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?

Steven Weinberg

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.

Steven Weinberg

I would not want to be a leader of a country that had launched ICBMs against the United States.

Steven Weinberg

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.

Steven Weinberg

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.

Steven Weinberg

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.

Steven Weinberg

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.

Steven Weinberg

If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn't understand consciousness. We wouldn't even understand turbulence.

Steven Weinberg

I love grand opera. I can't hear 'La Boheme' without dissolving.

Steven Weinberg

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.

Steven Weinberg

Maybe nature is fundamentally ugly, chaotic and complicated. But if it's like that, then I want out.

Steven Weinberg

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.

Steven Weinberg

Certainly good causes have sometimes been mobilized under the banner of religion, but you find the opposite, I think, more often the case.

Steven Weinberg

I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing.

Steven Weinberg

After receiving my Ph.D. in 1957, I worked at Columbia and then from 1959 to 1966 at Berkeley.

Steven Weinberg

I used to read a good deal of science fiction when I was a boy.

Steven Weinberg

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.

Steven Weinberg

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.

Steven Weinberg

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.

Steven Weinberg

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.

Steven Weinberg