Steven 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

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 .

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

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?

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

scientific theories cannot be deduced by purely mathematical reasoning.

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.

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. 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Nothing about the practice of modern science is obvious to someone who has never seen it done.

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

Once again I repeat: the aim pf physics at its most fundamental level is not just to describe the world but ti explain why it is the way it is.

The struggle in the seventh century between Roman missionaries and Irish monks for control over the English church was largely a conflict over the date of Easter.

As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, ‘Religion is an insult to human dignity.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I want to show how difficult was the discovery of modern science, how far from obvious are its practices and standards.

This also serves as a warning, that science may not yet be in its final form.

.....known as the anthropic principle, ehich states that the laws of nature should allow the existence of intelligent beings that can ask about the laws of nature.

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

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.

The proper measure of a philosophical system or a scientific theory is not the degree to which it anticipated modern thought, but its degree of success in treating the philosophical and scientific problems of its own day.

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.

In sum, the fruition of 50 years of research, and several hundred million dollars in government funds, has given us the following picture of sub-atomic matter. All matter consists of quarks and leptons, which interact by exchanging different types of quanta, described by the Maxwell and Yang-Mills fields. In one sentence, we have captured the essence of the past century of frustrating investigation into the subatomic realm, From this simple picture one can derive, from pure mathematics alone, all the myriad and baffling properties of matter. (Although it all seems so easy now, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, one of the creators of the Standard Model, once reflected on how tortuous the 50-year journey to discover the model had been. He wrote, "There's a long tradition of theoretical physics, which by no means affected everyone but certainly affected me, that said the strong interactions [were] too complicated for the human mind.")

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.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist (and atheist) Steven Weinberg made the point as well as anybody, in Dreams of a Final Theory:   Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that ‘God is the ultimate’ or ‘God is our better nature’ or ‘God is the universe.’ Of course, like any other word, the word ‘God’ can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that ‘God is energy,’ then you can find God in a lump of coal.

In its final form, the general theory of relativity was just a reinterpretation of the existing mathematics of curved spaces in terms of gravitation, together with a field equation that specified the curvature produced by any given amount of matter and energy. Remarkably, for the small densities and low velocities of the solar system, general relativity gave just the same results as Newton's theory of gravitation, with the two theories distinguished only by tiny effects like the precession of orbits and the deflection of light.

In the late 1960's, physicists Steven Weinberg, Abdus Salam, and Sheldon Glashow conquered the next unification frontier. In a phenomenal piece of scientific work they showed that the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces are nothing but different aspects of the same force, subsequently dubbed the electroweak force. The predictions of the new theory were dramatic. The electromagnetic force is produced when electrically charged particles exchange between them bundles of energy called photons. The photon is therefore the messenger of electromagnetism. The electroweak theory predicted the existence of close siblings to the photon, which play the messenger role for the weak force. These never-before-seen particles were prefigured to be about ninety times more massive than the proton and to come in both an electrically charged (called W) and a neutral (called Z) variety. Experiments performed at the European consortium for nuclear research in Geneva (known as CERN for Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire) discovered the W and Z particles in 1983 and 1984 respectively.

As it was, Einstein merely had the pleasure of renouncing the cosmological constant, which he had never liked.53 In a new edition of his popular book on relativity published in 1931, he added an appendix explaining why the term he had pasted into his field equations was, thankfully, no longer necessary.54 “When I was discussing cosmological problems with Einstein,” George Gamow later recalled, “he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he ever made in his life.”55 In fact, Einstein’s blunders were more fascinating and complex than even the triumphs of lesser scientists. It was hard simply to banish the term from the field equations. “Unfortunately,” says Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, “it was not so easy just to drop the cosmological constant, because anything that contributes to the energy density of the vacuum acts just like a cosmological constant.”56 It turns out that the cosmological constant not only was difficult to banish but is still needed by cosmologists, who use it today to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe.57 The mysterious dark energy that seems to cause this expansion behaves as if it were a manifestation of Einstein’s constant. As a result, two or three times each year fresh observations produce reports that lead with sentences along the lines of this one from November 2005: “The genius of Albert Einstein, who added a ‘cosmological constant’ to his equation for the expansion of the universe but then retracted it, may be vindicated by new research.

Isaac Newton is perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived. In a world obsessed with witchcraft and sorcery, he dared to write down the universal laws of the heavens and apply a new mathematics he invented to study forces, called the calculus. As physicist Steven Weinberg has written, 'It is with Isaac Newton that the modern dream of a final theory really begins.' In its time, it was considered to be the theory of everything-that is, the theory that described all motion. It all began when he was twenty-three years old. Cambridge University was closed because of the black plague. One day in 1666, while walking around his country estate, he saw an apple fall. Then he asked himself a question that would alter the course of human history. If an apple falls, then does the moon also fall? Before Newton, the church taught that there were two kinds of laws. The first were the laws found on Earth, which were corrupted by the sin of mortals. The second were the pure, perfect, and harmonious laws of the heavens. The essence of Newton's idea was to propose a unified theory that encompassed the heavens and the Earth. In his notebook, he drew a fateful picture (see figure 1). If a cannonball is fired from a mountaintop, it goes a certain distance before hitting the ground. But if you fire the cannonball at increasing velocities, it travels farther and farther before coming back to Earth, until it eventually completely circles the Earth and returns to the mountaintop. He concluded that the natural law that governs apples and cannonballs, gravity, also grips the moon in its orbit around the Earth. Terrestrial and heavenly physics were the same.

In the fall of 2006, I participated in a three-day conference at the Salk Institute entitled Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason, and Survival. This event was organized by Roger Bingham and conducted as a town-hall meeting before an audience of invited guests. Speakers included Steven Weinberg, Harold Kroto, Richard Dawkins, and many other scientists and philosophers who have been, and remain, energetic opponents of religious dogmatism and superstition. It was a room full of highly intelligent, scientifically literate people—molecular biologists, anthropologists, physicists, and engineers—and yet, to my amazement, three days were insufficient to force agreement on the simple question of whether there is any conflict at all between religion and science. Imagine a meeting of mountaineers unable to agree about whether their sport ever entails walking uphill, and you will get a sense of how bizarre our deliberations began to seem. While at Salk, I witnessed scientists giving voice to some of the most dishonest religious apologies I have ever heard. It is one thing to be told that the pope is a peerless champion of reason and that his opposition to embryonic stem-cell research is both morally principled and completely uncontaminated by religious dogmatism; it is quite another to be told this by a Stanford physician who sits on the President’s Council on Bioethics. Over the course of the conference, I had the pleasure of hearing that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were examples of secular reason run amok, that the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad are not the cause of Islamic terrorism, that people can never be argued out of their beliefs because we live in an irrational world, that science has made no important contributions to our ethical lives (and cannot), and that it is not the job of scientists to undermine ancient mythologies and, thereby, “take away people’s hope”—all from atheist scientists who, while insisting on their own skeptical hardheadedness, were equally adamant that there was something feckless and foolhardy, even indecent, about criticizing religious belief. There were several moments during our panel discussions that brought to mind the final scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers: people who looked like scientists, had published as scientists, and would soon be returning to their labs, nevertheless gave voice to the alien hiss of religious obscurantism at the slightest prodding. I had previously imagined that the front lines in our culture wars were to be found at the entrance to a megachurch. I now realized that we have considerable work to do in a nearer trench.

In learning general relativity, and then in teaching it to classes at Berkeley and MIT, I became dissatisfied with what seemed to be the usual approach to the subject. I found that in most textbooks geometric ideas were given a starring role, so that a student...would come away with an impression that this had something to do with the fact that space-time is a Riemannian [curved] manifold. Of course, this was Einstein's point of view, and his preeminent genius necessarily shapes our understanding of the theory he created. However, I believe that the geometrical approach has driven a wedge between general relativity and [Quantum Field Theory]. As long as it could be hoped, as Einstein did hope, that matter would eventually be understood in geometrical terms, it made sense to give Riemannian geometry a primary role in describing the theory of gravitation. But now the passage of time has taught us not to expect that the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions can be understood in geometrical terms, and too great an emphasis on geometry can only obscuret he deep connections between gravitation and the rest of physics...[My] book sets out the theory of gravitation according to what I think is its inner logic as a branch of physics, and not according to its historical development. It is certainly a historical fact that when Albert Einstein was working out general relativity, there was at hand a preexisting mathematical formalism, that of Riemannian geometry, that he could and did take over whole. However, this historical fact does not mean that the essence of general relativity necessarily consists in the application of Riemannian geometry to physical space and time. In my view, it is much more useful to regard general relativity above all as a theory of gravitation, whose connection with geometry arises from the peculiar empirical properties of gravitation.

La religion est une insulte à la dignité humaine. Que ce soit avec ou sans elle, il y aura toujours des gens bien qui font de bonnes choses, et des mauvais qui font de mauvaises choses. Mais pour que des gens bien agissent mal, il faut la religion.

Itwas one time when people thought the value of the fine structure constant wasimportant. Now of course it's still important, of course, as a practical matter,but we now know that the value it has is a function, that in any fundamental theory you derive the fine structure constant as a function of all sorts of mass ratios and so on, and it's not really that fundamental.

But every once in a while someone finds a way of explaining some phenomenon that fits so well and clarifies so much that it gives the finder intense satisfaction, especially when the new understanding is quantitative, and observation bears it out in detail. Imagine

The distinction between mathematics and science is pretty well settled. It remains mysterious to us why mathematics that is invented for reasons having nothing to do with nature often turns out to be useful in physical theories. In a famous article,8 the physicist Eugene Wigner has written of “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.

The dream of a final theory inspires much of today’s work in high-energy physics, and though we do not know what the final laws might be or how many years will pass before they are discovered, already in today’s theories we think we are beginning to catch glimpses of the outlines of a final theory. The

There's another promising idea about what the dark matter is, which emerges from a different proposal for improving the equations of physics. As we've discussed, QCD is in a profound and literal sense constructed as the embodiment of symmetry. There is an almost perfect match between the observed properties of quarks and gluons and the most general properties allowed by local color symmetry, in the framework of special relativity and quantum mechanics. The only exception is that the established symmetries of QCD fail to forbid one sort of behavior that is not observed to occur. The established symmetries permit a sort of interaction among gluons that would spoil the symmetry of the equations of QCD under a change in the direction of time. Experiments provide severe limits on the possible strength of that interaction. The limits are much more severe than might be expected to arise accidentally. The Core theory does not explain this "coincidence." Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn found a way to expand the equations that would explain it. Steven Weinberg and I, independently, showed that the expanded equations predict the existence of new, very light, very weakly interacting particles called axions. Axions are also serious candidates to provide the cosmological dark matter. In principle they might be observed in a variety of ways. Though none is easy, the hunt is on. It's also possible that both ideas are right, and both kinds of particles contribute to the total amount of dark matter. Wouldn't that be pretty?

What is important in science (I leave philosophy to others) is not the solution of some popular scientific problems of one’s own day, but understanding the world. In the course of this work, one finds out what sort of explanations are possible, and what sort of problems can lead to those explanations. The progress of science has been largely a matter of discovering what questions should be asked.

In principio Dio creò il cielo e la terra (Genesi, 1,1) ma non c'era nessuno a guardare (Steven Weinberg, The first three minutes)

much of the writing of physicists barely reaches the level of prose.

In a famous article,8 the physicist Eugene Wigner has written of “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians,

intelligent design” ideology being promoted today is not science—it is rather the abdication of science.

Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians gods with gray eyes and red hair,

A modern university dean might feel that this danger was a just punishment for Galileo’s evasion of teaching duties. But

their contemporaries in the West, Charlemagne and his lords, were dabbling in the art of writing their names.

Some for the Glories of the World, and some Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;

Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!

Is the cosmos all there is, or was, or ever will be? Of course not. That idea is complete nonsense, and from a man who should have known better. The laws of nature give “no hint” of a divine plan or creator? How could Steven Weinberg have made an assertion as foolish as that? To the dogmatic atheist, it seems like science fiction, or a recurrent nightmare. But there’s no getting around the scientific fact. The finding of modern physics that the universe has a beginning in space and in time meets E. O. Wilson’s litmus test for one of the most important scientific discoveries ever made. It provides, for all who take the trouble to understand and reflect upon it, powerful and convincing evidence of the existence of an eternal, supernatural being that created our world and everything in it.

after all, our purpose in theoretical physics is not just to describe the world as we find it, but to explain — in terms of a few fundamental principles — why the world is the way it is.

Even before the start of history, the sky must have been commonly used as a compass, a clock, and a calendar. It could not have been difficult to notice that the Sun rises every morning in more or less the same direction, that during the day one can tell how much time there is before night from the height of the Sun in the sky, and that hot weather will follow the time of year when the day lasts longest.

It seems to me that to understand these early Greeks, it is better to think of them not as physicists or scientists or even philosophers, but as poets.

There is an important feature of modern science that is almost completely missing in all the thinkers I have mentioned, from Thales to Plato: none of them attempted to verify or even (aside perhaps from Zeno) seriously to justify their speculations. In

Despite the experimental success of the theory...the fact that the infinities occur at all continues to produce grumbling...Dirac in particular always referred to renormalization as sweeping the infinities under the rug. I disagreed with Dirac and argued the point with him at conferences at Coral Gables and Lake Constance. Taking account of the difference between the bare charge and mass of the electron and their measured values is not merely a trick that is invented to get rid of infinities; it is something we would have to do even if everything was finite. There is nothing arbitrary or ad hoc about the procedure; it is simply a matter of correctly identifying what we are actually measuring.

We also get food for thought if we look at these life-forms. Reflecting on animals, we can see that they have limitations. They live on instincts and do not have ability to look into distant past and far future. They operate on survival instincts. Should humans be like that and only pay attention to survival and animal instincts? We know from our own introspection that we have a clear and strong moral conscience and free will to choose goodness and evil in our choices. Not only do we have that power of recognition, but a strong urge to see goodness, fairness and justice prevail in society. We never like to be cheated and be dealt unfairly. Even those who act in bad ways, they also recognize the evil acts as bad. Belief in afterlife accountability as included in monotheistic faith solves the puzzle by giving deterministic results for choices done with free will. It completes the cause and effect relation in moral matters. Steven Weinberg once remarked that looking at cosmos; one gets the impression that it is pointless. However, religious worldview makes life of every human being meaningful and purposive with promise of deterministic justice in the life to come.

For a variety of reasons—including alleged promotion promises, guilt, and John L. Weinberg’s pleading—more partners stayed than initially had been predicted. But they told me the trading losses, combined with the defections, dramatically affected the culture.

But John L. Weinberg said, “I always felt there was a terrific risk and still do, that when you start going that way [an IPO] you are going to have one group of partners who are going to take what has been worked on for 127 years and get that two-for-one or three-for-one. Any of us who are partners at the time when you do that don’t deserve it. We let people in at book value, they should go out at book value.

First, consider thinking gray, a concept we learned from Steven Sample’s book The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership. You may think about issues in terms of black and white, but the truth is somewhere in between, a shade of gray.

Another factor: Christianity offered opportunities for advancement in the church to intelligent young men, some of whom might otherwise have become mathematicians or scientists. Bishops and presbyters were generally exempt from the jurisdiction of the ordinary civil courts, and from taxation. A bishop such as Cyril of Alexandria or Ambrose of Milan could exercise considerable political power, much more than a scholar at the Museum in Alexandria or the Academy in Athens. This was something new. Under paganism religious offices had gone to men of wealth or political power, rather than wealth and power going to men of religion. For instance, Julius Caesar and his successors won the office of supreme pontiff, not as a recognition of piety or learning, but as a consequence of their political power.

What one needs is a quantum mechanical model with a wave function that describes not only various systems under study but also something representing a conscious observer. With such a model, one would try to show that, as a result of repeated interactions of the observer with individual systems, the wave function of the combined system evolves with certainty to a final wave function, in which the observer has become convinced that the probabilities of the individual measurements are what are prescribed in the Copenhagen interpretation.

We on earth do not feel either the gravitational field of the sun or the centrifugal force caused by the earth's motion around the sun because the two forces balance each other, but this balance would be spoiled if one force was proportional to the mass of the objects on which it acts and the other was not; some objects might then fall off the earth into the sun and others could be thrown off the earth into interstellar space.

In general the fact that gravitational and inertial forces are both proportional to the mass of the body on which they act but depend on no other property of the body makes it possible at any point in any gravitational field to identify a "freely falling frame of reference" in which neither gravitational nor inertial forces are felt because they are in perfect balance for all bodies. When we do feel gravitational or inertial forces it is because we are not in a freely falling frame. For example, on the earth's surface freely falling bodies accelerate toward the center of the earth at 32 feet per second per second, and we feel a gravitational force unless we happen to be accelerating downward at the same rate. Einstein made a logical jump and guessed that gravitational and inertial forces were at bottom the same thing. He called this the principle of equivalence of gravitation and inertia, or the equivalence principle for short. According to this principle, any gravitational field is completely described by telling which frame of reference is freely falling at each point in space.

The idea of an anthropic principle began with the remark that the laws of nature seem surprisingly well suited to the existence of life. A famous example is provided by the synthesis of the elements. According to modern ideas, this synthesis began when the universe was about three minutes old (before then it was too hot for protons and neutrons to stick together in atomic nuclei) and was later continued in stars. It had originally been though that the elements were formed by adding one nuclear particle at a time to atomic nuclei, starting with the simplest element, hydrogen, whose nucleus consists of just one particle (a proton). But, although there was no trouble in building up helium nuclei, which contain four nuclear particles (two protons and two neutrons), there is no stable nucleus with five nuclear particles and hence no way to take the next step. The solution found eventually by Edwin Salpeter in 1952 is that two helium nuclei can come together in stars to form the unstable nucleus of the isotope beryllium 8, which occasionally before it has a chance to fission into two helium nuclei absorbs yet another helium nucleus and forms a nucleus of carbon. However, as emphasized in 1954 by Fred Hoyke, in order for this process to account for the observed cosmic abundance of carbon, there must be a state of the carbon nucleus that has an energy that gives it an anomalously large probability of being formed in the collison of a helium nucleus and a nucleus of beryllium 8. (Precisely such a state was subsequently found by experimenters working with Hoyle.) Once carbon is formed in stars, there is no obstacle to building up all the heavier elements, including those like oxygen and nitrogen that are necessary for known forms of life. But in order for this to work, the energy of this state of the carbon nucleus must be very close to the energy of a nucleus of beryllium 8 plus the energy of a helium nucleus. If the energy of this state of the carbon nucleus were too large or too small, then little carbon or heavier elements would be formed in stars, and with only hydrogen and helium there would be no way that life could arise. The energies of nuclear states depend in a complicated way on all the constants of physics, such as the masses and electric charges of the different types of elementary particles. It seems at first sight remarkable that these constants should take just the values that are needed to make it possible for carbon to be formed in this way.