Steven Weinberg

Nobel-laureate physicist. In "Eye on the Present — The Whig History of Science" (New York Review of Books, 2015), he took the minority position that Whig history is legitimate specifically for science, because "in scientific history we really can say who was right." His exemption is narrow: it covers judging whether a past claim turned out correct, not importing a later concept or intent the original actors never had — a boundary the vault uses to split its own AI-history corrections into defensible present-knowledge appraisal versus anachronistic concept-importing.

References

• claim-weinberg-2015-defends-whig-history-as-legitimate-for-science
• observation-whig-history-splits-vault-myth-ledger-into-defensible-and-anachronistic
• moc-backpropagation-origins
• Captures: 2026-07-11-hop-whig-history-of-ai, 2026-07-18-does-the-deep-lineage-myth-displacing-contingent-truth (entity-candidate mention only)
• 2026-09-04: A fuller re-fetch of the same 2015 NYRB essay found Weinberg's exemption is bounded on a second side the vault hadn't quoted before — he also forbids treating past scientists as "spotless heroes or infallible geniuses, and others as villains or fools," one paragraph past the "who was right" sentence already on file (claim-weinberg-and-butterfield-both-explicitly-reject-hero-villain-narratives)