Steven Weinberg Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

It is almost irresistible 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.... It is very hard to realise that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realise 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 also seems pointless.

Steven Weinberg
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

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
It certainly feels to me that we are discovering something real in physics, something that is what it is without any regard to the social and historical conditions that allowed us to discover it.

Steven Weinberg
There is an essential element in science that is cold, objective, and nonhuman... the laws of nature are as impersonal and free of human values as the rules of arithmetic... Nowhere do we see human value or human meaning.

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
Any investigator is indeed fortunate who can contribute a tiny stone to the great edifice which we call scientific truth.

Steven Weinberg
The urge to trace the history of the universe back to its beginning is irresistible.

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

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
Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that 'God is the ultimate' or 'God is our better nature' or 'God is the universe.' Of course, like any other word, the word 'God' can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that 'God is energy,' then you can find God in a lump of coal.

Steven Weinberg
Physical reality remains so mysterious even to physicists because of the extreme improbability that it was constructed to be understood by the human mind.

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
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
Sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary,

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
We search for universal truths about nature and when we find them, we show that they can be deduced from deeper truths.

Steven Weinberg
Physics is not a finished logical system. Rather, at any moment it spans a great confusion of ideas, some that survive like folk epics from the heroic periods of the past, and others that arise like utopian novels from our dim premonitions of a future grand synthesis.

Steven Weinberg
That grand unselfish love of truth, and joy in its discovery, by whomsoever made, which characterize the true seeker and seer of science and creative art, alone can keep the mind alive and alert, alone can make the possession of truth a means of elevating and purifying the man.

Steven Weinberg
When we say that a thing is real we are simply expressing a sort of respect.

Steven Weinberg
The Logic of Induction is the Criterion of Truth inferred from Facts, as the Logic of Deduction is the Criterion of Truth deduced from necessary Principles.

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

Steven Weinberg
By the mental process of thinking we try to ascertain truth; it is our mind's effort to bring about its own enlightenment by evidence.

Steven Weinberg
We are not very pleased when we are forced to accept a mathematical truth by virtue of a complicated chain of formal conclusions and computations, which we traverse blindly, link by link, feeling our way by touch. We want first an overview of the aim and of the road; we want to understand the idea of the proof, the deeper context.

Steven Weinberg
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
Philosophy of Science is about as much use to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
Sometimes attributed to Richard Feynman

Steven Weinberg
It is very hard 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 also seems pointless.

Steven Weinberg
Finally, learn something about the history of science, or at a minimum the history of your own branch of science. The least important reason for this is that the history may actually be of some use to you in your own scientific work.

Steven Weinberg
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it 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 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