To Explain the World Quotes

“the idea is to see how far one can go without supposing supernatural intervention.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“Whatever the final laws of nature may be, there is no reason to suppose that they are designed to make physicists happy.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“As is natural for an academic, when I want to learn about something, I volunteer to teach a course on the subject.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“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”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“We simply do not find anything in the laws of nature that in any way corresponds to ideas of goodness, justice, love, or strife,”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“scientific theories cannot be deduced by purely mathematical reasoning.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“The progress of science has been largely a matter of discovering what questions should be asked.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“once one invokes the supernatural, anything can be explained, and no explanation can be verified.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“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.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“It was essential for the discovery of science that religious ideas be divorced from the study of nature.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“in the East al-Rashid and al-Mamun were delving into Greek and Persian philosophy,”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“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.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“It is not only in medicine that persons in authority will resist any investigation that might reduce their authority.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“Einstein occasionally used “God” as a metaphor for the unknown fundamental laws of nature.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“at its most fundamental level science is not undertaken for any practical reason.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“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.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“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.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“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.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“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.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“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.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“Nothing about the practice of modern science is obvious to someone who has never seen it done.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“No thing happens in vain, but everything for a reason and by necessity.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“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.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“This also serves as a warning, that science may not yet be in its final form.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“I want to show how difficult was the discovery of modern science, how far from obvious are its practices and standards.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“If physicists of 1900 were somehow taught today’s Standard Model of cosmology or of elementary particle physics, they would have found much to amaze them, but the idea of seeking mathematically formulated and experimentally validated impersonal principles that explain a wide variety of phenomena would have seemed quite familiar.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“Again and again, it has been an essential feature of scientific progress to understand which problems are ripe for study and which are not. For instance, leading physicists at the turn of the twentieth century, including Hendrik Lorentz and Max Abraham, devoted themselves to understanding the structure of the recently discovered electron. It was hopeless; no one could have made progress in understanding the nature of electron before the advent of quantum mechanics two decades later. The development of the special theory of relativity by Albert Einstein was made possible by Einstein’s refusal to worry about what electrons are. Instead he worried about how observations of anything (including electrons) depend on the motion of the observer. Then Einstein himself in his later years addressed the problem of unification of the forces of nature, and made no progress because no one at the time knew enough about these forces.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“Physicists are more opportunistic, demanding only enough precision and certainty to give them a good chance of avoiding serious mistakes. In the preface of my own treatise on the quantum theory of fields, I admit that “there are parts of this book that will bring tears to the eyes of the mathematically inclined reader.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“Unfortunately, string theory has not yet led to any predictions that can be tested experimentally, and as a result theorists (at least most of us) are keeping an open mind as to whether the theory actually applies to the real world. It is this insistence on verification that we most miss in all the poetic students of nature, from Thales to Plato.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“I don’t at all mean to say that the early Greeks decided to write poetically in order to avoid the need to validate their theories. They felt no such need. Today we test our speculations about nature by using proposed theories to draw more or less precise conclusions that can be tested by observation. This did not occur to the early Greeks, or to many of their successors, for a very simple reason: they had never seen it done.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science