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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

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Steven Weinberg
Age: 88 †
Born: 1933
Born: May 3
Died: 2021
Died: July 23
Cosmologist
Physicist
Theoretical Physicist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Seems
Concern
Impolite
Humans
Plans
Great
Seem
Impious
Would
Special
Pains
Prayer
Prayers
Taken
Hide
Religion
Bother
Pain
Atheism

More quotes by Steven Weinberg

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In our universe we are tuned into the frequency that corresponds to physical reality. But there are an infinite number of parallel realities coexisting with us in the same room, although we cannot tune into them.
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Though aware that there is nothing in the universe that suggests any purpose for humanity, one way that we can find a purpose is to study the universe by the methods of science, without consoling ourselves with fairy tales about its future, or about our own.
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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.
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As you learn more and more about the irrelevance of human life to the general mechanism of the universe, the idea of an interested god, becomes increasingly implausible.
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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.
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In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.
Steven Weinberg
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There is now a feeling that the pieces of physics are falling into place, not because of any single revolutionary idea or because of the efforts of any one physicist, but because of a flowering of many seeds of theory, most of them planted long ago.
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If you have bought one of those T-shirts with Maxwell's equations on the front, you may have to worry about its going out of style, but not about its becoming false. We will go on teaching Maxwellian electrodynamics as long as there are scientists.
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My advice is to go for the messes - that's where the action is.
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As for me, I have just enough confidence about the multiverse to bet the lives of both Andrei Linde and Martin Rees’s dog.
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A theorist today is hardly considered respectable if he or she has not introduced at least one new particle for which there is no experimental evidence.
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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.
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It is almost irrestible 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.
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[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
Steven Weinberg
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I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute ... it may be the most important contribution that we can make.
Steven Weinberg
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Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion, should be done and may, in fact, in the end, be our greatest contribution to civilization.
Steven Weinberg
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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.
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They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it's a good thing.
Steven Weinberg
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It is even harder 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 seems pointless.
Steven Weinberg
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Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.
Steven Weinberg