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If history is any guide at all, it seems to me to suggest that there is a final theory. In this century we have seen a convergence of the arrows of explanation, like the convergence of meridians toward the North Pole.
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
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Arrows
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North
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More quotes by Steven Weinberg
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
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
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
The universe is an enormous direct product of representations of symmetry groups.
Steven Weinberg
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
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
Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.
Steven Weinberg
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
Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough.
Steven Weinberg
[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
Steven Weinberg
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
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
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
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
In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.
Steven Weinberg
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
As for me, I have just enough confidence about the multiverse to bet the lives of both Andrei Linde and Martin Rees’s dog.
Steven Weinberg
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.
Steven Weinberg
Sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.
Steven Weinberg
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.
Steven Weinberg