If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn't understand consciousness. We wouldn't even understand turbulence.
Interpretation
Understanding consciousness and turbulence is a challenge even with knowledge of fundamental laws of nature.
Steven Weinberg highlights the complexity of consciousness and turbulence in this quote, suggesting that simply knowing the fundamental laws of nature does not equate to understanding these intricate phenomena. Both consciousness and turbulence are multifaceted challenges that require more than just foundational scientific principles; they demand deeper exploration and insight into the complexities of existence and physical systems.
In practice
In a lecture on quantum physics, to illustrate the limitations of scientific understanding.
It was one time when people thought the value of the fine structure constant was important. 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.
Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality - entails and titles of nobility - even before we had a constitution.
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.
[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
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.
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?
'Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.
The best way to conduct research on a larger scale is to make sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing... The sooner the better - start talking to other people about what you're doing. Because that's what will stimulate things the fastest.
Radio has no future." "X-rays are clearly a hoax". "The aeroplane is scientifically impossible.
We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.
There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower.
I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.