99+ Steven Weinberg Quotes on Atheism, Religion and Dreams of a Final Theory - Quotes.pub
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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.
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.
We on earth do not feel either the gravitational field of the sun or the centrifugal force caused by the earth's motion around the sun because the two forces balance each other, but this balance would be spoiled if one force was proportional to the mass of the objects on which it acts and the other was not; some objects might then fall off the earth into the sun and others could be thrown off the earth into interstellar space.
Plato and the neo-Platonists taught that the beauty we see in nature is a reflection of the beauty of the ultimate, the nous. For us, too, the beauty of present theories is an anticipation, a premonition, of the beauty of the final theory. And in any case, we would not accept any theory as final unless it were beautiful.
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.
There is a spooky quality about the ability of mathematicians to get there ahead of physicists. It's as if when Neil Armstrong first landed on the moon he found in the lunar dust the footsteps of Jules Verne.
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Journalists generally have no bias toward one cosmological theory or another, but many have a natural preference for excitement.
I enjoy being at a meeting that doesn't start with an invocation!
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.
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.
The more we refine our understanding of God to make the concept plausible, the more it seems pointless.
It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.
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.
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.
The progress of science has been largely a matter of discovering what questions should be asked.
Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we're so interested in them.
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.
In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.
Maybe nature is fundamentally ugly, chaotic and complicated. But if it's like that, then I want out.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On balance the moral influence of religion has been awful.
This is one of the great social functions of science – to free people from superstition.
Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.
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.
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.
As for me, I have just enough confidence about the multiverse to bet the lives of both Andrei Linde and Martin Rees's dog.
Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough.
Science doesn't make it impossible to believe in God, it just makes it possible not to believe in God.
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.
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.
I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically.
In science we don't have prophets. We have heroes, but not prophets.
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.