Weinberg Quotes & Sayings

My father was a pedant and a bully who cared about nobody, and I was not to see him until I was eighteen. — George Weinberg

Many people secretly think that gays are a lot happier than they are, and want to punish them. — George Weinberg

Along with yourself, who else really cares about this issue? (That is by far the best way to ask about other influencers and your contact's decision-making authority without it coming off as an insult. — Mike 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

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

I was a really crazy kid. I'm still a crazy kid. That's the nice thing about being in a rock band. You can feel 14 forever. — Max Weinberg

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

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

Stuff that's truly off-trail was what appealed to 'Weird Tales' editors. — Robert Weinberg

I have a friend - or had a friend, now dead - Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it ... and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too. — 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

There is no universal coming out process, so far as I know. — George 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

There's never an easy answer to the question "Should we do more testing?" because information can guide risk reduction, but doesn't necessarily do so. — Gerald M. Weinberg

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

Hope never abandons you, you abandon it. — George Weinberg

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

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

They Have a Negative Attitude and Pessimistic Outlook — Mike Weinberg

If by 'God' you have something definite in mind - a being that is loving, or jealous, or whatever - then you're faced with the question of why God's that way and not another way. And if you don't have anything very definite in mind when you talk about 'God' being behind the existence of the universe, then why even use the word? So I think religion doesn't help. It's part of the human tragedy: we're faced with a mystery we can't understand - Steven Weinberg — Jim Holt

If your whole team consists of novice programmers, your expertise will give you considerable power; but if the other team members are also experts, they will attach less importance to your technical expertise. In that case, they'll pay more attention to organizational power, like the power to acquire extra hardware, to extend the schedule, or to capture a more interesting assignment. — Gerald M. Weinberg

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

An essential idea is that if you give to some person or endeavor in life, you will make that more important. — George 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

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

When is the 'look out the windshield phase' of driving? Pretty much all driving is looking out the windshield! It's not a phase. Saying 'testing takes too long' is a bit like saying 'safe driving takes too long. — Gerald M. Weinberg

Take the operation, Gabriel - for Hannah Weinberg, if for no other reason. Get inside the network. Find out who Saladin really is and where he's operating. And then put him down before another bomb explodes." Gabriel — Daniel Silva

If every time you engage in a sex act, you go into a confession box, you will never accept your own sexuality. — George 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

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

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

Effective leaders often have to act even when they don't understand all possible factors — Gerald M. Weinberg

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

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

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

If you don't have questions about a product's risks, then there's no reason to test. If you have at least one such question, then ask: Will these tests cost more to execute than their answers will be worth? — Gerald M. Weinberg

How can one capture genes that behave like ghosts," Weinberg wrote, "influencing cells from behind some dark curtain? — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Within IBM at that time, growing a beard without getting fired was an indisputable mark of technical genius. In — Gerald M. 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 this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God. Without science, everything is a miracle. With science, there remains the possibility that nothing is. Religious belief in this case becomes less and less necessary, and also less and less relevant. — Lawrence M. Krauss

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

I felt like an apostle of the obvious and people imagined that I was doing something daring. — George Weinberg

You can bring tremendous value to your business, your customers, and yourself by becoming proficient at bringing in new business. — Mike Weinberg

How strange it would be if the final theory were to be discovered in our lifetimes! The discovery of the final laws of nature will mark a discontinuity in human intellectual history, the sharpest that has occurred since the beginning of modern science in the seventeenth century. Can we now imagine what that would be like? — Steven Weinberg

Problem-solving leaders have one thing in common: a faith that there's always a better way. — Gerald M. 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

No man wants to feel that he's there because of his woman's biological clock or because he's filling a job opening for husband or significant other. — George Weinberg

People have known of Shakespeare's homosexuality down through the ages. — George Weinberg

People don't become leaders because they never fail. They become leaders because of the way they respond to failure. — Gerald M. 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

Real love takes work. You have to be willing to make the effort. — Noah Weinberg

My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could. — George Weinberg

Testing gathers information about a product; it does not fix things it finds that are wrong. — Gerald M. Weinberg

One of the hardest choices for technical stars who become leaders is losing touch with the latest in technology. — Gerald M. 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

If you don't care about quality, you can meet any other requirement. — Gerald 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

Be loving and kind to everyone. — Irene 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

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

Separation of function is not to be despised, but neither should it be exalted. Separation is not an unbreakable law, but a convenience for overcoming inadequate human abilities, whether in science or engineering. As D'Arcy Thompson, one of the spiritual fathers of the general systems movement, said: As we analyze a thing into its parts or into its properties, we tend to magnify these, to exaggerate their apparent independence, and to hide from ourselves (at least for a time) the essential integrity and individuality of the composite whole. We divided the body into its organs, the skeleton into its bones, as in very much the same fashion we make a subjective analysis of the mind, according to the teaching of psychology, into component factors: but we know very well that judgement and knowledge, courage or gentleness, love or fear, have no separate existence, but are somehow mere manifestations, or imaginary coefficients, of a most complex integral.10 The — Gerald M. Weinberg

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

I have to give my family credit for putting up with the racket, because as some of you may know, its not the easiest thing in the world to live with a kid who's trying to become a rock and roll drummer. — Max Weinberg

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

I contend that proposing too early in the sales process (aka Premature Proposal Syndrome) produces a less-than-ideal proposal and puts the seller at a disadvantage. Some of the possible dangers of prematurely delivering a proposal include not having identified the buyer's criteria for making a decision, all the key players involved in the decision, and the true underlying issues driving the request for a proposal. — Mike Weinberg

Or, suppose you want to motivate your managers to ship products on time, so you conspicuously promote each manager whose product goes out the door on schedule. All goes as planned until the situation arises in which one of your managers has a project where the testers are reporting numerous problems. Because managers who have shipped products on time have been promoted, this manager thinks, I want that promotion so I need to ship this on time, but those bug reports are getting in the way. I know what I'll do! I'll put the testers on another project until the developers have a chance to catch up. — Gerald M. Weinberg

Words are easy to change, but don't accomplish much. — Gerald M. Weinberg

Interestingly, the best way to promote intimacy is to demand it. — George Weinberg

My dad continually reminded salespeople that their main job was to help the customer win. When you speak the account's language and frame the sales story around what is most meaningful to the client, you stand out from the competition. Customers see you differently because the words you choose demonstrate a commitment to their success. — Mike Weinberg

The best computer programmers never write a new program when they can use an old one for a new job. — Gerald M. Weinberg

In sum, the fruition of 50 years of research, and several hundred million dollars in government funds, has given us the following picture of sub-atomic matter. All matter consists of quarks and leptons, which interact by exchanging different types of quanta, described by the Maxwell and Yang-Mills fields. In one sentence, we have captured the essence of the past century of frustrating investigation into the subatomic realm, From this simple picture one can derive, from pure mathematics alone, all the myriad and baffling properties of matter. (Although it all seems so easy now, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, one of the creators of the Standard Model, once reflected on how tortuous the 50-year journey to discover the model had been. He wrote, "There's a long tradition of theoretical physics, which by no means affected everyone but certainly affected me, that said the strong interactions [were] too complicated for the human mind.") — Michio Kaku

If you cannot think of three ways of abusing a tool, you do not understand how to use it. Faithful — Gerald M. 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

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

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

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

Science doesn't make it impossible to believe in God, it just makes it possible not to believe in God — Steven Weinberg

You would be better off in exile than priding yourself on be like everyone else. — George Weinberg

As I said, men value their independence in a weird way, above practically everything. — George 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 will always desire to play with Bruce Springsteen. He's the most inspirational, most dedicated, most committed and most focused artist I've ever seen. I like to be around people like that. — Max Weinberg

As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, 'Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion. — Richard Dawkins

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

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 think 'Bat Out Of Hell' will probably last forever. — Max 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

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

In fact, the average programming manager would prefer that a project be estimated at twelve months and take twelve than that the same project be estimated at six months and take nine. This is an area where some psychological study could be rewarding, but there are indications from other situations that it is not the mean length of estimated time that annoys people but, rather, the standard deviation in the actual time taken. Thus, most people would prefer to wait a fixed ten minutes for the bus each morning than to wait one minute on four days and twenty-six minutes once a week-. Even though the average wait is six minutes in the second case, the derangement caused by one long and unexpected delay more than compensates for this disadvantage. If — Gerald M. Weinberg

Other kids' parents wouldn't let them read magazines like 'Weird Tales,' but my folks were big readers themselves, so they didn't mind. — Robert Weinberg