It was one time when people thought the value of the fine structure constant was important. Now of … - Steven Weinberg

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I knew I would be in the story somewhere," Eugenides interjected. "Oh no," said Phresine, "This was a humble servant. " "Ouch. " "Though very courageous. " "Not me," whispered Eugenides to his pillow.

Steven Weinberg

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.

Important, Mass, People, Religion, Sorts, Structure

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The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

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Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.

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The more we refine our understanding of God to make the concept plausible, the more it seems pointless.

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This is often the way it is in physics - our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. Even worse, there often seems to be a general agreement that certain phenomena are just not fit subjects for respectable theoretical and experimental effort.

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It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.

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