Atheists From The United States

"A superconductor of any kind is nothing more or less than a material in which a particular symmetry of the laws of nature, electromagnetic gauge invariance, is spontaneously broken. ... These rotations act on a two-dimensional vector, whose two components are the real and imaginary parts of the electron field, the quantum mechanical operator that in quantum field theories of matter destroys electrons. The rotation angle of the broken symmetry group can vary with location in the superconductor, and then the symmetry transformations also affect the electromagnetic potentials ... The symmetry breaking in a superconductor leaves unbroken a rotation by 180°, which simply changes the sign of the electron field. In consequence of this spontaneous symmetry breaking, products of any even number of electron fields have non-vanishing expectation values in a superconductor, though a single electron field does not. All of the dramatic exact properties of superconductors – zero electrical resistance, the expelling of magnetic fields from superconductors known as the Meissner effect, the quantization of magnetic flux through a thick superconducting ring, and the Josephson formula for the frequency of the AC current at a junction between two superconductors with different voltages – follow from the assumption that electromagnetic gauge invariance is broken in this way, with no need to inquire into the mechanism by which the symmetry is broken."

"There are those whose views about religion are not very different from my own, but who nevertheless feel that we should try to damp down the conflict, that we should compromise it. … I respect their views and I understand their motives, and I don't condemn them, but I'm not having it. To me, the conflict between science and religion is more important than these issues of science education or even environmentalism. I think the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief; and anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization."

"It seems that scientists are often attracted to beautiful theories in the way that insects are attracted to flowers — not by logical deduction, but by something like a sense of smell."

"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."

"In trying to get votes for the Superconducting Super Collider, I was very much involved in lobbying members of Congress, testifying to them, bothering them, and I never heard any of them talk about postmodernism or social constructivism. You have to be very learned to be that wrong."

"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."

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or 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."

"If you have bought one of those T-shirts with Maxwell's equations on the front, you may have to worry about its going out of style, but not about its becoming false. We will go on teaching Maxwellian electrodynamics as long as there are scientists."

"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."

"So what happens to the effective field theories of electroweak, strong, and gravitational interactions at energies of order 1015–1018 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."

"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

"Considering the pervasive importance of quantum mechanics in modern physics, it is odd how rarely one hears of efforts to test quantum mechanics experimentally with high precision.…The trouble is that it is very difficult to find any logically consistent generalization of quantum mechanics. One obvious target for generalization is the linearity of quantum mechanics, but if we arbitrarily add nonlinear terms to the Schrodinger equation, how do we know that the theory we obtain will have a sensible physical interpretation? At least in part, it is the dearth of generalized versions of quantum mechanics that has made it so hard to plan experimental tests of quantum mechanics."

"Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we're so interested in them."

"As everyone today knows, in specifying the value of a gauge coupling constant it is necessary to say not only what its value is but where — that is at what normalization scale — it has that value."

"... most physicists would probably agree that the place of local fields is nowhere so secure as in the theory of photons and gravitons, whose properties seem indissolubly linked with the space-time concepts of gauge invariance (of the second kind) and/or Einstein's equivalence principle."

"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect."

"Teller: Will you shut up! Homer Simpson: Hey, I thought you didn't talk. Teller: [nervously] Uh, I didn't mean to... it just slipped out. Oh god, now Penn's gonna beat me...I'm not the first Teller."

"The idea of mind-altering substances gives me the willies. Fill your tank with nitro, the car goes fast, sure, but not far."

"This I believe: I believe there is no god."

"... I vividly remember sitting in front of Wheeler, who told me his opinion of the leading particle theorists at various major universities and ended with the pronouncement that Steve Weinberg was the best of the upcoming generation."

"By inclination, Weinberg is an extreme reductionist. But he is also a realist and acknowledges when something is not working the way he might want it to. In 1987 the arch-reductionist concluded that certain facts seemed to be inconsistent with any explanation based on the usual kind of mathematical reasoning. Instead, it seemed they might be true only because if they were not, we observers could not be here to observe them. Weinberg undoubtedly disliked such anthropic-principle explanations. But when, to his disappointment, he found that the anthropic principle might explain the apparent vanishing of the cosmological constant, he said so loudly and clearly, despite the great hostility of the physics community toward the principle."

"Here he unwittingly puts his finger on what I believe is the actual source of the near-century of discomfort and disagreement. There is an implicit assumption, shared by almost all physicists, that the scientist must be separated from the science. The usual appeals to measurement with classical outcomes, it seems to me, are unsuccessful attempts to objectify and impersonalize processes in which an individual scientist acts on and is reacted upon by the world. The collapse of the wavefunction after measurement represents nothing more than the updating of that scientist’s expectations, based on his or her experience of the world’s response to the measurement. Weinberg hopes to keep the scientist out of the laws of nature, but our chronic failure to agree on the meaning of quantum mechanics demonstrates the futility of his hope. Nor does Weinberg’s hope make sense to me. Science is a highly developed form of human language. Embedded in books and papers, it is a distillation of the communicated individual experiences of all scientists. Why insist that science should make no reference to the process that has established it? The laws of quantum mechanics are exactly the same for everyone who uses them. In that important sense they are entirely objective. If a scientific law involves both the scientist and the world, it does not mean that science can tell us nothing about people, as Weinberg mysteriously worries, any more than it means that science can tell us nothing about the world."

"Weinberg’s paper “A Model of Leptons”, published in Physical Review Letters (PRL) on 20 November 1967, determined the direction of high-energy particle physics through the final decades of the 20th century. Just two and a half pages long, it is one of the most highly cited papers in the history of theoretical physics. Its contents are the core of the Standard Model of particles physics, now almost half a century old and still passing every experimental test."

"Asked what single mystery, if he could choose, he would like to see solved in his lifetime, Weinberg doesn’t have to think for long: he wants to be able to explain the observed pattern of quark and lepton masses."

"Steven Weinberg is famous as a scientist, but he thinks deeply and writes elegantly about many other things besides science.… he is not only preeminent as a mathematical physicist. He has also made important contributions to the discussion of history and politics."

"My own conclusion is that today there is no interpretation of quantum mechanics that does not have serious flaws. This view is not universally shared. Indeed, many physicists are satisfied with their own interpretation of quantum mechanics. But different physicists are satisfied with different interpretations. In my view, we ought to take seriously the possibility of finding some more satisfactory other theory, to which quantum mechanics is only a good approximation."

"To start, we will consider a single particle moving in three space dimensions under the influence of a general central potential. Later we will specialize to the case of a Coulomb potential, and work out the spectrum of hydrogen. One other classic problem, the harmonic oscillator, will be treated at the end of this chapter."

"Heisenberg’s starting point was the philosophical judgment, that a physical theory should not concern itself with things like electron orbits in atoms that can never be observed. This is a risky assumption, but in this case it served Heisenberg well."

"In this derivation Bohr had relied on the old idea of classical radiation theory, that the frequencies of spectral lines should agree with the frequency of the electron’s orbital motion, but he had assumed this only for the largest orbits, with large n. The light frequencies he calculated for transitions between lower states, such as n=2 → n=1, did not at all agree with the orbital frequency of the initial or final state. So Bohr’s work represented another large step away from classical physics."

"Planck’s quantization assumption applied to the matter that emits and absorbs radiation, not to radiation itself. As George Gamow later remarked, Planck thought that radiation was like butter; butter itself comes in any quantity, but it can be bought and sold only in multiples of one quarter pound. It was Albert Einstein (1879–1955) who in 1905 proposed that the energy of radiation of frequency ν was itself an integer multiple of hν."

"You don't have to own squirrels and starlings to get enjoyment from them … One day, we would like an end to pet shops and the breeding of animals. [Dogs] would pursue their natural lives in the wild … they would have full lives, not wasting at home for someone to come home in the evening and pet them and then sit there and watch TV."

"Ingrid Newkirk writes as she lives — with integrity, conviction, courage, and humor."

"When we were in Savannah, she told me, in the most unequivocal terms, that the world would be an infinitely better place without humans in it at all."

"Ingrid Newkirk is not only a thoughtful animal rights and environmental activist. She is an inspirational leader. A heroine. A woman upon whom so many depend, around the world, for information and guidance. In a world where all animals, everywhere, are more threatened than ever, Ingrid Newkirk is their champion."

"Fast-food chains, clothing designers and even U.S. presidential candidates know the bitterness of the long, hard P.R. winter that is a Newkirk-directed campaign. Tofu cream pies are thrown at CEOs, gruesome billboards go up near corporate headquarters and throngs of vocal protesters dog profit margins at the wave of Newkirk's hand. McDonald's, General Motors, Calvin Klein and, most recently, Burger King have all buckled under the strain in one way or another."

"Since co-founding People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals 21 years ago, Ingrid Newkirk has emerged as one of the shining lights of the animal rights movement. Through the use of shock tactics and a continuing series of controversial media campaigns, Newkirk and PETA have been able to effect change where other animal rights activists have failed miserably. Although criticized at one point or another by seemingly everybody under the sun, PETA nevertheless has a world-wide membership of over 300,000 activists and continues to be one of the most visible animal rights organizations in the world."

"We do not advocate "right to life" for animals."

"Well, it’s not like this is anything we are trying to hide. About three times in our 21-year history we have thought it was a good idea — and still do — to defend some very good activists who have done some decent things for animals and who have happened to get into trouble. One of those people is Rodney Coronado, who is a very committed Native American animal rights activist and a decent person. He did something [firebombed a research facility at Michigan State University] that put him in prison for three-and-a-half years and I think that if we hadn’t provided him with a good legal defence he wouldn’t be back out doing productive things in the community again — like the good person that he is. We are very happy to have done that."

"Our nonviolent tactics are not as effective. We ask nicely for years and get nothing. Someone makes a threat, and it works."

"If it’s anything that’s going to result in suffering to animals or people, then I don’t think [the end] justifies the means. … Yeah; but then again if you could hurt ten people to save 100 people and there was no option, what would you do? I can’t really address that."

"Perhaps the mere idea of receiving a nasty missive will allow animal researchers to empathize with their victims for the first time in their lousy careers. I find it small wonder that the laboratories aren’t all burning to the ground. If I had more guts, I’d light a match."

"Would I rather the research lab that tests animals is reduced to a bunch of cinders? Yes."

"I wish we all would get up and go into the labs and take the animals out or burn them down."

"When I hear of anyone walking into a lab and walking out with animals, my heart sings."

"Even if animal experiments did result in a cure for AIDS, of which there is no chance, I’d be against it on moral grounds."

"It [animal research] is immoral even if it's essential."

"I know it's illegal [trespassing], but I don't think it's wrong."

"Even painless research is fascism, supremacism, because the act of confinement is traumatizing in itself."

"If my father had a heart attack, it would give me no solace at all to know his treatment was first tried on a dog."

"Every animal has his or her story, his or her thoughts, daydreams, and interests. All feel joy and love, pain and fear, as we now know beyond any shadow of a doubt. All deserve that the human animal afford them the respect of being cared for with great consideration for those interests or left in peace."