Steven Weinberg - Human Quotes

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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 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
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
Either by God you mean something definite or you don't mean something definite. If by God you mean a personality who is concerned about human beings, who did all this out of love for human beings, who watches us and who intervenes, then I would have to say in the first place how do you know, what makes you think so? And in the second place, is that really an explanation? If that's true, what explains that? Why is there such a God? It isn't the end of the chain of whys, it just is another step, and you have to take the step beyond that.

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
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
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
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