Steven Weinberg is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. His honors include the Nobel Prize in Physics and National Medal of Science, election to numerous academies, and sixteen honorary doctoral degrees. In 2004 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society, with a citation that said he is “considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive in the world today.” He has written over 300 scientific articles, and treatises on general relativity, quantum field theory and cosmology. Among his books for general readers are Dreams of a Final Theory and The First Three Minutes. His latest book, Lake Views: This World and the Universe, is a collection of his essays in The New York Review of Books and other periodicals. He has served as consultant at the U. S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and member of the Board of Editors of Daedalus magazine, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, the JASON group of defense consultants, and many other boards and committees. Educated at Cornell, Copenhagen, and Princeton, he taught at Columbia, Berkeley, M.I.T. and Harvard, where he was Higgins Professor of Physics, before coming to Texas in 1982.