Science Quote by Steven Weinberg

Weinberg’s line lands like a compliment that turns, mid-sentence, into an indictment. He takes the reassuring cultural figure of “the expert” and reframes them as a specialist in polish: someone so trained in precision that they can glide past trivia-level mistakes while carrying a much larger, unexamined assumption to its logical disaster. The joke is not anti-intellectual; it’s anti-complacency. Expertise, he implies, can become a kind of aerodynamic confidence.

The specific intent reads as a warning from inside the priesthood. Coming from a scientist who helped build the modern Standard Model, Weinberg isn’t sneering at knowledge; he’s pointing to a failure mode of it. Scientific culture rewards clean derivations, careful error bars, and mastery of technique. Those skills are real. But they can also become a shield: if the calculations are flawless, who wants to question the premises? “Grand fallacy” names the meta-error - the worldview, model choice, or institutional consensus that quietly determines what counts as a “small error” in the first place.

The subtext is about prestige and momentum. Experts often inherit frameworks rather than choose them, and the more sunk cost and status attached, the harder it is to stop and ask whether the whole project is pointed the wrong way. Weinberg’s irony is that expertise can minimize local risk while maximizing systemic risk: fewer typos, bigger catastrophes.

Contextually, it fits a late-20th-century scientist’s skepticism toward fashionable theories and overconfident extrapolations - and it plays neatly in our own era of credential worship and technocratic certainty. It’s not “trust no one.” It’s “watch the assumptions, especially when the person speaking sounds hardest to argue with.”