Steven Weinberg: Thing

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

Steven Weinberg

The Atheism Tapes (2004)
Context: 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.

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

Steven Weinberg

The Atheism Tapes (2004)
Context: 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.

God

“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.”

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

People , Religion , Evil

“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.”

Steven Weinberg

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

Life , Understanding , Effort , Universe

“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.”

Steven Weinberg

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

World , Idea , Universe

“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.”

Steven Weinberg Scientist: Four golden lessons

Scientist: Four golden lessons (2003)

Learning

“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.”

Steven Weinberg

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

Love , Art , Way , Star

“One of the things that excited me so much about quantum chromodynamics after the work of Gross and Wilczek and Politzer was that it seemed to provide a rational explanation for what had always been mysterious to me — the fact that there were symmetries, like parity conservation, charge conjugation invariance, and strangeness conservation, that were very good symmetries of the strong and electromagnetic interactions — as far as we knew exact — and yet were not respected by the weak interactions. Why should nature have … symmetries that are symmetries of part of nature but not other parts of nature?”

Steven Weinberg

"Reminiscences of the Standard Model" - Special Colloquium by Steven Weinberg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX2R8-nJhLQ, 17 October 2017, YouTube video at 1:02:17 of 1:39:24

Nature , Strong , Parting

“Heisenberg’s starting point was the philosophical judgment, that a physical theory should not concern itself with things like electron orbits in atoms that can never be observed. This is a risky assumption, but in this case it served Heisenberg well.”

Steven Weinberg

Source: Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012, 2nd ed. 2015), Ch. 1: Historical Introduction