two to make the text more accessible. But even so, it is a wonderful book.

Despite that lack of material on black holes, or a modern differential geometry treatment of the theory (which can be found elsewhere, such as in Hawking & Ellis), this remains almost certainly the best introductory text to general relativity and a valuable reference work for anybody. It is a work of great beauty and profundity, with writing much better than the at times bizarre Misner, Thorner & Wheeler and more comprehensible than Wald: carefully weighed sentences and a smooth narrative flow make reading an extraordinarily pleasant experience, for a physics textbook. I've even read it at 2am in the morning. If the technical content (black holes, cauchy problem/ivp, spinors, NP formalism) is slightly (but not much!) less than can be found in Wald, then it is compensated for in the material on symmetric spaces, or the chapter on stellar equilibrium and collapse, which give physical insight beyond GR. And, above all, it is valuable for the dated but still useful material on classical cosmology. One may ignore the odd comments about incidental relations to differential geometry, and, to be honest, if anyone finds the black holes/cauchy problem sections of Wald comprehensive enough to be useful, I would be surprised. Neither Schutz nor Stephani impress me solidly, either. A useful next read might instead be Advanced General Relativity, John Stewart, CUP. In short, it is a beautifully written masterpiece.

At least some comments from a professional theoretical physicists who does not share major premises of Prof. Weinberg's physics. Just for those readers who are taking everything in books of this type for granted.

Which "3 minutes"? It is a true curiosity: General Relativity was invented to eliminate an absolute Newtonian concept of time from physics. But now, in the most ultra-relativistic situation one can imagine, Weingerg's physics is just back with the concept of absolute time - or better to say - any external time, because the concept of time is physically completely undefined by these cosmologists.

But there are also fundamental questions about Weinberg's interpretation of another underlying theory - quantum mechanics. Another paradox: Weinberg obviously believes that quantum wave functions are some real physically existing objects, and also that probabilities are physically real. But this is definitely not the view of Quantum Mechanics of Bohr, Heisenberg or Schroedinger, who recognized and emphasized that quantum probabilities are just representations of our incomplete information. In similar misleading way Weinberg also struggles with another intrinsically probabilistic theory - Statistical Thermodynamics, and associated Second Law. This makes for Weinberg extremely cumbersome to make the time-origin (singularity) compatible with the Maximum Entropy Principle, to avoid a "heat death" paradox in "his" universe, to define a physically meaningful time near his singularity by entropy, etc.

Concerning the Big Bang and three notorious arguments of its believers: (1) A strong link between the Red Shift and Doppler effect, supposed also by Weinberg, is still very uncertain; some other natural explanations exist in physical literature and has only been ignored, but still never refuted by any serious analysis; (2) Planck's black-body radiation law can hardly be used for any decisions between prospective geometries of the universe, as the same law is resulting for different geometries of the universe; (3) Arguments from particle physics are highly circular, because they actually presume the cosmological model to be proven.

But there are perhaps even more fundamental questions about the Big Bang hypothesis, e.g. its elementary clashes with thermodynamics and information theory, never mentioned by (and maybe unknown to) Prof. Weinberg and the Big-bang camp.

In summary, the whole cosmological narrative of Prof. Weinberg might be still closer to a fairytail than to science, and even his interpretations of basic underlying theories (quantum physics, general relativity, statistical thermodynamics) are highly questionable or even misleading. For creationists and people with some religious philosophy (which is also Prof. Weinberg's case) the Big-Bang narrative might be appealing, but definitely not all competent scientists necessarily see things this way. In my opinion, this is not emphasized enough in this highly speculative and physically somewhat too-fast book.

I am a true layman, having had NO education in physics beyond high school "physical science." However, I have read Hawking's "Brief History of Time," Timothy Ferris' "The Whole Shebang," and read Scientific American. I say this to point out that you do not need to bring a great deal of knowledge to the table to appreciate this book, provided you have some aptitude for cosomology. And, sure, it helps to have a passing acquaintance with General Relativity, Special Relativity, and some of the basics of particle physics. I can't imagine anybody would pick up this book if they didn't already have some passing interest in cosmology and had read a few magazine articles.

The text is clear and, considering the subject matter, amazingly brief. The author does not dummy down the mathematics too much either, which is a fault of some books written for laymen. On the other hand, he also doesn't overwhelm the reader with mathematics either. He wisely chooses to include a mathematics appendix and lets you either explore the math or not.

Quantum mechanics and general relatively are not particularly "intuitive" topics, so any beginning reader is going to have to read this slowly, carefully, and with some patience. But the book is as clear and open to lay people as I've yet encountered.

And, frankly, I think any educated lay person should have a BASIC understanding of the principles in this book. For the curious, this is a great place to start. And even if you've been through the "story" before, this book is great for reinforcing the story of the birth of the universe in a concise, holistic layout.

Stephen Weinberg received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Harvard university and has taught at the university of Texas for decades. He won the Nobel prize in physics in 1979 and has worked with such distinguished personages as the late Richard P. Feynman. In short, he is one of the leading minds in his field.

The First Three Minutes is an unusual book in astronomy / cosmology because it is now over 20 years old & yet it is STILL one of the classics of the "story" of the universe for the layman & non-expert. The book takes us on an exhilerating journey all the way back to the Plank epoch (10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang). Weinberg also deals with Einstein's theory of Relativity (which predicted the Big Bang), the Hubble Red Shift (the discovery that the universe is expanding) as well as the detection of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) in the 1960's by Ralph Wilson and Arno Penzias. All three of these factors, plus numerous other details all form the foundation for the way most scientists think about our universe (presently known as the Big Bang theory).

One of the things about Weinberg that I admire is that, like Carl Sagan, he concedes that he MIGHT be wrong, but that what he has to work with is the best paradigm available. This is brutally honest & also quite a refreshing approach. I tire quickly of reading science books that are written by individuals who are so conceited as to believe they know everything there is to know. One certainly does not have to worry about that type of arrogance with Weinberg.

So, if you even have a passing interest in cosmology, I would HIGHLY recommend this book. The book may be especially appealing to many people as it is 150 pages in & out (anyone who has ever browsed the science shelf at their local bookstore can readily see that there have been far longer books written on this topic). But oh, what a plethora of info that Weinberg furnishes in those 150 pages!

All in all, this is a very readable book which deals with a quite recondite topic.

FACING UP brings together a number of talks and papers by Steven Weinberg that have been scattered here and there up until now. For anyone who has followed Weinberg for a while, there is nothing new here except for brief (on the order of a few paragraphs) introductions to each of the pieces; however, the essays are quite good, and well worth a second reading. Weinberg's primary concerns are to defend reductionism and scientific realism (in the senses both that science means to describe the real world, and that science in fact makes progress towards the one true description), and, in at least one brilliant essay, to argue that physics points in the opposite direction as religion. The quality of philosophical thought in the essays is not exceptionally deep, but Weinberg does offer the reader what I think is a healthy dose of common sense.

This collection of twenty-three essays by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist are drawn from various publications and talks that Professor Weinberg has given over the last few years. The subjects range from defenses of reductionism and Zionism to spats with social constructionists (including his essay on the Sokal Hoax), to debates about the history of science and the prospects for utopia to the anthropic principle and final theories in physics. They have in common, besides Weinberg's well-mannered and modest (but not self-deprecating) prose, a belief in the advancement of scientific knowledge, and a criticism of mysticism, religion and ignorance. I found myself in substantial agreement with Weinberg on almost every subject, and in admiration of his measured, fair and very wise expression.

In the essay, "Confronting O'Brien" (that's the O'Brien of Orwell's 1984), Weinberg makes it clear where he stands on the possibility of two plus two equaling five, or on the so-called "strong" social constructionist view of scientific knowledge. He writes that while "there is no such thing as a clear and universal scientific method", nonetheless, "under the general heading of scientific method" there is "a commitment to reason...and a deference to observation and experiment," and "Above all...a respect for reality as something outside ourselves, that we explore but do not create." (p. 43)

In the chapter, "The Non-Revolution of Thomas Kuhn," Weinberg writes that "the task of science is to bring us closer and closer to objective truth." It is here that I demur. I think it would be better to say that science more and more allows us to better manipulate the environment to our advantage (or disadvantage!) and to see further into that environment--to smaller phenomena, more distant objects, and more clearly into the past and the present--rather than to speak of "objective truth," which in this context is little different from "ultimate truth," or a "final theory of everything." The dream of "objective truth" is the dream of religion and is anathema to Weinberg's sentiments elsewhere in the book. Note, however, that he carefully writes, "closer and closer to objective truth." That's a nice qualification, but I think he should have qualified the notion of "objective truth" as well.

But Prof. Weinberg is not without the means for having fun with his listeners and readers. He writes on page 87 from a talk to the National Association of Scholars about the scientific method, that "There is one philosophic principle that I find of use here...[that] there is a kind of zing--to use the best word I can think of--that is quite unmistakable when real scientific progress is being made." Clearly he is playing with the notion of a "philosophic" principle. Indeed, on the last page of the book he confesses, "I don't believe it is actually possible to prove anything about most of the things (apart from mathematical logic) that they [philosophers] argue about."

Proving that he is not hopelessly locked into a finite but unbounded universe, he notes several times in the book that the universe may be infinite; indeed one of the chapters is entitled, "Before the Big Bang." He also writes, "Chaotic inflation has in a sense revived the idea of a steady state theory in a grander form; our own Big Bang may be just one episode in a much larger universe that on average never changes." (pp. 176-177)

Weinberg's sense of humor is rather dry. While scolding journalists for writing that the Big Bang theory is unraveling, he observes (p. 175), "Journalists generally have no bias toward one cosmological theory or another, but many have a natural preference for excitement." Or, his take off on Kuhn's repeated and grandiose use of the word "paradigm" (after noting a paradigm shift from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics): "Now that really a paradigm shift. For Kuhn it seems to have been the paradigm of paradigm shifts..." (p. 204)

Also: "Any possible universe could be explained as the work of some sort of designer. Even a universe that is completely chaotic...could be supposed to have been designed by an idiot." (p. 232) Or (same page), "The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather."

Weinberg's critique of religion takes no prisoners. He writes (p. 241), "...on balance the moral influence of religion has been awful." He adds, "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil--that takes religion." (p. 242) He got a lot of flak for that, but considering the situation in the Middle East, his words seem prescient, although he was merely glancing back at history.

My favorite essays are the ones on the argument from design, the critique of Thomas Kuhn's thought, and the chapter on utopias. In the first he makes a neat distinction between anthropic reasoning that is "mystical mumbo jumbo," and that which is "just common sense." (p. 238) In the latter, while denigrating the prospect of a technological utopia, he writes that a world without work, a world in which people instead pursue the arts, science, etc., would be unsatisfactory (actually he mentions "general misery") because "there is only so much new literature...only so much new music," etc. to see and hear, and with so much competition, our work would get but scant notice. I really didn't understand this because people will make work where there is none, even if it is only working on their psyches and those of their friends, their bodies, etc. And besides, where is the end of exploring and of learning? Furthermore, the real joy is in the doing, not in the being noticed.

Perhaps this reveals part of Steven Weinberg's personality to us. He is a man who has done the very best work while being noticed at the highest level. What he writes is very much worth our time and consideration.

Anyone who has read Weinberg's essays in The New York Review of Books over the years knows that, in addition to being a superb popular expositor of science (as in books such as Dreams of A Final Theory, CH, Jul'93), the distinguished Nobel Prize physicist has not shied away from polemically treating more controversial matters as well. Not only has he written brilliantly about the Sokal hoax, but he also took on in its pages a sacred cow of postmodernism, Thomas S. Kuhn's perniciously influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which contributed significantly to the origins of that movement. Readers of those essays (and new readers as well) will be happy to have them under one cover, along with Weinberg's occasional other writings on science and education--invited talks, various articles, a commencement speech, book reviews, etc. Weinberg's writing is a joy. Difficult ideas are explained in a language that is learned, unpretentious, elegant, and persuasive all at once--it is the quality of the ideas that comes through, ideas needing no embellishing obfuscation of style. Much, much to be learned here, both by laypersons and specialists. A valuable, important book. Highly recommended. All levels.