Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Nature
Strange
Discovered
Human
Century
Discovery
Discontinuity
Humans
Modern
Lifetime
Seventeenth
Would
Imagine
Mark
Sharpest
Like
Since
Laws
Lifetimes
Law
Intellectual
Occurred
History
Beginning
Final
Science
Theory
Finals

More quotes by Steven Weinberg

Image
My advice is to go for the messes - that's where the action is.
Steven Weinberg
Image
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.
Steven Weinberg
Image
I enjoy being at a meeting that doesn't start with an invocation!
Steven Weinberg
Image
This doesn't mean that they commit themselves to the view that this is all there is. Many scientists (including me) think that this is the case, but other scientists are religious, and believe that what is observed in nature is at least in part a result of God's will.
Steven Weinberg
Image
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.
Steven Weinberg
Image
For good people to do evil things, it takes religion.
Steven Weinberg
Image
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
Image
I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing.
Steven Weinberg
Image
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.
Steven Weinberg
Image
Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough.
Steven Weinberg
Image
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.
Steven Weinberg
Image
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
Image
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.
Steven Weinberg
Image
Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.
Steven Weinberg
Image
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
Steven Weinberg
Image
In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.
Steven Weinberg
Image
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.
Steven Weinberg
Image
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.
Steven Weinberg
Image
The universe is an enormous direct product of representations of symmetry groups.
Steven Weinberg
Image
It appears that anything you say about the way that theory and experiment may interact is likely to be correct, and anything you say about the way that theory and experiment must interact is likely to be wrong.
Steven Weinberg