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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.

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
Science
Method
Find
Atheism
Without
Study
Consoling
Nothing
Humanity
Suggests
Way
Though
Methods
Purpose
Fairy
Future
Tales
Universe
Aware

More quotes by Steven Weinberg

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Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough.
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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.
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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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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.
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The universe is an enormous direct product of representations of symmetry groups.
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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.
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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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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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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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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?
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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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In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.
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I enjoy being at a meeting that doesn't start with an invocation!
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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.
Steven Weinberg
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[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
Steven Weinberg
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For good people to do evil things, it takes religion.
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It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors?
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The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
Steven Weinberg
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I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing.
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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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