Quotes from Steven Weinberg

When you do calculations using quantum mechanics, even when you are calculating something perfectly sensible like the energy of an atomic state, you get an answer that is infinite. This means you are wrong - but how do you deal with that? Is there something wrong with the theory, or something wrong with the way you are doing the calculation?

Science merely amplifies the capabilities of human beings. Science gives us the ability to do ill and to do good more than we had, and to question science in this respect is like questioning whether people ought to have two hands or just one, because with two hands they could do more evil than they can with just one.

Certainly science, because of its ability to increase our capacities to do things, raises terrible risks for us all. If it were possible to undiscover nuclear fission, I would be very happy to undiscover it, because of the risks that it puts us all under.

I used to read a good deal of science fiction when I was a boy.

I was born in 1933 in New York City to Frederick and Eva Weinberg. My early inclination toward science received encouragement from my father, and by the time I was 15 or 16, my interests had focused on theoretical physics.

After receiving my Ph.D. in 1957, I worked at Columbia and then from 1959 to 1966 at Berkeley.

Whatever faith you have you ought to be willing to confront it with the discoveries of science. There's something ignoble about not being willing to look at what we've found about the way the world is and trying to reconcile it with whatever you've decided to believe in for yourself.

Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality - entails and titles of nobility - even before we had a constitution.

For someone who claimed to have found the true method for seeking reliable knowledge, it is remarkable how wrong Descartes was about so many aspects of nature.

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.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. 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.

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

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

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

the idea is to see how far one can go without supposing supernatural intervention.

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