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 o… - Steven Weinberg

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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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About Steven Weinberg

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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Additional quotes by Steven Weinberg

So what happens to the effective field theories of electroweak, strong, and gravitational interactions at energies of order 10<sup>15</sup>–10<sup>18</sup> GeV? I know of only two plausible alternatives. One possibility is that the theory remains a quantum field theory, but one in which the finite or infinite number of renormalized couplings do not run off to infinity with increasing energy, but hit a fixed point of the renormalizable group equations. ... The other possibility, which I have to admit is a priori more likely, is that at very high energy we will run into really new physics, not describable in terms of a quantum field theory. I think that by far the most likely possibility is that this will be something like a string theory.

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.

Having taught quantum mechanics and written a book about it recently — a technical treatise — I find that I am not as happy about quantum mechanics as I used to be — not as dismissive of the critics. And it's a bad sign in particular that those physicists who are happy about quantum mechanics — who don't see anything wrong with it — don't agree with each other about what it means. ... And the problem has specifically to do with the act of measurement.

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