A Quote by Leonard Susskind

[Richard Feynman] truly believed that if you couldn't explain something simply, you didn't understand it.

Leonard Susskind

Quote Topics

Believed Explain Richard Richard Feynman Simply Something Truly Understand

Quote Author

Leonard Susskind
American - Physicist
Born: January 1, 1940

Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.

Bill Bryson

Brighter Than a Thousand Suns' by Robert Jungk and 'Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!' by Richard Feynman were both books my father purchased for me when I was in high school. Both left a lasting impression on me, because they chronicle the lives of some of the most creative scientists of the 21st century.

Baiju Bhatt

My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorse—and, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the truth of—a proposition that I don't understand. So far, my faith is not unlike religious faith, but I am not in the slightest bit motivated to go to my death rather than recant the formulas of physics. Watch: E doesn't equal mc2, it doesn't, it doesn't! I was lying, so there!

Daniel Dennett

Theorists write all the popular books on science: Heinz Pagels, Frank Wilczek, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, et al. And why not? They have all that spare time.

Leon M. Lederman

The late Richard Feynman, a superb physicist, said once as we talked about the laser that the way to tell a great idea is that, when people hear it, they say, 'Gee, I could have thought of that.'

Charles Hard Townes

If you really understand something, you can: 1) explain it using a clear metaphor and 2) explain the strongest counter-argument to the idea.

Ben Casnocha

Feynman's cryptic remark, "no one is that much smarter ...," to me, implies something Feynman kept emphasizing: that the key to his achievements was not anything "magical" but the right attitude, the focus on nature's reality, the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for phoniness, self-deception, bombast, and conventional but unproven assumptions.

Philip Warren Anderson

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

Albert Einstein

If you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it enough.

Albert Einstein

Truly powerful people don't explain why they want respect. They simply don't engage someone who doesn't give it to them.

Sherry Argov

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!"

Richard P. Feynman

How do you explain to somebody who doesn't understand that you don't build a library to read. A library is a resource. Something you go to, for reference, as and when. But also something you simply look at, because it gives you succour, answers to some idea of who you are or, more to the point, who you would like to be, who you will be once you own every book you need to own.

Howard Jacobson

Richard Nixon had a kind of Walter Mitty fantasy life. He was a man with a grandiose thoughts: dreams of not simply being president but maybe becoming one of the truly great presidents of American history.

Robert Dallek

I think when things happen in our lives that we can't truly understand why they destroy us, it's because we can't truly understand or communicate it to anyone else. And that is what is destructive - you can't communicate it to the people that you love and it makes things deteriorate. Or you're hiding from yourself, or you're hiding from somebody else, and that was really fascinating to me... that life isn't like the movies and you can't always point to one thing and explain why you did things that ended up hurting you.

Linda Cardellini

I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Roger Ebert

For [Richard] Feynman, the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must match reality. It must match what is already known. Scientific creativity is imagination in a straitjacket.

James Gleick

A Quote by Leonard Susskind

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors