I'm afraid that it's not possible to design a defense against every conceivable threat that you can think of.
Interpretation
It's impossible to prepare for every potential threat conceivable in any defense strategy.
This quote by Steven Weinberg emphasizes the inherent limitations in designing defenses against an array of potential threats. It acknowledges that no system can be entirely foolproof or cover every conceivable scenario, suggesting that uncertainty and unpredictability are fundamental aspects of life and security that we must accept.
In practice
In a cybersecurity conference, one might use this quote to discuss the limitations of security systems.
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?
That the fundamental aspects of heredity should have turned out to be so extraordinarily simple supports us in the hope that nature may, after all, be entirely approachable. Her much-advertised inscrutability has once more been found to be an illusion due to our ignorance. This is encouraging, for, if the world in which we live were as complicated as some of our friends would have us believe we might well despair that biology could ever become an exact science.
You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason---if you pick the proper postulates.
Astronauts are not superhuman. They lead ordinary lives and have varied personalities.
I don't care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don't have an intuitive feeling for equations.
Innovation is everyones responsibility, not just R&Ds.
The real achievement in discoveries... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before... The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of cabbages and kings β of previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of discourse β whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem.
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