Top 465 Quotes & Sayings by Richard P. Feynman - Page 5

Light is something like raindrops each little lump of light is called a photon and if the light is all one color, all the "raindrops" are the same.

The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language.

So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?" "No," I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely." At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?" But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible.

Our poets do not write about it; our artists do not try to portray this remarkable thing. I don't know why. Is nobody inspired by our present picture of the universe? The value of science remains unsung by singers... This is not yet a scientific age.

I don't feel frightened by not knowing things.

The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things.

Nature has a great simplicity and therefore a great beauty.

The Quantum Universe has a quotation from me in every chapter - but it's a damn good book anyway.

I don't like honors. I'm appreciated for the work that I did, and for people who appreciate it, and I notice that other physicists use my work. I don't need anything else. I don't think there's any sense to anything else.... I've already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me. I don't believe in honors... I can't stand it, it hurts me.

But logic is not all, one needs one's heart to follow an idea.

It is the fact that the electrons cannot all get on top of each other that makes tables and everything else solid.

It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science. It is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition. That is indeed difficult.

The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination, in a tight straightjacket.

When you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you've told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway.

Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it

So far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, like Newton's equations, are reversible.

The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry... The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.

Once we were driving in the midwest and we pulled into a McDonald's. Someone came up to me and asked me why I have Feynman diagrams all over my van. I replied, "Because I am Feynman!" The young man went, "Ahhhhh!"

[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is - absurd.

It is the facts that matter, not the proofs. Physics can progress without the proofs, but we can't go on without the facts ... if the facts are right, then the proofs are a matter of playing around with the algebra correctly.

[When a young person loses faith in his religion because he begins to study science and its methodology] it isn't that [through the obtaining of real knowledge that] he knows it all, but he suddenly realizes that he doesn't know it all.

Some people say, "How can you live without knowing?" I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.

Since then I never pay attention to anything by "experts". I calculate everything myself.

It is simple, therefore it is beautiful

No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.

We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.

We are not to tell nature what she’s gotta be... She's always got better imagination than we have.

It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations.

You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.

If there is something very slightly wrong in our definition of the theories, then the full mathematical rigor may convert these errors into ridiculous conclusions.

An ordinary fool isn't a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!

The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment.

I don't have to be good because they think I'm going to be good.

A philosopher once said, 'It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results.' Well, they don't!

We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt.

When you're thinking about something that you don't understand, you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion... Now, is the confusion's because we're all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid working against this, trying to figure out [how] to put the two sticks together to reach the banana and we can't quite make it... So I always feel stupid. Once in a while, though, the sticks go together on me and I reach the banana.

You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.

If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.

[B]eyond poverty, beyond the point that the material needs are reasonably satisfied, only from within is peace.

I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.

Science is of value because it can produce something.

Nature does not care what we call it, she just keeps on doing it.

I think I can safely say that nobody understands Quantum Mechanics.

A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood... How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong... As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge which is hard to recover from.

I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.

As usual, nature's imagination far surpasses our own, as we have seen from the other theories which are subtle and deep.

I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.

I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without any purpose - which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me.

The scale of light can be described by numbers called the frequency and as the numbers get higher, the light goes from red to blue to ultraviolet. We can't see ultraviolet light, but it can affect photographic plates. It's still light only the number is different.

But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.

There’s so much distance between the fundamental rules and the final phenomenon, that it’s almost unbelievable that the final variety of phenomenon can come from such a steady operation of such simple rules.

In fact, the science of thermodynamics began with an analysis, by the great engineer Sadi Carnot, of the problem of how to build the best and most efficient engine, and this constitutes one of the few famous cases in which engineering has contributed to fundamental physical theory. Another example that comes to mind is the more recent analysis of information theory by Claude Shannon. These two analyses, incidentally, turn out to be closely related.

Energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right.

The exception tests the rule.

I love only nature, and I hate mathematicians.

All we know so far is what doesn't work.