It seems to me that we are in the position of a company of players who have by chance found their way into a great theater. Outside, the city streets… - Steven Weinberg
" "It seems to me that we are in the position of a company of players who have by chance found their way into a great theater. Outside, the city streets are dark and lifeless, but in the theater the lights are on, the air is warm, and the walls are wonderfully decorated. However, no scripts are found, so the players begin to improvise—a little psychological drama, a little poetry, whatever comes to mind. Some even set themselves to explain the stage machinery. The players do not forget that they are just amusing themselves, and that they will have to return to the darkness outside the theater, but while on the stage they do their best to give a good performance. I suppose that this is a rather melancholy view of human life, but melancholy is one of the distinctive creations of our species, and not without its own consolations.
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
If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that—in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we're starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That's not an entirely despicable role for us to play.
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In the Standard Model the masses of quarks and leptons take values proportional to the coupling constants in the interaction of these fermions with scalar fields, constants that in the context of this model are entirely arbitrary. But the peculiar hierarchical pattern of lepton and quark masses seems to call for a larger theory, in which in some leading approximation the only quarks and leptons with non-zero mass are those of the third generation, the tau, top, and bottom, with the other lepton and quark masses arising from some sort of radiative correction. Such theories were actively considered ... soon after the completion of the Standard Model, but interest in this program seems to have lapsed subsequently ...