I'm afraid that it's not possible to design a defense against every conceivable threat that you can think of.
Interpretation
It's impossible to prepare for every potential threat conceivable in any defense strategy.
This quote by Steven Weinberg emphasizes the inherent limitations in designing defenses against an array of potential threats. It acknowledges that no system can be entirely foolproof or cover every conceivable scenario, suggesting that uncertainty and unpredictability are fundamental aspects of life and security that we must accept.
In practice
In a cybersecurity conference, one might use this quote to discuss the limitations of security systems.
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?
The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.
If you study science deep enough and long enough, it will force you to believe in God.
I am a futurist, projecting trends in science into the next decades and century, but ironically my two daughters - one is a neuroscientist and the other is a pastry chef - tell me that my taste in music is positively prehistoric.
The word 'chance' then expresses only our ignorance of the causes of the phenomena that we observe to occur and to succeed one another in no apparent order. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge.
And there is a lot of idiosyncrasy. But there are also regularities and phenomena. And what the data is going to be able to do - if there's enough of it - is uncover, in the mess and the noise of the world, some lines of music that actually have harmony. It's there, somewhere.
There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.
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