Top 100 Feynman's Quotes
#2. If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.
Richard Feynman
#3. The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.
Richard P. Feynman
#4. Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen.
Richard P. Feynman
#5. It is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions.
Richard P. Feynman
#6. Philosophers have said before that one of the fundamental requisites of science is that whenever you set up the same conditions, the same thing must happen. This is simply not true, it is not a fundamental condition of science.
Richard Feynman
#7. The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read.
Richard Feynman
#8. From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are, of course, in the new places, the places where the rules do not work - not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules.
Richard P. Feynman
#9. In the Raphael Room, the secret turned out to be that only some of the paintings were made by the great master; the rest were made by students. I had liked the ones by Raphael. This was a big jab for my self-confidence in my ability to appreciate art.
Richard P. Feynman
#10. All the evidence, experimental and even a little theoretical, seems to indicate that it is the energy content which is involved in gravitation, and therefore, since matter and antimatter both represent positive energies, gravitation makes no distinction.
Richard P. Feynman
#11. But the real glory of science is that we can find a way of thinking such that the law is evident.
Richard P. Feynman
#12. It is the fact that the electrons cannot all get on top of each other that makes tables and everything else solid.
Richard P. Feynman
#13. Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected.
Richard P. Feynman
#16. Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next? - RICHARD P. FEYNMAN
James Gleick
#18. Don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote,
Richard Feynman
#20. You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird ... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing
that's what counts.
Richard Feynman
#22. This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!
Richard Feynman
#23. It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing. It
Richard Feynman
#24. The little cathedral made with matchsticks is attracted to the earth, so to make a comparison the big cathedral should be attracted to an even bigger earth. Too bad. A bigger earth would attract it even more, and the sticks would break even more surely!
Richard Feynman
#25. I don't like honors ... 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.
Richard P. Feynman
#26. We can't define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into the paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers ... one saying to the other: you don't know what you are talking about! The second one says: what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?
Richard Feynman
#27. The situation in the sciences is this: A concept or an idea which cannot be measured or cannot be referred directly to experiment may or may not be useful. It need not exist in a theory.
Richard P. Feynman
#28. [Richard Feynman] truly believed that if you couldn't explain something simply, you didn't understand it.
Leonard Susskind
#29. Outside of their particular area of expertise scientists are just as dumb as the next person.
Richard P. Feynman
#30. The conservation of energy is a little more difficult, because this time we have a number which is not changed in time, but this number does not represent any particular thing. I
Richard Feynman
#31. The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.
Richard P. Feynman
#32. God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand.
Richard P. Feynman
#33. Professor Feynman?" "Hey! Why are you bothering me at this time in the morning?" "I thought you'd like to know that you've won the Nobel Prize." "Yeah, but I'm sleeping! It would have been better if you had called me in the morning." - and I hung up.
Richard Feynman
#35. It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is
Richard P. Feynman
#36. There is also a rhythm and a pattern between the phenomena of nature which is not apparent to the eye, but only to the eye of analysis; and it is these rhythms and patterns which we call Physical Laws. What
Richard Feynman
#37. I got a fancy reputation. During high school, every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew.
Richard P. Feynman
#38. You might ask why we cannot teach physics by just giving the basic laws on page one and then showing how they work in all possible circumstances, as we do in Euclidean geometry, where we state the axioms and then make all sorts of deductions. (So,
Richard Feynman
#39. What a contrast - the person sitting at the table gets this nice cake on a doilied plate, while the pantry man back there with the stubby thumbs is saying, 'Damn deez doilies!'" So that was the difference between the real world and what it looked like.
Richard Feynman
#40. See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
Richard P. Feynman
#41. It is always good to know which ideas cannot be checked directly, but it is not necessary to remove them all. It is not true that we can pursue science completely by using only those concepts which are directly subject to experiment.
Richard P. Feynman
#42. If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell 'friend,' I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend.
Richard P. Feynman
#43. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that's the end of you.
Richard Feynman
#45. As usual, nature's imagination far surpasses our own, as we have seen from the other theories which are subtle and deep.
Richard P. Feynman
#46. I learned from my father to translate: everything I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it's really saying.
Richard Feynman
#47. It's the way I study - to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.
Richard P. Feynman
#48. It doesn't make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn't make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong.
Richard Feynman
#49. 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.
Richard P. Feynman
#50. If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 1 in 100,000, I know he's full of crap.
Richard P. Feynman
#51. Before I was born, my father told my mother, 'If it's a boy, he's going to be a scientist.'
Richard P. Feynman
#52. We need to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed. It's OK to say, "I don't know."
Richard P. Feynman
#53. The Feynman quip is not without a philosopher's tu quoque: "most scientists tend to understand little more about science than fish about hydrodynamics" (Lakatos 1978:62 n.2).
Robert Nola
#54. It's all generated, maybe, by the fact that the attitude of the populace is to try to find the answer instead of trying to find a man who has a way of getting at the answer.
Richard Feynman
#58. We are not to tell nature what she's gotta be. She's always got better imagination than we have.
Richard P. Feynman
#59. I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way - by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
Richard Feynman
#60. It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.
Richard P. Feynman
#61. I have no responsibility to live up to what others expect of me. That's their mistake, not my failing.
Richard Feynman
#62. Once you start doubting, just like you're supposed to doubt, you ask me if the science is true. You say no, we don't know what's true, we're trying to find out and everything is possibly wrong.
Richard Feynman
#63. Einstein's gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea.
Richard P. Feynman
#64. The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's the most interesting: the part that doesn't go according to what you expected.
Richard P. Feynman
#65. So far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, like Newton's equations, are reversible.
Richard P. Feynman
#66. Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.
Richard P. Feynman
#67. You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.
Richard Feynman
#68. When you're young, you have all these things to worry about - should
you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but
then something else comes up. It's much easier to just plain decide. Never
mind - nothing is going to change your mind.
Richard Feynman
#69. There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!
Richard P. Feynman
#70. I think nature's imagination Is so much greater than man's, she's never going to let us relax
Richard Feynman
#71. I got a signed document from Bullock's saying that they had such-and-such drawings on consignment. Of course, nobody bought any of them, but otherwise, I was a big success: I had my drawings on sale at Bullock's!
Richard P. Feynman
#72. It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about we can discuss.
Richard P. Feynman
#73. That's the trouble with not being in your own field: You don't take it seriously.
Richard Feynman
#75. Some people think Wheeler's gotten crazy in his later years, but he's always been crazy.
Richard P. Feynman
#76. 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
#77. By honest I don't mean that you only tell what's true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind.
Richard P. Feynman
#78. I don't understand what it's all about or what's worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.
Richard P. Feynman
#79. So the librarians at UCLA worked very hard to find another copy of Villacorta's rendition of the Dresden Codex, and lent it to me.
Richard Feynman
#80. It's amazing how many people even today use a computer to do something you can do with a pencil and paper in less time.
Richard P. Feynman
#81. The Quantum Universe has a quotation from me in every chapter - but it's a damn good book anyway.
Richard P. Feynman
#82. 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.
Richard P. Feynman
#83. 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.
Richard P. Feynman
#84. The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination, in a tight straightjacket.
Richard Feynman
#85. No man is rich who is unsatisfied, but who wants nothing possess his heart's desire.
Richard P. Feynman
#86. When the problem [quantum chromodynamics] is finally solved, it will all be by imagination. Then there will be some big thing about the great way it was done. But it's simple -it will all be by imagination, and persistence.
Richard P. Feynman
#87. 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.
Richard P. Feynman
#88. I won't have anything to do with the Nobel Prize ... it's a pain in the ... (LAUGHS). I don't like honors.
Richard Feynman
#89. Computer science is not as old as physics; it lags by a couple of hundred years. However, this does not mean that there is significantly less on the computer scientist's plate than on the physicist's: younger it may be, but it has had a far more intense upbringing!
Richard P. Feynman
#90. You know, you're never going to draw again."
"What? That's ridiculous! Why should I never..."
"Because you've had a one-man show, and you're only an amareur.
Richard Feynman
#91. So when you try to squeeze light too much to make sure it's going in only a straight line, it refuses to cooperate and begins to spread out.
Richard Feynman
#92. We decided that 'trivial' means 'proved'. So we joked with the mathematicians: We have a new theorem- that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that's proved is trivial.
Richard P. Feynman
#93. When I tried to show him how an electromagnet works by making a little coil of wire and hanging a nail on a piece of string, I put the voltage on, the nail swung into the coil, and Jerry said, Ooh! It's just like fucking!
Richard Feynman
#94. Quarks came in a number of varieties - in fact, at first, only three were needed to explain all the hundreds of particles and the different kinds of quarks - they are called u-type, d-type, s-type.
Richard P. Feynman
#95. Well, I have been working on my own theory for twelve years," and then he proceeded to describe it in excruciating detail. When he was finished, Feynman turned to me and said, in front of the man who had just proudly described his work, "That's exactly what I mean about wasting your time.
Leonard Mlodinow
#96. I am not interested in what today's mathematicians find interesting.
Richard P. Feynman
#97. 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.
Richard P. Feynman
#98. Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Richard Feynman
#99. Working out another system to replace Newton's laws took a long time because phenomena at the atomic level were quite strange. One had to lose one's common sense in order to perceive what was happening at the atomic level.
Richard P. Feynman
#100. 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.
Richard P. Feynman
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