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In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.

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
Complexity
Simplicity
Interesting

More quotes by Steven Weinberg

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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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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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For good people to do evil things, it takes religion.
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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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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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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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
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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.
Steven Weinberg
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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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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
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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.
Steven Weinberg
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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.
Steven Weinberg
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The universe is an enormous direct product of representations of symmetry groups.
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?
Steven Weinberg
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Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.
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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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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I enjoy being at a meeting that doesn't start with an invocation!
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.
Steven Weinberg
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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.
Steven Weinberg