S Weinberg Quotes

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.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. 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.

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

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.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless

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

Man created God in his image: intolerant, sexist, homophobic and violent.

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.

I don't need to argue here that the evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the hand of a designer.

It does not matter whether you win or lose, what matters is whether I win or lose!

As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, ‘Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.

What you don't know may not hurt you, but what you don't remember always does.

problem-solving leaders have one thing in common: a faith that there's always a better way.

How can one capture genes that behave like ghosts," Weinberg wrote, "influencing cells from behind some dark curtain?

the idea is to see how far one can go without supposing supernatural intervention.

PREFACE PROBLEM: Nobody reads prefaces. SOLUTION: Call the preface Chapter 1. NEW PROBLEM CREATED BY SOLUTION: Chapter 1 is boring. RESOLUTION: Throw away Chapter 1 and call Chapter 2 Chapter 1.

Hope never abandons you; you abandon it.

Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have are enough customers.

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.

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.

As is natural for an academic, when I want to learn about something, I volunteer to teach a course on the subject.

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

the next darwin is more likely to be a data wonk than a naturalist wandering through an exotic landscape

People don't become leaders because they never fail. They become leaders because of the way they respond to failure.

If it's not broken, tinker with it till you find out how it works.

religions of the Roman Empire “were all considered by the people, as equally true, by the philosopher, as equally false, and by the magistrate, as equally useful.”8

Whatever the final laws of nature may be, there is no reason to suppose that they are designed to make physicists happy.

Once you eliminate your number one problem, number two gets a promotion. —GERALD WEINBERG,

فالسعى إلى رضا عن فهم الكون هو من الأشياء النادرة التى تسمو بالإنسان فوق مستوى الترهات ،وتنعم عليه بشىء من شرف المشاركة فى هذه المسرحية المأساوية .

The best computer programmers never write a new program when they can use an old one for a new job.

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?

Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things—that takes religion. —Steven Weinberg, 1999

We simply do not find anything in the laws of nature that in any way corresponds to ideas of goodness, justice, love, or strife,

Once you eliminate your number one problem, number two gets a promotion.

If you are a leader, the people are your work.

scientific theories cannot be deduced by purely mathematical reasoning.

Poor distribution - not product - is the number one cause of failure.

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.

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg likens this multiple universe theory to radio. All around you, there are hundreds of different radio waves being broadcast from distant stations. At any given instant, your office or car or living room is full of these radio waves. However, if you turn on a radio, you can listen to only one frequency at a time; these other frequencies have decohered and are no longer in phase with each other. Each station has a different energy, a different frequency. As a result, your radio can only be turned to one broadcast at a time.Likewise, in our universe we are "tuned" into the frequency that corresponds to physical reality. But there are an infinite number of parallel realities coexisting with us in the same room, although we cannot "tune into" them. Although these worlds are very much alike, each has a different energy. And because each world consists of trillions upon trillions of atoms, this means that the energy difference can be quite large. Since the frequency of these waves is proportional to their energy (by Planck's law), this means that the waves of each world vibrate at different frequencies and cannot interact anymore. For all intents and purposes, the waves of these various worlds do not interact or influence each other.

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.

In this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God. Without science, everything is a miracle. With science, there remains the possibility that nothing is. Religious belief in this case becomes less and less necessary, and also less and less relevant.

If you don't have questions about a product's risks, then there's no reason to test. If you have at least one such question, then ask: Will these tests cost more to execute than their answers will be worth?

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.

once one invokes the supernatural, anything can be explained, and no explanation can be verified.

Leadership is familiar, but not well understood.

The progress of science has been largely a matter of discovering what questions should be asked.

It was essential for the discovery of science that religious ideas be divorced from the study of nature.

In this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God.

Testing gathers information about a product; it does not fix things it finds that are wrong.

One of the hardest choices for technical stars who become leaders is losing touch with the latest in technology.

Many of the great world religions teach that God demands a particular faith and form of worship. It should not be surprising that SOME of the people who take these teachings seriously should sincerely regard these divine commands as incomparably more important than any merely secular virtues like tolerance or compassion or reason. Across Asia and Africa the forces of religious enthusiasm are gathering strength, and reasom and tolerance are not safe even in the secular states of the West. The historian Huge Trevor-Roper has said that it was the spread of the spirit of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that finally ended the burning pf the witches in Europe. We may need to rely again on the influence of science to preserve a sane wolrd.It's not the certainty of the scientific knowledge that fits it for this role, but its UNCERTAINTY. Seeing scientists change their minds again and again about the matters that can be studied directly in laboratory experiments, how can one take seriously the claims of religious traditions or sacred writings to certain knowledge about matters beyond human experience

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.

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.

o love is to battle, if two kiss the world changes, desires take flesh thoughts take flesh, wings sprout on the backs of the slave, the world is real and tangible, wine is wine, bread regains its savor, water is water, to love is to battle, to open doors, to cease to be a ghost with a number forever in chains, forever condemned by a faceless master; the world changes if two look at each other and see Piedra de Sol (The Sun Stone), translated by Eliot Weinberger

All theatre, by virtue of its being a cultural construct and therefore ideologically inscribed, is political.

We sort of understood abstractly the idea that there are only two kinds of software projects: failures and future legacy horrors.

There are many technical workers who enjoy wandering so much that, like Alice in Wonderland, they don’t much care where they go, so long as they get somewhere.

It is not only in medicine that persons in authority will resist any investigation that might reduce their authority.

Einstein occasionally used “God” as a metaphor for the unknown fundamental laws of nature.

at its most fundamental level science is not undertaken for any practical reason.

in the East al-Rashid and al-Mamun were delving into Greek and Persian philosophy,

Many entrepreneurs who build great products simply don’t have a good distribution strategy.

Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual translation: the poem dies when it has no place to go.

There is a spooky quality about the ability of mathematicians to get there ahead of physicists. It's as if when Neil Armstrong first landed on the moon he found in the lunar dust the footsteps of Jules Verne.

Question: Which Mediterranean government shares all of Ronald Reagan's views on international terrorism, the present danger of Soviet advance, the hypocrisy of the United Nations, the unreliability of Europe, the perfidy of the Third World and the need for nuclear defense policy? Question: Which Mediterranean government is Ronald Reagan trying, with the help of George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, to replace with a government led by a party which professes socialism and which contains extreme leftists? If you answered 'the government of Israel' to both of the above, you know more about political and international irony than the President does.

The faster you run high quality experiments, the more likely you’ll find scalable, effective growth tactics. Determining the success of a customer acquisition idea is dependent on an effective tracking and reporting system, so don’t start testing until your tracking/reporting system has been implemented.

*No matter how strange it may look, most people are actually trying to be helpful.* That

There is no principle, built into the laws of nature, that says that theoretical physicists have to be happy.

If you cannot think of three ways of abusing a tool, you do not understand how to use it. Faithful

Good customer support is so rare that, if you simply try to make your customers happy, they are likely to spread the news of your awesome product on that basis alone.

This is what we call the 50% rule: spend 50% of your time on product and 50% on traction.

The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.

Unless and until all members of a team have a common understanding of the problem, attempts to solve the problem are just so much wasted energy.

you don’t have to be a boss to be a leader

problem-solving leaders have one thing in common: a faith that there’s always a better way

No thing happens in vain, but everything for a reason and by necessity.

Hear the wind and you will know the wind. Wind blows, and the generations are its leaves. There was no higher praise than what was said of Confucius: He knows where the wind comes from.

Fisher's Fundamental Theorem states—in terms appropriate to the present context—that the better adapted a system is to a particular environment, the less adaptable it is to new environments.

Mathematics is the means by which we deduce the consequences of physical principles. More than that, it is the indispensable language in which the principles of physical science are expressed.

But if oxen (and horses) and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies [of their gods] in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses.

The real difference between Aristarchus and today's astronomers and physicists is not that his observational data were in error, but that he never tried to judge the uncertainty in them, or even acknowledged that they might be imperfect.

Linear models tend to define relationships in terms of roles rather than people: the boss rather than the person actually exerting influence. The organic model tends to define relationships in terms of one unique person to another unique person.

The Babylonians had achieved great competence in arithmetic, using a number system based on 60 rather than 10. They had also developed some simple techniques of algebra, such as rules (though these were not expressed in symbols) for solving various quadratic equations.

The Internet’s abundant capacity has removed the old artificial constraints on publishing—including getting our content checked and verified. The new strategy of publishing everything we find out thus results in an immense cloud of data, free of theory, published before verified, and available to anyone with an Internet connection. And this is changing the role that facts have played as the foundation of knowledge.

Though resident much of his life in the city of Cnidus on the coast of Asia Minor, Eudoxus was a student at Plato’s Academy, and returned later to teach there. No writings of Eudoxus survive, but he is credited with solving a great number of difficult mathematical problems, such as showing that the volume of a cone is one-third the volume of the cylinder with the same base and height. (I have no idea how Eudoxus could have done this without calculus.) But his greatest contribution to mathematics was the introduction of a rigorous style, in which theorems are deduced from clearly stated axioms.

Max Weinberg, Garry Tallent, Steve Van Zandt, Danny Federici, Roy Bittan, Clarence Clemons. This was the core of the group that over the next forty years would evolve into the hard-rockin’, history-makin’, earth-shakin’, booty-quakin’, lovemakin’ and, yes, eventually, Viagra-takin’ legendary E Street Band.

The best illustrated histories of the assassination are Twenty Days by Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., and Lincoln’s Assassins: Their Trial and Execution by James L. Swanson and Daniel R. Weinberg. Twenty Days contains more than three hundred black-and-white photos of the people and places connected to the assassination and Lincoln’s funeral.

Why is it that we reward programmers who work all night to remove the errors they put into their programs, or managers who make drastic organizational changes to resolve the crises their poor management has created? Why not reward the programmers who design so well that they don’t have dramatic errors, and managers whose organizations stay out of crisis mode? Organizing

Không văn bản nào là không thể dịch; chỉ có những văn bản chưa tìm được dịch giả của mình. Bản dịch không thấp kém so với nguyên bản; nó chỉ thấp kém so với những bản dịch khác, đã thành văn hoặc chưa thành văn. Không có bản dịch cuối cùng nào do một bản dịch luôn xuất hiện trong bối cảnh của nền văn học đương đại của nó. […] Mọi thứ đáng dịch đều nên được dịch nhiều lần nhất có thể, ngay cả bởi cùng một dịch giả, bởi vì ta không thể bước hai lần vào cùng một nguyên bản. Thơ là thứ đáng dịch, và dịch là thứ giữ cho văn học tồn tại. Dịch là thay đổi và chuyển động; văn học chết khi nó giậm chân tại chỗ, khi nó không còn nơi nào để đi.

For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a ‘misfiring of something useful’, it is a kind if virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive. Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism, originally formulated by d’Holbach, that has now become a major worldview among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this “scientism” have been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett, theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other “new atheists” – Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience, and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist – religion is the cause of the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and “poisons everything.” They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness. But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) followed Monod in his discussion of the implications of evolution. Everything in the natural world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but Gould insisted that science was not competent to decide whether God did or did not exist, because it could only work with natural explanations. Gould had no religious axe to grind; he described himself as an atheistically inclined agnostic, but pointed out that Darwin himself had denied he was an atheist and that other eminent Darwinians - Asa Gray, Charles D. Walcott, G. G. Simpson, and Theodosius Dobzhansky - had been either practicing Christians or agnostics. Atheism did not, therefore, seem to be a necessary consequence of accepting evolutionary theory, and Darwinians who held forth dogmatically on the subject were stepping beyond the limitations that were proper to science.

The Weinberg–Salam theory exhibits a property known as spontaneous symmetry breaking. This means that what appear to be a number of completely different particles at low energies are in fact found to be all the same type of particle, only in different states. At high energies all these particles behave similarly. The effect is rather like the behavior of a roulette ball on a roulette wheel. At high energies (when the wheel is spun quickly) the ball behaves in essentially only one way – it rolls round and round. But as the wheel slows, the energy of the ball decreases, and eventually the ball drops into one of the thirty-seven slots in the wheel. In other words, at low energies there are thirty-seven different states in which the ball can exist. If, for some reason, we could only observe the ball at low energies, we would then think that there were thirty-seven different types of ball!

If by 'God' you have something definite in mind - a being that is loving, or jealous, or whatever - then you're faced with the question of why God's that way and not another way. And if you don't have anything very definite in mind when you talk about 'God' being behind the existence of the universe, then why even use the word? So I think religion doesn't help. It's part of the human tragedy: we're faced with a mystery we can't understand - Steven Weinberg

Rabbi Moshe Weinberger of Mesivta Beis Shraga related how his father used to say that on Purim, the handle of the gragger (noisemaker) we spin is beneath the gragger itself, while on Chanukah the handle of the dreidel (four-sided top) we spin is on top. Purim, he expounded, represents human initiative, an "awakening from below," while Chanukah represents Divine intervention, an "awakening from above." On Purim, we stir ourselves with drink, joy, a hearty meal and other activities. On Chanukah, we light a candle that we are not allowed to use for any purpose other than to gaze at its flame. We just sit back and look. We let Hashem take over. We remind ourselves that Hashem is running the show.

Dịch giả thường được đề nghị nói về quan hệ của họ với tác giả họ dịch, và họ có xu hướng trả lời bằng những giai thoại đôi khi hài hước trong tác phẩm. Tuy nhiên, tác giả không bao giờ nói về dịch giả của họ, ngoài một vài than phiền thoáng qua. Điều này là do quan hệ giữa tác giả và dịch giả không có cốt truyện. Hay đúng hơn, câu chuyện chỉ có một nhân vật thực sự: tác giả. Dịch giả, trong vai trò dịch giả, không phải là một con người hoàn chỉnh; dịch giả, trong sự tương đồng quen thuộc, là diễn viên đóng vai tác giả. Đôi khi độc giả chúng ta nhận thức được diễn viên 'diễn' xuất sắc hoặc kém, đôi khi chúng ta quên mất anh ta là diễn viên (chính là 'sự vô hình' thường được coi như một lý tưởng dịch, nhất là trong văn xuôi).

Before history there was science, of a sort. At any moment nature presents us with a variety of puzzling phenomena: fire, thunderstorms, plagues, planetary motion, light, tides, and so on. Observation of the world led to useful generalizations: fires are hot; thunder presages rain; tides are highest when the Moon is full or new, and so on. These became part of the common sense of mankind. But here and there, some people wanted more than just a collection of facts. They wanted to explain the world.

Through the works of Weinberg, Glashow, and Salam on the electroweak theory and the elegant framework developed by the physicists David Gross, David Politzer, and Frank Wilczek for quantum chromodynamics, the characteristic group of the standard model has been identified with a product of three Lie groups denoted by U(1), SU(2), and SU(3). In some sense, therefore, the road toward the ultimate unification of the forces of nature has to go through the discovery of the most suitable Lie group that contains the product U(1) X SU(2) x SU(3).

Weinberg said: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." I must disagree with my old teacher. To me the universe seems quite the opposite of pointless. It seems that the more we learn, the more we see how it all fits together. As we study the universe as a whole, we realize that microcosm and macrocosm are, increasingly, the same subject. By unifying them, we are learning that nature is as it is not because it is the chance consequence of a random series of meaningless events; quite the opposite. More and more, the universe appears to be as it is because it must be that way.

Avoid succumbing to the gambler’s fallacy or the base rate fallacy. Anecdotal evidence and correlations you see in data are good hypothesis generators, but correlation does not imply causation—you still need to rely on well-designed experiments to draw strong conclusions. Look for tried-and-true experimental designs, such as randomized controlled experiments or A/B testing, that show statistical significance. The normal distribution is particularly useful in experimental analysis due to the central limit theorem. Recall that in a normal distribution, about 68 percent of values fall within one standard deviation, and 95 percent within two. Any isolated experiment can result in a false positive or a false negative and can also be biased by myriad factors, most commonly selection bias, response bias, and survivorship bias. Replication increases confidence in results, so start by looking for a systematic review and/or meta-analysis when researching an area.

The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can’t adequately imagine, in conformance with Einstein’s theory of relativity (which we will get to in due course). For the moment it is enough to know that we are not adrift in some large, ever-expanding bubble. Rather, space curves, in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite. Space cannot even properly be said to be expanding because, as the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg notes, “solar systems and galaxies are not expanding, and space itself is not expanding.” Rather, the galaxies are rushing apart. It is all something of a challenge to intuition. Or as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” The analogy that is usually given for explaining the curvature of space is to try to imagine someone from a universe of flat surfaces, who had never seen a sphere, being brought to Earth. No matter how far he roamed across the planet’s surface, he would never find an edge. He might eventually return to the spot where he had started, and would of course be utterly confounded to explain how that had happened. Well, we are in the same position in space as our puzzled flatlander, only we are flummoxed by a higher dimension.