Nobel Prize laureate Steven Weinberg was the first official recipient of FFRF’s Emperor Has No Clothes Award, which he accepted in November 1999 at the annual convention in San Antonio, Texas.
Weinberg received the honor for a widely reprinted remark at a conference in April 1999 in Washington, D.C.: “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, 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.”
Weinberg, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Texas-Austin at the time, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979 with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam for contributions to the “theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.”
Weinberg, 82, received the National Medal of Science in 1991 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society in 2004, with a citation that said he’s “considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive in the world today.”
