Steven Weinberg: Work

“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.”

Steven Weinberg Scientist: Four golden lessons

Scientist: Four golden lessons (2003)

Knowledge , Problem , Time

“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

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

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

Way

“Finally, learn something about the history of science, or at a minimum the history of your own branch of science. The least important reason for this is that the history may actually be of some use to you in your own scientific work.”

Steven Weinberg Scientist: Four golden lessons

Scientist: Four golden lessons (2003)

History , Learning , Science

“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

“In this derivation Bohr had relied on the old idea of classical radiation theory, that the frequencies of spectral lines should agree with the frequency of the electron’s orbital motion, but he had assumed this only for the largest orbits, with large n. The light frequencies he calculated for transitions between lower states, such as n=2 → n=1, did not at all agree with the orbital frequency of the initial or final state. So Bohr’s work represented another large step away from classical physics.”

Steven Weinberg

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

Light , Idea

“Perhaps the most important immediate consequence of Planck’s work was to provide long-sought values for atomic constants.”

Steven Weinberg

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

“The development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s was the greatest advance in physical science since the work of Isaac Newton. It was not easy; the ideas of quantum mechanics present a profound departure from ordinary human intuition. Quantum mechanics has won acceptance through its success. It is essential to modern atomic, molecular, nuclear, and elementary particle physics, and to a great deal of chemistry and condensed matter physics as well.”

Steven Weinberg

Preface
Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012, 2nd ed. 2015)

Idea , Science , Success , Departure

“There’s something I’ve been working on for more than a year — maybe it’s just an old man’s obsession, but I’m trying to find an approach to quantum mechanics that makes more sense than existing approaches. I’ve just finished editing the second edition of my book, Lectures on Quantum Mechanics, in which I think I strengthen the argument that none of the existing interpretations of quantum mechanics are entirely satisfactory.”

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg, in " Science’s Path From Myth to Multiverse https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150317-sciences-path-from-myth-to-multiverse/" by Dan Falk (March 17, 2015)

Sense , Thinking , Books , Making love

“To start, we will consider a single particle moving in three space dimensions under the influence of a general central potential. Later we will specialize to the case of a Coulomb potential, and work out the spectrum of hydrogen. One other classic problem, the harmonic oscillator, will be treated at the end of this chapter.”

Steven Weinberg

Source: Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012, 2nd ed. 2015), Ch. 2: Particle States in a Central Potential

Problem