Steven Weinberg Quotes

This is one of the great social functions of science – to free people from superstition

I’m afraid that it’s not possible to design a defense against every conceivable threat that you can think of.

Certainly science, because of its ability to increase our capacities to do things, raises terrible risks for us all. If it were possible to undiscover nuclear fission, I would be very happy to undiscover it, because of the risks that it puts us all under.

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.

The universe is an enormous direct product of representations of symmetry groups.

Certainly good causes have sometimes been mobilized under the banner of religion, but you find the opposite, I think, more often the case.

Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion, should be done and may, in fact, in the end, be our greatest contribution to civilization.

In my experience, many Americans think of religion as important and want to do whatever they can to support it. But if you ask them what they themselves believe, you’ll find they’re very uncertain about their religious beliefs. They don’t actually accept the theology of their official church.

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.

My work during the 1970s has been mainly concerned with the implications of the unified theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions, with the development of the related theory of strong interactions known as quantum chromodynamics, and with steps toward the unification of all interactions.

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.

One thing that is clearly not maximized by free markets is equality. I am talking not about that pale substitute for equality known as equality of opportunity but about equality itself.

Symmetry principles are principles governing the laws of nature that say those laws look the same if you change your point of view in certain ways.

I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That’s a good thing.

Even though I knew pretty early that I was going to be a scientist, it wasn’t the science that interested me in science fiction; it was the vision of future societies that, for better or worse, would be radically different from our own.

An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.

Rational argument can be defeated by refusing to argue rationally.

It’s very difficult to convince other countries that they shouldn’t pursue nuclear weapons programs if we ourselves are actively developing a component of a strategic defense system.

I would say it’s a lot easier to develop a decoy system than to develop the intercontinental ballistic missile itself. I would think that any country that could develop the missile could develop quite a decoy system. It doesn’t have to be terribly sophisticated.

In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.

All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically

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.

Most scientists I know don’t care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.

Sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.

Science doesn’t make it impossible to believe in God, it just makes it possible not to believe in God

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.

Science merely amplifies the capabilities of human beings. Science gives us the ability to do ill and to do good more than we had, and to question science in this respect is like questioning whether people ought to have two hands or just one, because with two hands they could do more evil than they can with just one.

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.

Even if there is a God, how do you know that his moral judgments are the correct ones? Seems to me Abraham should have said, ‘God, that’s just not right.’

Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality – entails and titles of nobility – even before we had a constitution.

I used to read a good deal of science fiction when I was a boy.

I was born in 1933 in New York City to Frederick and Eva Weinberg. My early inclination toward science received encouragement from my father, and by the time I was 15 or 16, my interests had focused on theoretical physics.

The most influential utopian idea of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was socialism, which has failed everywhere. Under the banner of socialism, Stalin’s U.S.S.R. and Mao’s China gave us not utopias but ghastly anti-utopias.

For someone who claimed to have found the true method for seeking reliable knowledge, it is remarkable how wrong Descartes was about so many aspects of nature.

If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn’t understand consciousness. We wouldn’t even understand turbulence.

If any one idea can justly be called the American idea, it is that a child’s circumstances at birth should not determine the station in life that that child will occupy as an adult.

My Ph.D. thesis, with Sam Treiman as adviser, was on the application of renormalization theory to the effects of strong interactions in weak interaction processes.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.