Top 465 Quotes & Sayings by Richard P. Feynman - Page 6

(Joan,1941) She wrote me a letter asking,"How can I read it?,Its so hard." I told her to start at the beginning and read as far as you can get until you're lost. Then start again at the beginning and keep working through until you can understand the whole book. And thats what she did

A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.

In any organization there ought to be the possibility of discussion... fence sitting is an art, and it's difficult, and it's important to do, rather than to go headlong in one direction or the other. It's just better to have action, isn't it than to sit on the fence? Not if you're not sure which way to go, it isn't.

The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. ... If you will simply admit that maybe Nature does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possible avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

If I say [electrons] behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before.

Nature's imagination far surpasses our own.

Don't worry about anything. Go out and have a good time.

It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.

Everything is made of atoms.

The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas brought in - a trial and error system.

This is not yet a scientific age.

You see, the chemists have a complicated way of counting: instead of saying "one, two, three, four, five protons", they say, "hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron."

It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.

The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way someday.

I am not interested in what today's mathematicians find interesting.

I have argued flying saucers with lots of people. I was interested in possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it's possible or not but whether it's going on or not.

Just as a poet often has license from the rules of grammar and pronunciation, we should like to ask for 'physicists' license from the rules of mathematics in order to express what we wish to say in as simple a manner as possible.

What I can't create I don't understand

To guess what to keep and what to throw away takes considerable skill. Actually it is probably merely a matter of luck, but it looks as if it takes considerable skill.

The same equations have the same solutions

There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower.

Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.

Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going," wrote Feynman, "but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly.

In its efforts to learn as much as possible about nature, modern physics has found that certain things can never be "known" with certainty. Much of our knowledge must always remain uncertain. The most we can know is in terms of probabilities.

Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it's a wonderful problem, because it doesn't look so easy.

If you don't like it, go somewhere else, to another universe where the rules are simpler.

To test whether you have learned an idea or a definition, rephrase what you just learned without using the new word.

It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand.

As you know, a theory in physics is not useful unless it is able to predict underlined effects which we would otherwise expect.

I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something. How careful you have to be about checking your experiments. How easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something.

I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.

I have to disregard everybody else, and then I can do my own work.

A person talks in such generalities that everyone can understand him and it's considered to be some deep philosophy. However, I would like to be very rather more special and I would like to be understood in an honest way, rather than in a vague way.

Another of the qualities of science is that it teaches the value of rational thought, as well as the importance of freedom of thought; the positive results that come from doubting that all the lessons are true... Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

The unanswerable mysteries... the attitude that all is uncertain... to summarize it - the humility of the intellect.

Today's brains are yesterday's mashed potatoes.

I think, however, that there isn't any solution to this problem of education other than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher - a situation in which the student discusses the ideas, thinks about the things, and talks about the things. It's impossible to learn very much by simply sitting in a lecture, or even by simply doing problems that are assigned. But in our modern times we have so many students to teach that we have to try to find some substitute for the ideal.

If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery.

The most important thing I found out from my father is that if you asked any question and pursued it deeply enough, then at the end there was a glorious discovery of a general and beautiful kind.

Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.

Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn.

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!" "Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

That is the logical tight-rope on which we have to walk if we wish to interpret nature.

There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation.

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.

One cannot understand... the universality of laws of nature, the relationship of things, without an understanding of mathematics. There is no other way to do it.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of stars-mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? ...What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it.

Strange! I don't understand how it is that we can write mathematical expressions and calculate what the thing is going to do without being able to picture it.

There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble.

This attitude of mind - this attitude of uncertainty - is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire. It becomes a habit of thought. Once acquired, we cannot retreat from it anymore.

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.

The shell game that we play ... is technically called 'renormalization'. But no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It's surprising that the theory still hasn't been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate.

I think Nature's imagination is so much greater than man's, she's never gonna let us relax!

The problem of creating something new, but which is consistent with everything which has been seen before, is one of extreme difficulty.

You know how it always is, every new idea, it takes a generation or two until it becomes obvious that there's no real problem. It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.

You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things... It doesn't frighten me.

All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it.

There are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess.

To do any important work in physics a very good mathematical ability and aptitude are required. Some work in applications can be done without this, but it will not be very inspired. If you must satisfy your "personal curiosity concerning the mysteries of nature" what will happen if these mysteries turn out to be laws expressed in mathematical terms (as they do turn out to be)? You cannot understand the physical world in any deep or satisfying way without using mathematical reasoning with facility.

I don't believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere, I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something. I'm making some contribution." It's just psychological.