{"author":"Steven Weinberg","author_id":"Steven+Weinberg","total_quotes":16,"quotes":[{"text":"It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws. We don't yet know the most fundamental laws, and we can't work out all the consequences of the laws we do know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. We can't predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain, even though we can't always calculate their consequences. I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years.","author":"Steven Weinberg","tags":["human-mind","intelligence"],"id":9550,"author_id":"Steven+Weinberg"},{"text":"Maybe nature is fundamentally ugly, chaotic and complicated. But if it's like that, then I want out.","author":"Steven Weinberg","tags":["ugly","want","complicated "],"id":81805,"author_id":"Steven+Weinberg"},{"text":"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.","author":"Steven Weinberg","tags":["bad","ethics","frederick-douglass","good","mark-twain","morality","nobel-laureate","physics","science","slavery","superstition"],"id":92738,"author_id":"Steven+Weinberg"},{"text":"To calculate 'the' fine structure constant, 1/137, we would need a realistic model of just about everything, and this we do not have. In this talk I want to return to the old question of what it is that determines gauge couplings in general, and try to prepare the ground for a future realistic calculation.","author":"Steven Weinberg","tags":["fine-structure-constant","history-of-science","mathematics","physics","theory-of-everything"],"id":98964,"author_id":"Steven+Weinberg"},{"text":"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 Issac because God told him to do that. Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.","author":"Steven Weinberg","tags":["atrocity","belief","irrational","myth","myths","superstition"],"id":145182,"author_id":"Steven+Weinberg"},{"text":"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. ","author":"Steven Weinberg","tags":["research","science","tragedy"],"id":155330,"author_id":"Steven+Weinberg"},{"text":"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.","author":"Steven Weinberg","tags":["accomplishment","religious","science"],"id":157975,"author_id":"Steven+Weinberg"},{"text":"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?","author":"Steven Weinberg","tags":["belief","childish","europe","offense","pointless","superstition","tradition"],"id":165473,"author_id":"Steven+Weinberg"},{"text":"Fine Structure Constant: Fundamental numerical constant of atomic physics and quantum electrodynamics, defined as the square of the charge of the electron divided by the product of Planck's constant and the speed of light.","author":"Steven Weinberg","tags":["electron","fine-structure-constant","fundamental-constants","history-of-science","physics","quantum-theory","universe"],"id":174193,"author_id":"Steven+Weinberg"},{"text":"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without religion, 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.","author":"Steven Weinberg","tags":["atheism","do","doing","evil","good","religion","steven","weinberg"],"id":188202,"author_id":"Steven+Weinberg"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":16,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}