Gerald Weinberg

1933–2018 · American computer scientist

Topics: physics, engineering leadership, software engineering, learning

• As any poet knows, a system is a way of looking at the world.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• Quality is value to some person

  — Gerald Weinberg

• 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.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• If the software doesn't have to work, you can always meet any other requirement.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• It is with Isaac Newton that the modern dream of a final theory really begins.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• A theorist today is hardly considered respectable if he or she has not introduced at least one new particle for which there is no experimental evidence.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• It doesn't work to build half an accelerator. The particles need to go all the way around.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• The Third Law of Consulting: Never forget they're paying you by the hour, not by the solution.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• Science is the study of those things that can be reduced to the study of other things.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• The general systems movement has taken up the task of helping scientists unravel complexity, technologists to master it, and others to learn to live with it.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• There is a hope, which I nurse but I don't see being realized, that eventually we'll find that quantum mechanics as we know it now is just an approximation ...

  — Gerald Weinberg

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

  — Gerald Weinberg

• 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.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• The principle is simple and powerful enough to be Marvin's Fourth Great Secret: If what they've been doing hasn't solved the problem, tell them to do something else.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• I managed to get a quick PhD — though when I got it I knew almost nothing about physics. But I did learn one big thing: that no one knows everything, and you don't have to.

  — Gerald Weinberg

• Finally, learn something about the history of science, or at a minimum the history of your own branch of science. The least important reason for this is that the history may actually be of some use to you in your own scientific work.

  — Gerald Weinberg