Frases de Steven Weinberg (54 citas)

Closing statements of presentation at Beyond Belief : Science, Religion, Reason and Survival (5 November 2006)
Contexto: There are those whose views about religion are not very different from my own, but who nevertheless feel that we should try to damp down the conflict, that we should compromise it. … I respect their views and I understand their motives, and I don't condemn them, but I'm not having it. To me, the conflict between science and religion is more important than these issues of science education or even environmentalism. I think the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief; and anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.

“Maybe at the very bottom of it… I really don't like God.”

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Steven Weinberg

The Atheism Tapes (2004)
Contexto: Maybe at the very bottom of it... I really don't like God. You know, it's silly to say I don't like God because I don't believe in God, but in the same sense that I don't like Iago, or the Reverend Slope or any of the other villains of literature, the god of traditional Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to me a terrible character. He's a god who will... who obsessed the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don't worship him in the right way. Now I realise that many people don't believe in that any more who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians, but that is the traditional God and he's a terrible character. I don't like him.

“It is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.”

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Steven Weinberg

The Atheism Tapes (2004)
Contexto: I have a friend — or had a friend, now dead — Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it... and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.

“Now I realise that many people don't believe in that any more who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians, but that is the traditional God and he's a terrible character. I don't like him.”

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Steven Weinberg

“Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.”

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Steven Weinberg

The Atheism Tapes (2004)
Contexto: Many people do simply awful things out of sincere religious belief, not using religion as a cover the way that Saddam Hussein may have done, but really because they believe that this is what God wants them to do, going all the way back to Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac because God told him to do that. Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.

“There is one constant that seems to be fine tuned…and that is dark energy.”

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Steven Weinberg

The Atheism Tapes (2004)
Contexto: There is one constant that seems to be fine tuned... and that is dark energy.

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

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Steven Weinberg

Address at the Conference on Cosmic Design, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. (April 1999)
This comment is modified in a later article derived from these talks:
:Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.
:* "A Designer Universe?" at PhysLink.com http://www.physlink.com/Education/essay_weinberg.cfm

“All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically”

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Steven Weinberg

Fuente: Dreams of a Final Theory

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”

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Steven Weinberg

(1993), Epilogue, p. 155
The First Three Minutes (1977; second edition 1993)

“Science doesn't make it impossible to believe in God, it just makes it possible not to believe in God”

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Steven Weinberg

“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

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Steven Weinberg

Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (1993), ISBN 0-09-922391-0.

“One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.”

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Steven Weinberg

Address at the Conference on Cosmic Design, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. (April 1999)

“In fact, there is something puzzling about the Higgs mass we now do observe. It is generally known as the “hierarchy problem.” Since it is the Higgs mass that sets the scale for the masses of all other known elementary particles, one might guess that it should be similar to another mass that plays a fundamental role in physics, the so-called Planck mass, which is the fundamental unit of mass in the theory of gravitation. (It is the mass of hypothetical particles whose gravitational attraction for one another would be as strong as the electric force between two electrons separated by the same distance.) But the Planck mass is about a hundred thousand trillion times larger than the Higgs mass. So, although the Higgs particle is so heavy that a giant particle collider was needed to create it, we still have to ask, why is the Higgs mass so small?”

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Steven Weinberg

"The Big Higgs Question" http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/07/09/big-higgs-question/, The New York Review of Books, 9 July 2012

“Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. …The most important thing accomplished by the three-degree radiation background in 1965 was to force us to take seriously the idea that there was an early universe.”

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Steven Weinberg

1977
The First Three Minutes (1977; second edition 1993)

“I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just… you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?”

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Steven Weinberg

The Atheism Tapes (2004)

“Considering the pervasive importance of quantum mechanics in modern physics, it is odd how rarely one hears of efforts to test quantum mechanics experimentally with high precision.…The trouble is that it is very difficult to find any logically consistent generalization of quantum mechanics. One obvious target for generalization is the linearity of quantum mechanics, but if we arbitrarily add nonlinear terms to the Schrodinger equation, how do we know that the theory we obtain will have a sensible physical interpretation? At least in part, it is the dearth of generalized versions of quantum mechanics that has made it so hard to plan experimental tests of quantum mechanics.”

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Steven Weinberg

"Testing Quantum Mechanics" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0003491689902765, Annals of Physics (1989)

“Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we're so interested in them.”

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Steven Weinberg

"Elementary particles and the laws of Physics" in The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures (1987)

“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.”

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Steven Weinberg

"Particle physics, from Rutherford to the LHC," Physics Today 64, no.8 (August 2011), 29-33, on 30.

“As you will never be sure which are the right problems to work on, most of the time that you spend in the laboratory or at your desk will be wasted. If you want to be creative, then you will have to get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge.”

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Steven Weinberg Scientist: Four golden lessons

Scientist: Four golden lessons (2003)

“Another lesson to be learned, to continue using my oceanographic metaphor, is that while you are swimming and not sinking you should aim for rough water.”

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Steven Weinberg Scientist: Four golden lessons

Scientist: Four golden lessons (2003)

“… I found that I was unable to explain the foundations of quantum mechanics in a way that I found entirely satisfactory.”

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Steven Weinberg

The Problems of Quantum Mechanics: Steven Weinberg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBninatwq6k (July 17, 2018) YouTube video at 3:58 of 45:42

“It seems that scientists are often attracted to beautiful theories in the way that insects are attracted to flowers — not by logical deduction, but by something like a sense of smell.”

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Steven Weinberg

Physics Today (November 2005) page 35

“Either by God you mean something definite or you don't mean something definite. If by God you mean a personality who is concerned about human beings, who did all this out of love for human beings, who watches us and who intervenes, then I would have to say in the first place how do you know, what makes you think so? And in the second place, is that really an explanation? If that's true, what explains that? Why is there such a God? It isn't the end of the chain of whys, it just is another step, and you have to take the step beyond that.”

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Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg, PBS interview, 1998 http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/wein-frame.html

“In trying to get votes for the Superconducting Super Collider, I was very much involved in lobbying members of Congress, testifying to them, bothering them, and I never heard any of them talk about postmodernism or social constructivism. You have to be very learned to be that wrong.”

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Steven Weinberg

"Night Thoughts of a Quantum Physicist" (February 1995); republished in Facing Up: Science And Its Cultural Adversaries (2001)

“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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Steven Weinberg

"The Revolution That Didn't Happen" in The New York Review of Books (1998) http://www.nybooks.com/articles/735

“I managed to get a quick PhD — though when I got it I knew almost nothing about physics. But I did learn one big thing: that no one knows everything, and you don't have to.”

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Steven Weinberg Scientist: Four golden lessons

Scientist: Four golden lessons (2003)

“If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that—in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we're starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That's not an entirely despicable role for us to play.”

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Steven Weinberg

Quoted in Frankenberry The Faith of Scientists: In Their Own Words (2008), p. 336

“Symmetry is not enough by itself. In electromagnetism, for example, if you write down all the symmetries we know, such as Lorentz invariance and gauge invariance, you don’t get a unique theory that predicts the magnetic moment of the electron. The only way to do that is to add the principle of renormalisability – which dictates a high degree of simplicity in the theory and excludes these additional terms that would have changed the magnetic moment of the electron from the value Schwinger calculated in 1948.”

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Steven Weinberg

as quoted in an interview by Matthew Chalmers: [Model physicist, CERN Courier, 13 October 2017, http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/70138]

“It doesn't work to build half an accelerator. The particles need to go all the way around.”

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Steven Weinberg

On The Shoulders of Giants - "The Future of Science" by Steven Weinberg, World Science Festival, YouTube, 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GrjjCVk6cA