Steven Weinberg je americký fyzik. V roce 1979 získal Nobelovu cenu za fyziku za svou práci o sjednocení slabé a elektromagnetické interakce.
Weinberg absolvoval střední školu v roce 1950 , bakalářský titul získal na Cornellově univerzitě v roce 1954, titul Ph.D. na Princetonské univerzitě v roce 1957. V současnosti je profesorem fyziky a astronomie na Texaské univerzitě v Austinu.
Vedle svého vědeckého výzkumu byl Steven Weinberg prominentním veřejným mluvčím vědy, svědčil před Kongresem pro podporu gigantického supravodivého urychlovače , napsal mnoho článků pro New York Review of Books a měl různé přednášky o hlubším významu vědy. Jeho knihy o vědě psané pro veřejnost kombinují typickou vědeckou popularizaci s prvky historie a filozofie vědy.
Weinberg je také známý pro svou podporu Izraele. Je ateista.
Jeden z jeho známých citátů: S vírou nebo bez ní, dobří lidé mohou jednat dobře a špatní lidé mohou činit zlo; ale mají-li dobří lidé činit zlo – k tomu je zapotřebí víry.
Wikipedia
„Čím více se zdá vesmír srozumitelným, tím více se také zdá zbytečným.“
Originál: (en) The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
Zdroj: [Dyson, Freeman, 1996, Selected Papers of Freeman Dyson: With Commentary, American Mathematical Soc., 529, angličtina]
Closing statements of presentation at Beyond Belief : Science, Religion, Reason and Survival (5 November 2006)
Kontext: 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.”
The Atheism Tapes (2004)
Kontext: 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.
“It is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.”
The Atheism Tapes (2004)
Kontext: 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.
The Atheism Tapes (2004)
Kontext: 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.
“Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.”
The Atheism Tapes (2004)
Kontext: 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 Isaac because God told him to do that. Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.
“There is one constant that seems to be fine tuned…and that is dark energy.”
The Atheism Tapes (2004)
Kontext: There is one constant that seems to be fine tuned... and that is dark energy.
Address at the Conference on Cosmic Design, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. (April 1999)
This comment is modified in a later article derived from these talks:
: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.
:* "A Designer Universe?" at PhysLink.com http://www.physlink.com/Education/essay_weinberg.cfm
“All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically”
Zdroj: Dreams of a Final Theory
(1993), Epilogue, p. 155
The First Three Minutes (1977; second edition 1993)
“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (1993), ISBN 0-09-922391-0.
Address at the Conference on Cosmic Design, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. (April 1999)
"The Big Higgs Question" http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/07/09/big-higgs-question/, The New York Review of Books, 9 July 2012
1977
The First Three Minutes (1977; second edition 1993)
The Atheism Tapes (2004)
"Testing Quantum Mechanics" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0003491689902765, Annals of Physics (1989)
“Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we're so interested in them.”
"Elementary particles and the laws of Physics" in The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures (1987)
"Particle physics, from Rutherford to the LHC," Physics Today 64, no.8 (August 2011), 29-33, on 30.
The Problems of Quantum Mechanics: Steven Weinberg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBninatwq6k (July 17, 2018) YouTube video at 3:58 of 45:42
Steven Weinberg, PBS interview, 1998 http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/wein-frame.html
"Night Thoughts of a Quantum Physicist" (February 1995); republished in Facing Up: Science And Its Cultural Adversaries (2001)
"The Revolution That Didn't Happen" in The New York Review of Books (1998) http://www.nybooks.com/articles/735
Quoted in Frankenberry The Faith of Scientists: In Their Own Words (2008), p. 336
as quoted in an interview by Matthew Chalmers: [Model physicist, CERN Courier, 13 October 2017, http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/70138]
“It doesn't work to build half an accelerator. The particles need to go all the way around.”
On The Shoulders of Giants - "The Future of Science" by Steven Weinberg, World Science Festival, YouTube, 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GrjjCVk6cA
