Either by God you mean something definite or you don't mean something definite. If by God you mean a personality who is concerned about human beings, who did all this out of love for human beings, who watches us and who intervenes, then I would have to say in the first place how do you know, what makes you think so? And in the second place, is that really an explanation? If that's true, what explains that? Why is there such a God? It isn't the end of the chain of whys, it just is another step, and you have to take the step beyond that.
American theoretical physicist (1933-2021)
Steven Weinberg (born 3 May 1933 – 23 July 2021) was an American physicist. He was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics (with colleagues Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow) for combining electromagnetism and the weak force into the electroweak force.
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The best military historians in fact do recognize the difficulty in stating rules of generalship. They do not speak of a science of war, but rather of a pattern of military behavior that cannot be taught or stated precisely but that somehow or other sometimes helps in winning battles. This is called the art of war. In the same spirit I think that one should not hope for a science of science, the formulation of any definite rules about how scientists do or ought to behave, but only aim at a description of the sort of behavior that historically has led to scientific progress—an art of science.
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Consider the geometry of a three-dimensional homogeneous and isotropic space. ...[G]eometry is encoded in a metric <math>g_{ij}(\mathbf{x})</math> (with i and j running over the three coordinate directions), or equivalently a line element <math>ds^2 \equiv g_{ij} dx^i dx^j</math>, with summation over repeated indices... <math>ds</math> is the proper distance between <math>\mathbf{x}</math> and <math>\mathbf{x}+\mathbf{dx}</math>, meaning... the distance measured by a surveyor who uses a... Cartesian [coordinate system] in a small neighborhood of... point <math>\mathbf{x}</math>.) One... homogeneous isotropic three-dimensional space with positive definite lengths is flat space, with line element<math>ds^2=d\mathbf{x}^2</math>...The coordinate transformations that leave this invariant are... ordinary three-dimensional rotations and translations. ...Another ...possibility is a four-dimensional with some radius <math>a</math>, with line element<math>ds^2=d \mathbf{x}^2+dz^2,\;\;z^2 + \mathbf{x}^2 = a^2</math>,...Here the transformations that leave the line element invariant are four-dimensional rotations; the direction of <math>\mathbf{x}</math> can be changed to any other direction by a four-dimensional rotation that does not change <math>z</math>. ...[T]he only other possibility (up to a coordinate transformation) is a hyperspherical surface in four-dimensional , with line element<math>ds^2 = d\mathbf{x}^2 - dz^2,\;\;z^2 - \mathbf{x}^2 = a^2</math>,...where <math>a^2</math> is (so far) an arbitrary positive constant. The coordinate transformations that leave this invariant are four-dimensional pseudo-rotations, just like s, but with <math>z</math> instead of time.
The years since the mid-1970s have been the most frustrating in the history of particle physics. We are paying the price of our own success: theory has advanced so far that further progress will require the study of processes at energies far beyond the reach of existing facilities. In order to break out of this impasse, physicists began in 1982 to develop plans for a scientific project of unprecedented size and cost, known as the Superconducting Super Collider.
In 1999 I finished my three volume book on the quantum theory of fields (..."QTF"), and... set... the task of learning... the theory underlying the great progress in cosmology in the previous two decades. ...Review articles ...gave good summaries of the data, but ...often quoted formulas without ...derivation, and sometimes ...without reference to the original derivation. Occasionally the formulas were wrong, and extremely difficult for me to rederive. ...[O]riginal ...articles sometimes had gaps in their arguments, or relied on hidden assumptions, or used unexplained notation. Often massive computer programs had taken the place of analytic studies. In many cases... it was easiest to work out the relevant theory myself.
This book is the result. Its aim... self-contained explanations of the ideas and formulas... used and tested in modern cosmological observations.
The reader may... wonder why when amber is rubbed with fur the electrons go from the fur to the amber, but when glass is rubbed with silk the electrons go from the glass to the silk? ...[W]e still don't know. The question involves the physics of surfaces of complex solids... In a purely empirical way, there has been developed... the triboelectric sequence... The electrification is most intense for objects... well separated in the... sequence. ...It is ironic that we still do not have a detailed understanding of frictional electrification, even though it was the first... to be studied... But... often... science progresses... by selecting problems that are as free as possible from irrelevant complications and... provide opportunities to get at fundamental principles...
[I]n 1897 Thomson... detected a deflection... by electric forces between the rays and the electrified metal plates. ...due largely to the use of better vacuum pumps ...to where the effects of residual gas ...became negligible. (Some evidence for... deflection was [also] found... by Goldstein.) [D]eflection was toward the positively charged plate... away from the negatively charged one, confirming Perrin... that the rays carry negative electric charge.