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Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough.

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
Theories
Seriously
Theory
Mistake
Take
Enough

More quotes by 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 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
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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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I enjoy being at a meeting that doesn't start with an invocation!
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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.
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The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
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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In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.
Steven Weinberg
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The universe is an enormous direct product of representations of symmetry groups.
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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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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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
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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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My advice is to go for the messes - that's where the action is.
Steven Weinberg
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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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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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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.
Steven Weinberg
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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.
Steven Weinberg
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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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Sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.
Steven Weinberg