Atheists From The United States

"[On the Dating Handbook] 'With a telescope, some munchies, and a warm blanket, watch for Halley's comet.' Yeah. I like that. There's no time limit. Just sit there and grow old together."

"[With reference to a 'how to date' book] Because you've been on dates where y'know, you forget to open your eyes and wear pants and speak English."

"I have a few business ideas (that I'm going to advertise in High Times, amongst other places), and one of them is a service in which I offer to eat and describe pork to kosher people."

"High Times magazine is a notch intellectually below Highlights for Children. I mean, they're both great to read when you're baked, but come on, ya know..."

"And then Jesus answered him, Jesus said, 'Well, my son...that is when I was helping one of the other FIVE BILLION PEOPLE on the planet, you selfish fuck. C'mon! You were walking back to your Malibu beach colony home and stubbed your toe on some driftwood, it's not a fuckin' emergency, alright? There's other people with real problems.'"

"We get to see it! January 1st, 2000! We get to see... all those fundamentalist preachers having to do their backpedaling when the Armageddon doesn't occur."

"[After reading an article on Miles for Kids in an inflight journal] What [President of the Airline] is doing is, he's urging everyone to give up their frequent flyer miles for sick kids... But as I was reading this, there were two empty seats next to me. Why can't sick kids sit there? If they're so concerned with sick kids, shouldn't they have like a pen of sick kids next to the gate?"

"If you wanna find out 101 things to do with plums, heh, read your in-flight magazine."

"I don't remember ordering the Christian sandwich..."

"[On marketing and commercials] HENDERSON VALLEY EGGS! You're gonna love our eggs!!!... [cut to small granny in rockin chair] I like eggs the old fashioned way. [return to youth] "Fuck you granny!" [punch mimic]"

"[On airport pornography] I've never seen anybody purchase them, but apparently people are. They wouldn't carry them just for aesthetic purposes. They're not trying to impress people with their porn collection, you know. So, it's just a matter of economics...Apparently enough people are goin' in there goin' 'Oh, whoa... All right! The worlds filthiest ball-draining cum-mag! Right on! This ought to make the flight a little more tolerable. Alright. Oh shit! Ha Ha! Page 35: Puckering virgin assholes - alright I gotta get it. Hope nobody is sitting next to me on the plane, because they're in for a rude awakening. Cause I'm gonna be spankin' it!' Ah, it's weird. I'm not knocking porn, I love porn... but when I go to the airport I don't have to buy those magazines, because I have this thing called will power. And I utilize it so that I don't have to whip my dick out in public. I can wait five hours. At least until I'm in the cab on my way home."

"I really don't have a problem with gay marriage... because I'm tolerant and rational."

"I thought it was really odd at how much people freaked out at Katrina. You'd think they'd be worried about something important. 'Oh my God, look! George Bush is just appointing all his friends into office and we're in an unfounded war...' But no- 'Fuck that! That nigger's stealing some potato chips!'"

"So I was watching all the Katrina coverage and I got really angry at... Christians who didn't pray hard enough... It's their fucking fault. First off, they needed to pray against the people that were praying for Katrina to hit, because New Orleans is a den of sin and iniquity; an area where gay people dance! But now they have to pray double, and if they had just put that little effort up front, we could've avoided all of this. I think it's time we take a lesson from history, and return to human sacrifice."

"We must ask, not whether an anarcho-capitalist society would be safe from a power grab by the men with the guns (safety is not an available option), but whether it would be safer than our society is from a comparable seizure of power by the men with the guns. I think the answer is yes. In our society, the men who must engineer such a coup are politicians, military officers, and policemen, men selected precisely for the characteristic of desiring power and being good at using it. They are men who already believe that they have a right to push other men around - that is their job. They are particularly well qualified for the job of seizing power. Under anarcho-capitalism the men in control of protection agencies are selected for their ability to run an efficient business and please their customers. It is always possible that some will turn out to be secret power freaks as well, but it is surely less likely than under our system where the corresponding jobs are labeled 'non-power freaks need not apply'. (pp. 123-124)"

"Perhaps the best way to see why anarcho-capitalism would be much more peaceful than our present system is by analogy. Consider our world as it would be if the cost of moving from one country to another were zero. Everyone lives in a housetrailer and speaks the same language. One day, the president of France announces that because of troubles with neighboring countries, new military taxes are being levied and conscription will begin shortly. The next morning the president of France finds himself ruling a peaceful but empty landscape, the population having been reduced to himself, three generals, and twenty-seven war correspondents. (p.123)"

"In the ideal socialist state, power will not attract power freaks. People who make decisions will show no slightest bias towards their own interests. There will be no way for a clever man to bend the institutions to serve his own ends. And the rivers will run uphill. (p.108)"

"If we want to be honest, we can ship the Statue of Liberty back to France or replace the outdated verse with new lines, "America the closed preserve/ That dirty foreigners don't deserve". (p.71)"

"The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations. (p.4)"

"David D. Friedman is the one of the most important living anarcho-capitalist philosophers. He has added a philosopher's insistence on consistency to the firm grasp of economic principles he presumably learned at the paternal knees."

"Legal rules are to be judged by the structure of incentives they establish and the consequences of people altering their behavior in response to those incentives (p.11)"

"[T]he assumption describes our actions, not our thoughts. If you had to understand something intellectually in order to do it, none of us would be able to walk. Economics is based on the assumption that people have reasonably simple objectives and choose means to achieve them. Both assumptions are false-but useful. Suppose someone is rational only half the time. Since there is generally one right way of doing things and many wrong ways, the rational behavior can be predicted but the irrational cannot. If we assume he is rational, we predict his behavior correctly about half of the tie - far from perfect, but a lot better then nothing. If I could do well at the racetrack I would be a very rich man. [R]ationality is an assumption I make about other people. I know myself. [R]ationality is an assumption I make about other people. I know myself well enough to allow for the consequences of my own irrationality. But for the vast mass of my fellow humans, about whom I know very little, rationality is the best predictive assumption available. (pp.3-5)"

"The tendency to be rational is the consistent and hence predictable element in human behavior. (p.4)"

"Economics is that way of understanding behavior that starts from the assumption that people have objectives and tend to choose the correct way to achieve them."

"An ideal objectivist society with a limited government is superior to an anarcho-capitalist society in precisely the same way that an ideal socialist society is superior to a capitalist society. Socialism does better with perfect people than anarcho-capitalism with imperfect. And it is better to wear a bikini with the sun shining than a raincoat when it is raining. That is no argument against carrying an umbrella. (p.134)"

"I predict that, if anarcho-capitalist institutions appeared in this country tomorrow, heroin would be legal in New York and illegal in most other places. (p.128)"

"Perhaps the most important immediate consequence of Planck’s work was to provide long-sought values for atomic constants."

"The principles of quantum mechanics are so contrary to ordinary intuition that they can best be motivated by taking a look at their prehistory."

"The development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s was the greatest advance in physical science since the work of Isaac Newton. It was not easy; the ideas of quantum mechanics present a profound departure from ordinary human intuition. Quantum mechanics has won acceptance through its success. It is essential to modern atomic, molecular, nuclear, and elementary particle physics, and to a great deal of chemistry and condensed matter physics as well."

"In the case where the universe does not recollapse, the proper distance to the is...d_{MAX}(t) = a(t) \int_{0}^{r_{MAX}(t)} \frac{dr}{\sqrt{1-Kr^2}} = a(t)\int_{0}^{\infty} \frac{dt'}{a(t')}... In the absence of a cosmological constant, a(t) grows like t^{\frac{2}{3}}, and the integral diverges, so there is no event horizon. But with a cosmological constant, a(t) will eventually grow as exp(Ht) with H = H_0 \Omega^{1/2}_\Lambda constant and... an event horizon... approaches... d_{MAX}(\infty) = 1/H. As time passes all sources of light outside our gravitationally bound will move beyond this... and become unobservable. The same is true for the quintessence theory... In that case a(t) eventually grows as exp(const \times\, t^{2/{(2+\frac{\alpha}{2})}}), so for any \alpha \ge 0 the integral... [d_{MAX}(t)] converges."

"[T]he distance at present isd_{\mathrm{max}}(t_0) = \frac{1}{H_0} \int_{0}^{1} \frac{dx}{x^2 \sqrt{\Omega_\Lambda+\Omega_K x^{-2}+\Omega_M x^{-3}}}...[T]here may have been a time before the radiation-dominated era in which there was nothing in the universe but , in which case the particle horizon distance would... be infinite. But as far as telescopic observations... [d_{max}(t_0)] gives the proper distance beyond which we cannot now see."

"Modern cosmological theories can exhibit horizons of two... types. which limit the distances at which past events can be observed or at which it will ever be possible to observe future events. These are called Rindler s and s, respectively."

"In 1929 Hubble announced... a "roughly linear" relation between and distance. ...His data points ...did not really support a linear relation. But in the early 1930s he had measured redshifts and distances out to the , with a redshift z \eqsim 0.02, corresponding to... 7,000 km/sec and a linear relation... was evident. The conclusion... the universe is really expanding. ...At the time of writing, the largest... z=6.96. It may eventually become possible to measure the expansion rate H(t) \equiv \dot{a}(t)/a(t) at times t earlier than the present, by observing the change in very accurately measured redshifts of individual galaxies over times as short as a decade."

"[T]he property of being a geodesic is invariant under coordinate transformations... so the path of the photon or particle will... be a geodesic in any spatial coordinate system..."

"Consider... [the formula given by special relativity for the magnitude of the ]P \equiv m_0 \sqrt{g_{ij}\frac{dx^i}{d\tau}\frac{dx^j}{d\tau}}...where d\tau^2 = dt^2 - g_{ij} dx^i dx^j. [This holds because in] a locally inertial Cartesian coordinate system, for which g_{ij} = \delta_{ij}, we have d\tau = dt\sqrt{1 - \mathbf {v}^2} where v^i = \frac{dx^i}{dt}... [The P] is evidently invariant under arbitrary changes in the spatial coordinates, so we can evaluate it... in Robertson-Walker coordinates. ...[T]o save work ...adopt a spatial coordinate system in which the particle position is near the origin x^i = 0, where \tilde{g}_{ij} = \delta_{ij} + \mathit0(\mathbf{x}), and we can therefore ignore the purely spatial components of \Gamma_{jk}^i of the . General relativity gives [the momentum]... with a metric g_{ij} = a^2(t)\delta_{ij}...P(t) \propto 1/a(t)... for any non-zero mass, however small... Hence, although for photons both m_0 and d\tau vanish... [the momentum relation] is still valid."

"[T]o extend this to the geometry of spacetime... include a term... in the spacetime line element, with a now an arbitrary function of time (known as the Robertson-Walker scale factor):d\tau^2 \equiv -g_{\mu\nu}(x) dx^\mu dx^\nu = dt^2-a^2(t)[d\mathbf{x}^2 + K \frac{(\mathbf{x} \cdot d\mathbf{x}^2)}{1-K\mathbf{x}^2}]"

"[In] the case of Euclidean space...ds^2 = a^2[d\mathbf{x}^2 + K \frac{(\mathbf{x} \cdot d\mathbf{x}^2)}{1-K\mathbf{x}^2}]...where K ="

"Consider the geometry of a three-dimensional homogeneous and isotropic space. ...[G]eometry is encoded in a metric g_{ij}(\mathbf{x}) (with i and j running over the three coordinate directions), or equivalently a line element ds^2 \equiv g_{ij} dx^i dx^j, with summation over repeated indices... ds is the proper distance between \mathbf{x} and \mathbf{x}+\mathbf{dx}, meaning... the distance measured by a surveyor who uses a... Cartesian [coordinate system] in a small neighborhood of... point \mathbf{x}.) One... homogeneous isotropic three-dimensional space with positive definite lengths is flat space, with line elementds^2=d\mathbf{x}^2...The coordinate transformations that leave this invariant are... ordinary three-dimensional rotations and translations. ...Another ...possibility is a four-dimensional with some radius a, with line elementds^2=d \mathbf{x}^2+dz^2,\;\;z^2 + \mathbf{x}^2 = a^2,...Here the transformations that leave the line element invariant are four-dimensional rotations; the direction of \mathbf{x} can be changed to any other direction by a four-dimensional rotation that does not change z. ...[T]he only other possibility (up to a coordinate transformation) is a hyperspherical surface in four-dimensional , with line elementds^2 = d\mathbf{x}^2 - dz^2,\;\;z^2 - \mathbf{x}^2 = a^2,...where a^2 is (so far) an arbitrary positive constant. The coordinate transformations that leave this invariant are four-dimensional pseudo-rotations, just like s, but with z instead of time."

"Almost all of modern cosmology is based on this Robert-Walker metric, at least as a first approximation."

"The visible universe seems the same in all directions... larger than about 300 million light years. The ... (...[~]one part in 105) in the cosmic microwave background... radiation... traveling... [~]14 billion years, supporting the conclusion..."

"I hope the readers will let me know of any mistakes... I will post them on... zippy.ph.utexas.edu/~weinberg/corrections.html."

"Where I knew them I have included references to... the Cornell archive, ...arxiv.org, as well as to the published literature. ...I have quoted the latest measurements of cosmological s known to me, in part... to give the reader a sense of what is... observationally possible. ...I have not tried to combine measurements from observations of different types because... it would [not] add... additional physical insight and any... cosmological concordance would... soon be out of date."

"I decided to exclude material that was highly speculative... cosmological theory in higher dimensions... anthropic reasoning... holographic cosmology... conjectures about the details of inflation, or many other new ideas. ...The present book is largely concerned with ...mainstream cosmology: ...inflation driven by one or more scalar fields ...followed by a big bang dominated by radiation, , baryonic matter, and ."

"So much has happened in cosmology since the 1960s that this book... bears little resemblance to... Gravitation and Cosmology. On occasion I refer back to (..."G&C") for material that does not seem worth repeating... Classical general relativity has not changed much since 1972 (apart from a great strengthening of its experimental verification) so it did not seem necessary to cover gravitation... I provide a brief introduction in Appendix B. Other appendices deal with technical material... I have also supplied a glossary of symbols..."

"I have tried... to present analytic calculations of cosmological phenomena, and not just report results obtained elsewhere by numerical computation. The calculations... in the literature... necessarily take many details into account, which either make an analytic treatment impossible, or obscure the main physical features of the calculation. Where this is the case, I have not hesitated to sacrifice some degree of accuracy for greater transparency."

"In 1999 I finished my three volume book on the quantum theory of fields (..."QTF"), and... set... the task of learning... the theory underlying the great progress in cosmology in the previous two decades. ...Review articles ...gave good summaries of the data, but ...often quoted formulas without ...derivation, and sometimes ...without reference to the original derivation. Occasionally the formulas were wrong, and extremely difficult for me to rederive. ...[O]riginal ...articles sometimes had gaps in their arguments, or relied on hidden assumptions, or used unexplained notation. Often massive computer programs had taken the place of analytic studies. In many cases... it was easiest to work out the relevant theory myself. This book is the result. Its aim... self-contained explanations of the ideas and formulas... used and tested in modern cosmological observations."

"I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?"

"There is one constant that seems to be fine tuned...and that is dark energy."

"I have a friend — or had a friend, now dead — Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it... and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too."

"Maybe at the very bottom of it... I really don't like God. You know, it's silly to say I don't like God because I don't believe in God, but in the same sense that I don't like Iago, or the Reverend Slope or any of the other villains of literature, the god of traditional Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to me a terrible character. He's a god who will... who obsessed the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don't worship him in the right way. Now I realise that many people don't believe in that any more who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians, but that is the traditional God and he's a terrible character. I don't like him."