Top 84 Steven Weinberg Quotes

#1. The proper measure of a philosophical system or a scientific theory is not the degree to which it anticipated modern thought, but its degree of success in treating the philosophical and scientific problems of its own day.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #39693
#2. Premature as the question may be, it is hardly possible not to wonder whether we will find any answer to our deepest questions, any signs of the workings of an interested God, in a final theory. I think that we will not.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #45162
#3. As is natural for an academic, when I want to learn about something, I volunteer to teach a course on the subject.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #54816
#4. The fact that Newton and Michael Faraday and other scientists of the past were deeply religious shows that religious skepticism is not a prejudice that governed science from the beginning, but a lesson that has been learned through centuries of experience in the study of nature.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #54991
#5. Intelligent design ideology being promoted today is not science - it is rather the abdication of science.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #55551
#6. Some for the Glories of the World, and some Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come;

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #132814
#7. 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.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #144033
#8. Quantum field theory, which was born just fifty years ago from the marriage of quantum mechanics with relativity, is a beautiful but not very robust child.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #198724
#9. I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute ... it may be the most important contribution that we can make.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #213797
#10. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #247343
#11. Whatever the final laws of nature may be, there is no reason to suppose that they are designed to make physicists happy.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #281891
#12. after all, our purpose in theoretical physics is not just to describe the world as we find it, but to explain - in terms of a few fundamental principles - why the world is the way it is.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #316903
#13. Fine Structure Constant: Fundamental numerical constant of atomic physics and quantum electrodynamics, defined as the square of the charge of the electron divided by the product of Planck's constant and the speed of light.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #332246
#14. Science and technology benefit each other, but at its most fundamental level science is not undertaken for any practical reason.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #360077
#15. If history is any guide at all, it seems to me to suggest that there is a final theory. In this century we have seen a convergence of the arrows of explanation, like the convergence of meridians toward the North Pole.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #373985
#16. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #398682
#17. The universe is an enormous direct product of representations of symmetry groups.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #403971
#18. As for me, I have just enough confidence about the multiverse to bet the lives of both Andrei Linde and Martin Rees's dog.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #419452
#19. It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #421876
#20. Finally, there is a more subtle relation among F, E, and V.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #422346
#21. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #451954
#22. Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we're so interested in them.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #461054
#23. If (the antiproton) had not been discovered, the foundations of physics really would have crumbled.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #493831
#24. The more comprehensible the universe becomes the more pointless it seems.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #494430
#25. I don't need to argue here that the evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the hand of a designer.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #500834
#26. The progress of science has been largely a matter of discovering what questions should be asked.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #510469
#27. All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #532454
#28. There is now a feeling that the pieces of physics are falling into place, not because of any single revolutionary idea or because of the efforts of any one physicist, but because of a flowering of many seeds of theory, most of them planted long ago.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #535482
#29. Maybe nature is fundamentally ugly, chaotic and complicated. But if it's like that, then I want out.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #538276
#30. It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors?

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #575201
#31. It does not help that some politicians and journalists assume the public is interested only in those aspects of science that promise immediate practical applications to technology or medicine.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #582408
#32. This is one of the great social functions of science - to free people from superstition

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #583611
#33. An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #612126
#34. Our job in physics is to see things simply, to understand a great many complicated phenomena in a unified way, in terms of a few simple principles.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #614690
#35. It seems to me that to understand these early Greeks, it is better to think of them not as physicists or scientists or even philosophers, but as poets.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #619045
#36. My advice is to go for the messes - that's where the action is.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #636955
#37. Sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary,

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #747334
#38. It was essential for the discovery of science that religious ideas be divorced from the study of nature.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #808527
#39. It is not only in medicine that persons in authority will resist any investigation that might reduce their authority.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #813502
#40. There is an important feature of modern science that is almost completely missing in all the thinkers I have mentioned, from Thales to Plato: none of them attempted to verify or even (aside perhaps from Zeno) seriously to justify their speculations. In

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #840595
#41. A physicist friend of mine once said that in facing death, he drew some consolation from the reflection that he would never again have to look up the word "hermeneutics" in the dictionary.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #847235
#42. Journalists generally have no bias toward one cosmological theory or another, but many have a natural preference for excitement.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #894561
#43. It seems that scientists are often attracted to beautiful theories in the way that insects are attracted to flowers - not by logical deduction, but by something like a sense of smell.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #896664
#44. It appears that anything you say about the way that theory and experiment may interact is likely to be correct, and anything you say about the way that theory and experiment must interact is likely to be wrong.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #898520
#45. It is almost irrestible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #924590
#46. [C]reationists [and] other religious enthusiasts [are], in many parts of the world ... , the most dangerous adversaries of science.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #959330
#47. Science should be taught not in order to support religion and not in order to destroy religion. Science should be taught simply ignoring religion.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #970586
#48. I enjoy being at a meeting that doesn't start with an invocation!

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #979897
#49. Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #996379
#50. Science doesn't make it impossible to believe in God, it just makes it possible not to believe in God

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1022412
#51. In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1023587
#52. Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1048748
#53. The struggle in the seventh century between Roman missionaries and Irish monks for control over the English church was largely a conflict over the date of Easter.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1108993
#54. I want to show how difficult was the discovery of modern science, how far from obvious are its practices and standards.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1126209
#55. 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.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1166464
#56. A modern university dean might feel that this danger was a just punishment for Galileo's evasion of teaching duties. But

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1170390
#57. The more we refine our understanding of God to make the concept plausible, the more it seems pointless.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1196550
#58. No thing happens in vain, but everything for a reason and by necessity.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1235235
#59. If you have bought one of those T-shirts with Maxwell's equations on the front, you may have to worry about its going out of style, but not about its becoming false. We will go on teaching Maxwellian electrodynamics as long as there are scientists.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1277540
#60. Nothing in physics seems so hopeful to as the idea that it is possible for a theory to have a high degree of symmetry was hidden from us in everyday life. The physicist's task is to find this deeper symmetry.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1293388
#61. Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1304708
#62. It does not matter whether you win or lose, what matters is whether I win or lose!

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1308395
#63. They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it's a good thing.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1310983
#64. Though aware that there is nothing in the universe that suggests any purpose for humanity, one way that we can find a purpose is to study the universe by the methods of science, without consoling ourselves with fairy tales about its future, or about our own.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1320781
#65. In our universe we are tuned into the frequency that corresponds to physical reality. But there are an infinite number of parallel realities coexisting with us in the same room, although we cannot tune into them.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1338384
#66. Nothing about the practice of modern science is obvious to someone who has never seen it done.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1343057
#67. I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1356194
#68. In trying to get votes for the Superconducting Super Collider, I was very much involved in lobbying members of Congress, testifying to them, bothering them, and I never heard any of them talk about postmodernism or social constructivism. You have to be very learned to be that wrong.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1390862
#69. This also serves as a warning, that science may not yet be in its final form.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1395502
#70. If language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1399081
#71. Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians gods with gray eyes and red hair,

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1404529
#72. Even in the dark times between experimental breakthroughs, there always continues a steady evolution of theoretical ideas, leading almost imperceptibly to changes in previous beliefs.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1442083
#73. In science we don't have prophets. We have heroes, but not prophets.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1468475
#74. On balance the moral influence of religion has been awful.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1541725
#75. If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to bother such a God with our prayers.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1545185
#76. A theorist today is hardly considered respectable if he or she has not introduced at least one new particle for which there is no experimental evidence.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1588402
#77. Mathematics is the means by which we deduce the consequences of physical principles. More than that, it is the indispensable language in which the principles of physical science are expressed.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1589376
#78. As you learn more and more about the irrelevance of human life to the general mechanism of the universe, the idea of an interested god, becomes increasingly implausible.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1590029
#79. Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1606257
#80. This doesn't mean that they commit themselves to the view that this is all there is. Many scientists (including me) think that this is the case, but other scientists are religious, and believe that what is observed in nature is at least in part a result of God's will.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1675561
#81. The whole history of the last thousands of years has been a history of religious persecutions and wars, pogroms, jihads, crusades. I find it all very regrettable, to say the least.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1727687
#82. Much of the writing of physicists barely reaches the level of prose.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1733945
#83. Rational argument can be defeated by refusing to argue rationally.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1773738
#84. Einstein occasionally used "God" as a metaphor for the unknown fundamental laws of nature.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg Quotes #1864247

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