“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.”
“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
"...The dream that behaviorists and Marxists had of changing human nature seems to me the worst sort of exaggeration of the capabilities of science. In Three Sisters, Chekhov has Baron Tuzenbach reply to Vershinin's utopian dreams.
Well, maybe we'll fly in balloons, the cut of jackets will be different, we'll have discovered a sixth sense, maybe even developed it -- I don't know. But life will be the same -- difficult, full of unknowns, and happy. In a thousand years, just like today, people will sigh and say, oh, how hard it is to be alive. They'll still be scared of death, and won't want to die.
Facing a new millennium we can share some of Vershinin's
hopes for utopia, but when it comes to judging the chances of really changing
the way we live, no doubt most of us would side with Tuzenbach..."
(recycling my post dated November 21 2010)
For Scientific American November 2010, Amir D. Aczel
says:
"For years the cosmos and the atom have been at odds with one another. If any physicist can reconcile them, it's Steven Weinberg."
Maybe. But for me, Weinberg reached an exalted status not because what he may still do in science or his Nobel prize but when I read his this line in one of the greatest pieces of prose I have read: "...Whatever purposes may be served by rewarding the talented, I have never understood why untalented people deserve less of the world's good things than other people..."
(Five and a Half Utopias, The Atlantic, January 2000)
No ism, no right/left, no ideology, no religion, no holy text...I trust only a poet-saint or a sage to write a line of this profundity. I hope some day a Marathi Vinda (विंदा) will write what happened when Weinberg and Dnyaneshwar (ज्ञानेश्वर) met! May I suggest a title for the poem:'Gyanya-Weinya Chi Bhet' (ग्यान्या-व्यान्याची भेट)]. And doesn't he look the Rishi/sage part in following lovely picture?
Picture courtesy: Jeff Wilson and Scientific American, November 2010