Quotes from Steven Weinberg

As is natural for an academic, when I want to learn about something, I volunteer to teach a course on the subject.

We simply do not find anything in the laws of nature that in any way corresponds to ideas of goodness, justice, love, or strife

religions of the Roman Empire "were all considered by the people, as equally true, by the philosopher, as equally false, and by the magistrate, as equally useful."8

scientific theories cannot be deduced by purely mathematical reasoning.

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

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

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without religion, 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

Even if there is a God, how do you know that his moral judgments are the correct ones? Seems to me Abraham should have said, 'God, that's just not right.'

With or without religion, 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.

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

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.

once one invokes the supernatural, anything can be explained, and no explanation can be verified.

It is not only in medicine that persons in authority will resist any investigation that might reduce their authority.

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.

at its most fundamental level science is not undertaken for any practical reason.

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 Babylonians had achieved great competence in arithmetic, using a number system based on 60 rather than 10. They had also developed some simple techniques of algebra, such as rules (though these were not expressed in symbols) for solving various quadratic equations.

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.

Once again I repeat: the aim pf physics at its most fundamental level is not just to describe the world but ti explain why it is the way it is.

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.

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

No thing happens in vain, but everything for a reason and by necessity.

Nothing about the practice of modern science is obvious to someone who has never seen it done.

The real difference between Aristarchus and today's astronomers and physicists is not that his observational data were in error, but that he never tried to judge the uncertainty in them, or even acknowledged that they might be imperfect.