Quotes from Steven Weinberg

Science and technology benefit each other, but at its most fundamental level science is not undertaken for any practical reason.

Even before the start of history, the sky must have been commonly used as a compass, a clock, and a calendar. It could not have been difficult to notice that the Sun rises every morning in more or less the same direction, that during the day one can tell how much time there is before night from the height of the Sun in the sky, and that hot weather will follow the time of year when the day lasts longest.

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.

The dream of a final theory inspires much of today's work in high-energy physics, and though we do not know what the final laws might be or how many years will pass before they are discovered, already in today's theories we think we are beginning to catch glimpses of the outlines of a final theory. The

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.

after all, our purpose in theoretical physics is not just to describe the world as we find it, but to explain — in terms of a few fundamental principles — why the world is the way it is.

As the much quoted lines of a novel of L. P. Hartley put it, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." I

There is no law, written in the stars which says that theoretical physicists have to be happy

Science and technology benefit each other, but at its most fundamental level science is not undertaken for any practical reason. Though science has nothing to say one way or the other about the existence of God or an afterlife, its goal is to find explanations of natural phenomena that are purely naturalistic. Science is cumulative; each new theory incorporates successful earlier theories as approximations, and even explains why these approximations work, when they do work.

Though mathematics is used in the formulation of physical theories and in working out their consequences, science is not a branch of mathematics

Democritus wrote books on ethics, natural science, mathematics, and music, of which many fragments survive. One of these fragments expresses the view that all matter consists of tiny indivisible particles called atoms (from the Greek for "uncuttable"), moving in empty space: "Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention; atoms and Void [alone] exist in reality.

What is most striking is not so much that Parmenides and Zeno were wrong as that they did not bother to explain why, if motion is impossible, things appear to move. Indeed, none of the early Greeks from Thales to Plato, in either Miletus or Abdera or Elea or Athens, ever took it on themselves to explain in detail how their theories about ultimate reality accounted for the appearances of things.

There is an important feature of modern science that is almost completely missing in all the thinkers I have mentioned, from Thales to Plato: none of them attempted to verify or even (aside perhaps from Zeno) seriously to justify their speculations. In reading their writings, one continually wants to ask, "How do you know?

To calculate 'the' fine structure constant, 1/137, we would need a realistic model of just about everything, and this we do not have. In this talk I want to return to the old question of what it is that determines gauge couplings in general, and try to prepare the ground for a future realistic calculation.

their contemporaries in the West, Charlemagne and his lords, were dabbling in the art of writing their names.

Los hombres no se contentan con consolarse mediante cuentos de dios y gigantes, o limitando sus pensamientos a los asuntos cotidianos de la vida. También construyen telescopios, satélites y aceleradores, y se sientan en sus escritorios durante horas interminables tratando de descifrar el significado de los datos que reúnen.

El esfuerzo por comprender el universo es una de las pocas cosas que eleva la vida humana por sobre el nivel de la farsa y le imprime algo de la elevación de la tragedia.

At sufficiently high energy the force of gravitation between two typical elementary particles becomes as strong as any other force between them. The energy at which this happens is about a thousand million billion billion volts. This is known as the Planck energy.

Even though I knew pretty early that I was going to be a scientist, it wasn't the science that interested me in science fiction; it was the vision of future societies that, for better or worse, would be radically different from our own.

If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn't understand consciousness. We wouldn't even understand turbulence.

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.

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

In my experience, many Americans think of religion as important and want to do whatever they can to support it. But if you ask them what they themselves believe, you'll find they're very uncertain about their religious beliefs. They don't actually accept the theology of their official church.

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.