It is almost irrestible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning.
Interpretation
Humans tend to believe they have a unique purpose in the universe, rather than being random products of chance.
In this quote, Steven Weinberg expresses the common human inclination to see ourselves as having a special role in the cosmos, rather than perceiving our existence as merely a result of a series of fortuitous events. This reflects a deeper existential desire to find meaning and purpose in life, contrasting the scientific understanding of our origins with a longing for significance in a vast universe.
In practice
This quote could inspire a discussion in a philosophy class about the nature of existence.
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.
Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality - entails and titles of nobility - even before we had a constitution.
It's very difficult to convince other countries that they shouldn't pursue nuclear weapons programs if we ourselves are actively developing a component of a strategic defense system.
[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
With or without religion, 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.
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?
As he mused about these things, he realized that he had to choose between thinking of himself as the poor victim of a thief and as an adventurer in quest of his treasure.
The engineers of the future will be poets.
The Pythagoreans degrade impious men into brutes and, if one is to believe Empedocles, even into plants.
We need to defend the interests of those whom we've never met and never will.
So as through a glass and darkly_x000D_ The age long strife I see_x000D_ Where I fought in many guises,_x000D_ Many names - but always me.
His [Erwin Schrödinger's] private life seemed strange to bourgeois people like ourselves. But all this does not matter. He was a most lovable person, independent, amusing, temperamental, kind and generous, and he had a most perfect and efficient brain.
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