The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
Steven Weinberg
An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.
I would not want to be a leader of a country that had launched ICBMs against the United States.
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.
My work during the 1970s has been mainly concerned with the implications of the unified theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions, with the development of the related theory of strong interactions known as quantum chromodynamics, and with steps toward the unification of all interactions.
Symmetry principles are principles governing the laws of nature that say those laws look the same if you change your point of view in certain ways.
My Ph.D. thesis, with Sam Treiman as adviser, was on the application of renormalization theory to the effects of strong interactions in weak interaction processes.
If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn't understand consciousness. We wouldn't even understand turbulence.
I love grand opera. I can't hear 'La Boheme' without dissolving.
I was born in 1933 in New York City to Frederick and Eva Weinberg. My early inclination toward science received encouragement from my father, and by the time I was 15 or 16, my interests had focused on theoretical physics.
Maybe nature is fundamentally ugly, chaotic and complicated. But if it's like that, then I want out.
Science merely amplifies the capabilities of human beings. Science gives us the ability to do ill and to do good more than we had, and to question science in this respect is like questioning whether people ought to have two hands or just one, because with two hands they could do more evil than they can with just one.
Certainly good causes have sometimes been mobilized under the banner of religion, but you find the opposite, I think, more often the case.
I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing.
After receiving my Ph.D. in 1957, I worked at Columbia and then from 1959 to 1966 at Berkeley.
I used to read a good deal of science fiction when I was a boy.
Even though I knew pretty early that I was going to be a scientist, it wasn't the science that interested me in science fiction; it was the vision of future societies that, for better or worse, would be radically different from our own.
The most influential utopian idea of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was socialism, which has failed everywhere. Under the banner of socialism, Stalin's U.S.S.R. and Mao's China gave us not utopias but ghastly anti-utopias.
One thing that is clearly not maximized by free markets is equality. I am talking not about that pale substitute for equality known as equality of opportunity but about equality itself.
If any one idea can justly be called the American idea, it is that a child's circumstances at birth should not determine the station in life that that child will occupy as an adult.
Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality - entails and titles of nobility - even before we had a constitution.
For someone who claimed to have found the true method for seeking reliable knowledge, it is remarkable how wrong Descartes was about so many aspects of nature.
When you do calculations using quantum mechanics, even when you are calculating something perfectly sensible like the energy of an atomic state, you get an answer that is infinite. This means you are wrong - but how do you deal with that? Is there something wrong with the theory, or something wrong with the way you are doing the calculation?
It's very difficult to convince other countries that they shouldn't pursue nuclear weapons programs if we ourselves are actively developing a component of a strategic defense system.
I would say it's a lot easier to develop a decoy system than to develop the intercontinental ballistic missile itself. I would think that any country that could develop the missile could develop quite a decoy system. It doesn't have to be terribly sophisticated.
I'm afraid that it's not possible to design a defense against every conceivable threat that you can think of.
In my experience, many Americans think of religion as important and want to do whatever they can to support it. But if you ask them what they themselves believe, you'll find they're very uncertain about their religious beliefs. They don't actually accept the theology of their official church.
Certainly science, because of its ability to increase our capacities to do things, raises terrible risks for us all. If it were possible to undiscover nuclear fission, I would be very happy to undiscover it, because of the risks that it puts us all under.
Even if there is a God, how do you know that his moral judgments are the correct ones? Seems to me Abraham should have said, 'God, that's just not right.'
Whatever faith you have you ought to be willing to confront it with the discoveries of science. There's something ignoble about not being willing to look at what we've found about the way the world is and trying to reconcile it with whatever you've decided to believe in for yourself.
