Steven Weinberg Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Itwas one time when people thought the value of the fine structure constant wasimportant. Now of course it's still important, of course, as a practical matter,but we now know that the value it has is a function, that in any fundamental theory you derive the fine structure constant as a function of all sorts of mass ratios and so on, and it's not really that fundamental. — Steven Weinberg

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

There are those whose views about religion are not very different from my own, but who nevertheless feel that we should try to damp down the conflict, that we should compromise it. ... I respect their views and I understand their motives, and I don't condemn them, but I'm not having it. To me, the conflict between science and religion is more important than these issues of science education or even environmentalism. I think the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief; and anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization. — Steven Weinberg

Sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary, — Steven Weinberg

Einstein occasionally used "God" as a metaphor for the unknown fundamental laws of nature. — Steven Weinberg

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

I enjoy being at a meeting that doesn't start with an invocation! — Steven Weinberg

I chose "Discovery" instead of "Invention" to suggest that science is the way it is not so much because of various adventitious historic acts of invention, but because of the way nature is. With all its imperfections, modern science is a technique that is sufficiently well tuned to nature so that it works - it is a practice that allows us to learn reliable things about the world. In this sense, it is a technique that was waiting for people to discover it. — Steven Weinberg

Some for the Glories of the World, and some Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come; — Steven Weinberg

If there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather. — Steven Weinberg

It is not only in medicine that persons in authority will resist any investigation that might reduce their authority. — Steven Weinberg

Another factor: Christianity offered opportunities for advancement in the church to intelligent young men, some of whom might otherwise have become mathematicians or scientists. Bishops and presbyters were generally exempt from the jurisdiction of the ordinary civil courts, and from taxation. A bishop such as Cyril of Alexandria or Ambrose of Milan could exercise considerable political power, much more than a scholar at the Museum in Alexandria or the Academy in Athens. This was something new. Under paganism religious offices had gone to men of wealth or political power, rather than wealth and power going to men of religion. For instance, Julius Caesar and his successors won the office of supreme pontiff, not as a recognition of piety or learning, but as a consequence of their political power. — Steven Weinberg

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

Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum! — Steven Weinberg

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

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

You know, our fundamentalist friends dislike the teaching of evolution in schools because of the effect they feel it has on our view of our own special importance, while liberals insist that scientific and spiritual matters can be kept in separate compartments. On this point, I tend to agree with the fundamentalists, though I come to opposite conclusions about teaching evolution because I am convinced it's true. — Steven Weinberg

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

It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws. We don't yet know the most fundamental laws, and we can't work out all the consequences of the laws we do know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. We can't predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain, even though we can't always calculate their consequences. I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years. — Steven Weinberg

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

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

How then did we come to the "standard model"? And how has it supplanted other theories, like the steady state model? It is a tribute to the essential objectivity of modern astrophysics that this consensus has been brought about, not by shifts in philosophical preference or by the influence of astrophysical mandarins, but by the pressure of empirical data. — Steven Weinberg

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

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

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

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

Maybe at the very bottom of it ... I really don't like God. You know, it's silly to say I don't like God because I don't believe in God, but in the same sense that I don't like Iago, or the Reverend Slope or any of the other villains of literature, the god of traditional Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to me a terrible character. He's a god who will ... who obsessed the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don't worship him in the right way. Now I realise that many people don't believe in that any more who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians, but that is the traditional God and he's a terrible character. I don't like him. — Steven Weinberg

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

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless — Steven Weinberg

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

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

It does not matter whether you win or lose, what matters is whether I win or lose! — Steven Weinberg

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

I now want to tell three stories about advances in twentieth-century physics. A curious fact emerges in these tales: time and again physicists have been guided by their sense of beauty not only in developing new theories but even in judging the validity of physical theories once they are developed. Simplicity is part of what I mean by beauty, but it is a simplicity of ideas, not simplicity of a mechanical sort that can be measured by counting equations or symbols. — Steven Weinberg

Many people do simply awful things out of sincere religious belief, not using religion as a cover the way that Saddam Hussein may have done, but really because they believe that this is what God wants them to do, going all the way back to Abraham being willing to sacrifice Issac because God told him to do that. Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing. — Steven Weinberg

No thing happens in vain, but everything for a reason and by necessity. — Steven Weinberg

Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God's hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries. — Steven Weinberg

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

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

Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians gods with gray eyes and red hair, — Steven Weinberg

On balance the moral influence of religion has been awful. — Steven Weinberg

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, there is a more subtle relation among F, E, and V. — Steven Weinberg

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

If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that - in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we're starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That's not an entirely despicable role for us to play. — Steven Weinberg

Rational argument can be defeated by refusing to argue rationally. — Steven Weinberg

But if oxen (and horses) and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies [of their gods] in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses. — Steven Weinberg

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

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

The more comprehensible the universe becomes the more pointless it seems. — Steven Weinberg

Intelligent design ideology being promoted today is not science - it is rather the abdication of science. — Steven Weinberg

It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her. — Steven Weinberg

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

To calculate 'the' fine structure constant, 1/137, we would need a realistic model of just about everything, and this we do not have. In this talk I want to return to the old question of what it is that determines gauge couplings in general, and try to prepare the ground for a future realistic calculation. — Steven Weinberg

Despite the experimental success of the theory...the fact that the infinities occur at all continues to produce grumbling...Dirac in particular always referred to renormalization as sweeping the infinities under the rug. I disagreed with Dirac and argued the point with him at conferences at Coral Gables and Lake Constance. Taking account of the difference between the bare charge and mass of the electron and their measured values is not merely a trick that is invented to get rid of infinities; it is something we would have to do even if everything was finite. There is nothing arbitrary or ad hoc about the procedure; it is simply a matter of correctly identifying what we are actually measuring. — Steven Weinberg

I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just ... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this? — Steven Weinberg

We have simply arrived too late in the history of the universe to see this primordial simplicity easily ... But although the symmetries are hidden from us, we can sense that they are latent in nature, governing everything about us. That's the most exciting idea I know: that nature is much simpler than it looks. Nothing makes me more hopeful that our generation of human beings may actually hold the key to the universe in our hands-that perhaps in our lifetimes we may be able to tell why all of what we see in this immense universe of galaxies and particles is logically inevitable. — Steven Weinberg

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

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

Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. 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. — Steven Weinberg

Much of the writing of physicists barely reaches the level of prose. — Steven Weinberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was essential for the discovery of science that religious ideas be divorced from the study of nature. — Steven Weinberg

The progress of science has been largely a matter of discovering what questions should be asked. — Steven Weinberg

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

The distinction between mathematics and science is pretty well settled. It remains mysterious to us why mathematics that is invented for reasons having nothing to do with nature often turns out to be useful in physical theories. In a famous article,8 the physicist Eugene Wigner has written of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. — Steven Weinberg

Even though their arguments did not invoke religion, I think we all know what's behind these arguments. They're trying to protect religious beliefs from contradiction by science. They used to do it by prohibiting teachers from teaching evolution at all; then they wanted to teach intelligent design as an alternative theory; now they want the supposed "weaknesses" in evolution pointed out. But it's all the same program - it's all an attempt to let religious ideas determine what is taught in science courses. — Steven Weinberg

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

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

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

My advice is to go for the messes - that's where the action is. — Steven Weinberg

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

Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. — Steven Weinberg

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

This is often the way it is in physics - our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. Even worse, there often seems to be a general agreement that certain phenomena are just not fit subjects for respectable theoretical and experimental effort. — Steven Weinberg

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

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

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

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

Its a consequence of the experience of science. As you learn more and more about the universe, you find you can understand more and more without any reference to supernatural intervention, so you lose interest in that possibility. Most scientists I know dont care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists. And that, I think, is one of the great things about science-that it has made it possible for people not to be religious. — Steven Weinberg

The dream of a final theory inspires much of today's work in high-energy physics, and though we do not know what the final laws might be or how many years will pass before they are discovered, already in today's theories we think we are beginning to catch glimpses of the outlines of a final theory. The — Steven Weinberg

In science we don't have prophets. We have heroes, but not prophets. — Steven Weinberg

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

Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists. — Steven Weinberg

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