Steven Weinberg - Disney Science | More Heroes,Less Prophets

Closing remarks from a lecture given by Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg.

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it 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."
-- Steven Weinberg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Weinberg

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• Atheist
• Atheism

[lakumbar]

It baffles me why majority of westerners despite their great achievements in science and living standards still cling onto a primitive ideology they called religion, on par with your Muslim cousins. Philosophical arguments and logical discussions are always conveyed in great depth and clarity in universities and public forum but when it comes to religion you are just as deluded as the Arabs. The question is why do you still remain suckers to this day?

[geodesicks]

Weinberg is a Jewish atheist. He considers himself culturally Jewish, but doesn't believe in the nonsense from the desert. How do I know? I spoke to him the day before yesterday at CERN.

And WTF is the "proportional laws of physis", "quantom mechanis" or "berrylium" or "vacuum"? Going by YouTube comments, why is it that people like you who cannot spell (yeah, say they're all typos) are typically the religious ones? It says something about your level of education or intellectual capacity.

[Hasmashti]

Excellent finish, we need more heroes

[Icemario87]

@sbergman27 way cool, makes me wanna read it

[sbergman27]

@Icemario87 In the intervening time between when I made the post you are responding to, and today, I have read Brian Greene's latest book: "The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos"

It's quite good, And it's all about this particular topic. You are correct. Many different aspects of the consensus cosmology converge upon suggesting different types of multiverses. The nice thing about studying science is that there is no shame in admitting having been wrong. :-)

[Icemario87]

@sbergman27 "It's premature to hypothesize a Multiverse. The only reason we have for invoking the anthropic principle & hypothesizing a Multiverse, is the suspiciously fine-tuned nature of our physical constants, combined with the Copernican principle. "

This is false. Physicists working on the problem of "what was the universe like before the expansion" have many working mathmatical models and some of the best theories all suggest the possibility of a multiverse. Heard it in a Weinberg video.

[sbergman27]

@EnderTheBest DeBroglie? The Nobel Prize winner of '29? New theories are met with skepticism. That's how science is supposed to work. Experiment yielded evidence in support, and a consensus around particle/wave duality eventually formed. Your statements about Einstein are simply false. Due to a poor economy, he worked as a patent (not bank) clerk from '03-'09, and published on the PE effect and Sp. Rel. And he too had to defend his theories with evidence. I'm not as familiar with Stueckelberg.

[EnderTheBest]

@sbergman27 Examples? De Broglie, Einstein, Stueckelberg,...Einstein could not work as a physicist, therefore he worked like a bank clerk, STR faced a big, irrational defiance among scientists...I am talking about one of the best physicist, he should not have problems like these. But yes, scientists really do not let absurd theories pass their journals. That's all.

[sbergman27]

@EnderTheBest Concrete examples, please? Good theories often show up before the data which shows them to be better than the current model. e.g. Lemaître had to wait for Hubble's work before his cosmic egg view was accepted. But that's how science is *supposed* to work. Individual scientists are only human. But the scientific body is far less susceptible to bias and pettiness. Someone in the crowd *will* pick up a worthy theory and do the experiments to either validate it or not.

[EnderTheBest]

@sbergman27 Straw man argument? :-) History is full of examples when good, true theories were rejected by members of the scientific community. Hard to say, but true... Scientists are not going to behave in the ideal way you have described.

[sbergman27]

@Scruffylazy Nice straw man argument. But no, he and other members of the scientific community are going to check whether your ideas are logically consistent, and explain the body of experimental data that the current consensus theory does, while either making fewer assumptions or making testable predictions which experimentally test true. Chances are, your theory is not going to succeed at this. You may be too naive to understand why. But if you study, you will be able to see for yourself.

[sbergman27]

It's premature to hypothesize a Multiverse. The only reason we have for invoking the anthropic principle & hypothesizing a Multiverse, is the suspiciously fine-tuned nature of our physical constants, combined with the Copernican principle. But until we understand *how* the physical constants got the values they did, we can't say whether they are fine tuned or not. It may well be that they *had to* have the specific values that they do, for reasons entirely separate from the anthropic principle.