With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.
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.
One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.
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.
Before history there was science, of a sort. At any moment nature presents us with a variety of puzzling phenomena: fire, thunderstorms, plagues, planetary motion, light, tides, and so on. Observation of the world led to useful generalizations: fires are hot; thunder presages rain; tides are highest when the Moon is full or new, and so on. These became part of the common sense of mankind. But here and there, some people wanted more than just a collection of facts. They wanted to explain the world.
I would say it's a lot easier to develop a decoy system than to develop the intercontinental ballistic missile itself. I would think that any country that could develop the missile could develop quite a decoy system. It doesn't have to be terribly sophisticated.
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
My work during the 1970s has been mainly concerned with the implications of the unified theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions, with the development of the related theory of strong interactions known as quantum chromodynamics, and with steps toward the unification of all interactions.
I was born in 1933 in New York City to Frederick and Eva Weinberg. My early inclination toward science received encouragement from my father, and by the time I was 15 or 16, my interests had focused on theoretical physics.
Certainly science, because of its ability to increase our capacities to do things, raises terrible risks for us all. If it were possible to undiscover nuclear fission, I would be very happy to undiscover it, because of the risks that it puts us all under.
If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn't understand consciousness. We wouldn't even understand turbulence.
Symmetry principles are principles governing the laws of nature that say those laws look the same if you change your point of view in certain ways.
