Top 100 Quotes About Feynman
#1. 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
#2. [Richard Feynman] truly believed that if you couldn't explain something simply, you didn't understand it.
Leonard Susskind
#3. 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
#4. Some people make a great mystery of this idea, sometimes called the multiverse concept, but these are just different expressions of the Feynman sum over histories.
Stephen Hawking
#5. I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there. - Richard Feynman
James Gleick
#6. Feynman once said, 'Science is imagination in a straitjacket.' It is ironic that in the case of quantum mechanics, the people without the straitjackets are generally the nuts.
Lawrence M. Krauss
#7. 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
#8. Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times.
James Gleick
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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.
Richard P. Feynman
#12. Richard Feynman once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't.
Steven Pinker
#13. "Half genius and half buffoon," Freeman Dyson ... wrote ... [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American-unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science.
James Gleick
#14. 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
#15. The third quality that is needed for a scientist to become a public icon is wisdom. Besides being a famous joker and a famous genius, Feynman was also a wise human being whose answers to serious questions made sense.
Freeman Dyson
#16. 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
#17. Richard Feynman famously said that the first step in discovering a new physical law is to guess it. It
Jason Wilkes
#18. If Feynman could see beauty as the inspiration for the theory of the rainbow, and if an electron could behave like a wave, and light like a particle, then the little contradiction of Leonard flitting among different subfields of physics, or even among varied careers, would not shake the universe.
Anonymous
#19. In 1965, physicist Richard Feynman opined, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," and the sentiment is equally applicable today.
Sean Carroll
#20. New knowledge enhances an ever increasing sense of our own ignorance. The more we know, the more we know we don't know. Feynman called it 'the expanding frontier of ignorance'.
Matt Baldwin
#21. I wonder how Feynman would feel if he had to be talking to not just a few nuts of this kind but e.g. to 2,500 similar nuts who would be moreover described by the media as good scientists, if not the best ones in the world. ;-) Good for him that he managed to die in time.
Lubos Motl
#22. 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
#23. I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will go "down the drain" into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. - Nobel physicist Richard Feynman
Robert Lanza
#24. Dick Feynman was a genius of visualization (he was also no slouch with equations): he made a mental picture of anything he was working on. While others were writing blackboard-filling formulas to express the laws of elementary particles, he would just draw a picture and figure out the answer.
Leonard Susskind
#25. His colleague Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particles partons16, as in Dolly, but was over-ruled. Instead they became known as quarks.
Bill Bryson
#26. Feynman once wrote, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
Stephen Hawking
#28. 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
#29. All our bright minds," Feynman said sardonically, "and we can't figure how to stop the enemy from dumping dirt on us." Freeman said with delicate precision, "We are hothouse flowers, really. Not made for the blunt edge of war." Nods
Gregory Benford
#30. The great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be: "All things are made of atoms.
Bill Bryson
#31. Feynman resented the polished myths of most scientific history, submerging the false steps and halting uncertainties under a surface of orderly intellectual progress, but he created a myth of his own.
James Gleick
#33. If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.
Richard Feynman
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. But the real glory of science is that we can find a way of thinking such that the law is evident.
Richard P. Feynman
#43. 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
#44. 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
#48. 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
#50. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Outside of their particular area of expertise scientists are just as dumb as the next person.
Richard P. Feynman
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand.
Richard P. Feynman
#63. It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is
Richard P. Feynman
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
Richard P. Feynman
#69. 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
#70. Science is a process for learning about nature in which competing ideas about how the world works are measured against observations.
Richard P. Feynman
#71. I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.
Richard P. Feynman
#72. I dedicate this lecture to showing what ridiculous conclusions and rare statements such a man as myself can make. I wish, therefore, to destroy any image of authority that has previously been generated.
Richard Feynman
#73. 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.
Richard Feynman
#74. Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn.
Richard Feynman
#75. Observation, reason, and experiment make up what we call the scientific method.
Richard P. Feynman
#76. (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
Richard Feynman
#77. I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something you're more familiar with, because I do not understand it in terms of something you are more familiar with.
Richard Feynman
#79. You see, I get so much fun out of thinking that I don't want to destroy this pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick.
Richard Feynman
#80. 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
#81. 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 ...
Richard P. Feynman
#82. I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.
Richard P. Feynman
#83. Turbulence is the most important unsolved problem of classical physics.
Richard P. Feynman
#84. Religion gives inspiration to act well. Not only that, it gives inspiration to the arts and to many other activities of human beings.
Richard Feynman
#86. Mathematics is not a science from our point of view, in the sense that it is not a natural science. The test of its validity is not experiment.
Richard Feynman
#87. Once you have a computer that can do a few things - strictly speaking, one that has a certain 'sufficient set' of basic procedures - it can do basically anything any other computer can do. This, loosely, is the basis of the great principle of 'Universality'.
Richard P. Feynman
#88. 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.
Richard Feynman
#89. I think we should teach them [the people] wonders and that the purpose of knowledge is to appreciate wonders even more.
Richard Feynman
#90. The beauty that is there is also available for me, too. But I see a deeper beauty that isn't so readily available to others ... I don't see how studying a flower ever detracts from its beauty. It only adds
Richard P. Feynman
#91. It is impossible, by the way, when picking one example of anything, to avoid picking one which is atypical in some sense.
Richard P. Feynman
#92. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty
some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.
Richard P. Feynman
#93. All the time you're saying to yourself, 'I could do that, but I won't,' - which is just another way of saying that you can't.
Richard Feynman
#94. The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
Richard P. Feynman
#96. Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad - but it does not carry instructions on how to use it.
Richard P. Feynman
#97. I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.
Richard P. Feynman
#98. Everybody who reasons carefully about anything is making a contribution ... and if you abstract it away and send it to the Department of Mathematics they put it in books.
Richard P. Feynman
#99. 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.
Richard P. Feynman
#100. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation.
Richard P. Feynman
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