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Don't Think About What You Want To Be, But What You Want To Do. Keep Up Some Kind Of A Minimum With Other Things So That Society Doesn't Stop You From Doing Anything At All.

-Richard P. Feynman

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Don't Think About What

Richard P. Feynman

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Don't Think About What You Want To Be, But What You Want To Do. Keep Up Some Kind Of A Minimum With Other Things So That Society Doesn't Stop You From Doing Anything At All.

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More From Richard P. Feynman

The "paradox" Is Only A Conflict Between Reality And Your Feeling Of What Reality "ought To Be."

The Only Way To Have Real Success In Science, The Field I'm Familiar With, Is To Describe The Evidence Very Carefully Without Regard To The Way You Feel It Should Be. If You Have A Theory , You Must Try To Explain What's Good And What's Bad About It Equally. In Science, You Learn A Kind Of Standard Integrity And Honesty .

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.

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.

Unless A Thing Can Be Defined By Measurement, It Has No Place In A Theory. And Since An Accurate Value Of The Momentum Of A Localized Particle Cannot Be Defined By Measurement It Therefore Has No Place In The Theory.

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.

I Think I Can Safely Say That Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics.

The Game I Play Is A Very Interesting One. It's Imagination, In A Tight Straightjacket.

The Unanswerable Mysteries... The Attitude That All Is Uncertain... To Summarize It - The Humility Of The Intellect.

What I Cannot Create, I Do Not Understand.

The Chance Is High That The Truth Lies In The Fashionable Direction. But, On The Off-chance That It Is In Another Direction - A Direction Obvious From An Unfashionable View Of Field Theory - Who Will Find It? Only Someone Who Has Sacrificed Himself By Teaching Himself Quantum Electrodynamics From A Peculiar And Unusual Point Of View; One That He May Have To Invent For Himself.

If Science Is To Progress, What We Need Is The Ability To Experiment, Honesty In Reporting Results—the Results Must Be Reported Without Somebody Saying What They Would Like The Results To Have Been—and Finally—an Important Thing—the Intelligence To Interpret The Results.

Do Not Read So Much, Look About You And Think Of What You See There.

I Believe That A Scientist Looking At Nonscientific Problems Is Just As Dumb As The Next Guy.

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.

If I Could Explain It To The Average Person, I Wouldn't Have Been Worth The Nobel Prize.

No Problem Is Too Small Or Too Trivial If We Can Really Do Something About It.

It Is Important To Realize That In Physics Today, We Have No Knowledge Of What Energy Is

Since Then I Never Pay Attention To Anything By "experts". I Calculate Everything Myself.

Why Make Yourself Miserable Saying Things Like, "why Do We Have Such Bad Luck? What Has God Done To Us? What Have We Done To Deserve This?" - All Of Which, If You Understand Reality And Take It Completely Into Your Heart, Are Irrelevant And Unsolvable. They Are Just Things That Nobody Can Know. Your Situation Is Just An Accident Of Life.

I Think Nature's Imagination Is So Much Greater Than Man's, She's Never Gonna Let Us Relax!

Work Hard To Find Something That Fascinates You.

We Are At The Very Beginning Of Time For The Human Race. It Is Not Unreasonable That We Grapple With Problems. But There Are Tens Of Thousands Of Years In The Future. Our Responsibility Is To Do What We Can, Learn What We Can, Improve The Solutions, And Pass Them On.

One Does Not, By Knowing All The Physical Laws As We Know Them Today, Immediately Obtain An Understanding Of Anything Much. I Love Only Nature, And I Hate Mathematicians.

God Was Invented To Explain Mystery. God Is Always Invented To Explain Those Things That You Do Not Understand.

The Quantum Universe Has A Quotation From Me In Every Chapter - But It's A Damn Good Book Anyway.

From A Long View Of The History Of Mankind The Most Significant Event Of The Nineteenth Century Will Be Judged As Maxwell's Discovery Of The Laws Of Electrodynamics.

Tell Your Son To Stop Trying To Fill Your Head With Science - For To Fill Your Heart With Love Is Enough!

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.

While I Am Describing To You How Nature Works, You Won't Understand Why Nature Works That Way. But You See, Nobody Understands That.

Science Is A Way To Teach How Something Gets To Be Known, What Is Not Known, To What Extent Things Are Known (for Nothing Is Known Absolutely), How To Handle Doubt And Uncertainty, What The Rules Of Evidence Are, How To Think About Things So That Judgments Can Be Made, How To Distinguish Truth From Fraud, And From Show.

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.

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.

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 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!

The Game I Play Is A Very Interesting One. It's Imagination In A Straightjacket, Which Is This: That It Has To Agree With The Known Laws Of Physics. ... It Requires Imagination To Think Of What's Possible, And Then It Requires An Analysis Back, Checking To See Whether It Fits, Whether Its Allowed, According To What's Known, Okay?

It Is The Fact That The Electrons Cannot All Get On Top Of Each Other That Makes Tables And Everything Else Solid.

On The Contrary, It's Because Somebody Knows Something About It That We Can't Talk About Physics . It's The Things That Nobody Knows Anything About That We Can Discuss. We Can Talk About The Weather; We Can Talk About Social Problems; We Can Talk About Psychology; We Can Talk About International Finance Gold Transfers We Can't Talk About, Because Those Are Understood So It's The Subject That Nobody Knows Anything About That We Can All Talk About!

Science Is Of Value Because It Can Produce Something.

The Fundamental Principle Of Science, The Definition Almost, Is This: The Sole Test Of The Validity Of Any Idea Is Experiment.

What Is Necessary For 'the Very Existence Of Science,' And What The Characteristics Of Nature Are, Are Not To Be Determined By Pompous Preconditions, They Are Determined Always By The Material With Which We Work, By Nature Herself. We Look, And We See What We Find, And We Cannot Say Ahead Of Time Successfully What It Is Going To Look Like. ... It Is Necessary For The Very Existence Of Science That Minds Exist Which Do Not Allow That Nature Must Satisfy Some Preconceived Conditions.

The Thing That Doesn't Fit Is The Thing That Is Most Interesting.

Most Interesting

Science Is Like Sex: Sometimes Something Useful Comes Out, But That Is Not The Reason We Are Doing It

I'd Hate To Die Twice. It's So Boring.

The Truth Always Turns Out To Be Simpler Than You Thought.

Science Is What We Have Learned About How To Keep From Fooling Ourselves.

Fooling Ourselves

Nature Does Not Care What We Call It, She Just Keeps On Doing It.

The Other Thing That Gives A Scientific Man The Creeps In The World Today Are The Methods Of Choosing Leaders - In Every Nation. Today, For Example, In The United States, The Two Political Parties Have Decided To Employ Public Relations Men, That Is, Advertising Men, Who Are Trained In The Necessary Methods Of Telling The Truth Or Lying In Order To Develop A Product.

Nature's Imagination Far Surpasses Our Own.

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.

I Do Believe That There Is A Conflict Between Science And Religion ... The Spirit Or Attitude Toward The Facts Is Different In Religion From What It Is In Science. The Uncertainty That Is Necessary In Order To Appreciate Nature Is Not Easily Correlated With The Feeling Of Certainty In Faith.

I Love Only Nature, And I Hate Mathematicians.

The Inside Of A Computer Is As Dumb As Hell But It Goes Like Mad!

The Same Equations Have The Same Solutions

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.

The First Principle Is That You Must Not Fool Yourself And You Are The Easiest Person To Fool.

I Would Rather Have Questions That Can't Be Answered Than Answers That Can't Be Questioned.

As Revealed By Physics, The Truth Is So Remarkable, So Amazing!

What Did You Ask At School Today?

The Test Of All Knowledge Is Experiment.

Mathematics Is Not Just A Language. Mathematics Is A Language Plus Reasoning.

If All Of This, All The Life Of A Stream Of Water, Can Be Nothing But A Pile Of Atoms, How Much More Is Possible?

People Are Always Asking For The Latest Developments In The Unification Of This Theory With That Theory, And They Don't Give Us A Chance To Tell Them Anything About What We Know Pretty Well. They Always Want To Know The Things We Don't Know.

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.

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!"

There Is One Simplification At Least. Electrons Behave ... In Exactly The Same Way As Photons; They Are Both Screwy, But In Exactly In The Same Way.

Know How To Solve Every Problem That Has Been Solved.

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.

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.

I Wonder Why. I Wonder Why. I Wonder Why I Wonder.

All We Know So Far Is What Doesn't Work.

It Is Our Responsibility To Leave The People Of The Future A Free Hand.

We Can Deduce, Often, From One Part Of Physics Like The Law Of Gravitation, A Principle Which Turns Out To Be Much More Valid Than The Derivation.

Work As Hard And As Much As You Want To On The Things You Like To Do The Best.

Things You Like

People Often Think I'm A Faker, But I'm Usually Honest, In A Certain Way--in Such A Way That Often Nobody Believes Me!

Thank You Very Much, I Enjoyed Myself

If You Keep Proving Stuff That Others Have Done, Getting Confidence, Increasing The Complexities Of Your Solutions - For The Fun Of It - Then One Day You'll Turn Around And Discover That Nobody Actually Did That One! And That's The Way To Become A Computer Scientist.

Any Schemes - Such As 'think Of Symmetry Laws', Or 'put The Information In Mathematical Form', Or 'guess Equations'- Are Known To Everybody Now, And They Are All Tried All The Time. When You Are Stuck, The Answer Cannot Be One Of These, Because You Will Have Tried These Right Away...the Next Scheme, The New Discovery, Is Going To Be Made In A Completely Different Way.

All Theoretical Chemistry Is Really Physics; And All Theoretical Chemists Know It.

The Electron Is A Theory We Use; It Is So Useful In Understanding The Way Nature Works That We Can Almost Call It Real.

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.

It Is Our Responsibility As Scientists, Knowing The Great Progress Which Comes From A Satisfactory Philosophy Of Ignorance, The Great Progress Which Is The Fruit Of Freedom Of Thought, To Proclaim The Value Of This Freedom; To Teach How Doubt Is Not To Be Feared But Welcomed And Discussed; And To Demand This Freedom As Our Duty To All Coming Generations.

For A Successful Technology, Reality Must Take Precedence Over Public Relations, For Nature Cannot Be Fooled.

Study Hard What Interests You The Most In The Most Undisciplined, Irreverent And Original Manner Possible.

Everything Is Made Of Atoms.

This Is The Key Of Modern Science And Is The Beginning Of The True Understanding Of Nature. This Idea. That To Look At The Things, To Record The Details, And To Hope That In The Information Thus Obtained, May Lie A Clue To One Or Another Of A Possible Theoretical Interpretation.

Physicists Like To Think That All You Have To Do Is Say, These Are The Conditions, Now What Happens Next?

Physics Is To Mathematics What Sex Is To Masturbation.

Doubt Is Clearly A Value In Science. It Is Important To Doubt And That The Doubt Is Not A Fearful Thing, But A Thing Of Great Value.

There Is No Harm In Doubt And Skepticism, For It Is Through These That New Discoveries Are Made.

It Is In The Admission Of Ignorance And The Admission Of Uncertainty That There Is A Hope For The Continuous Motion Of Human Beings In Some Direction That Doesn't Get Confined, Permanently Blocked, As It Has So Many Times Before In Various Periods In The History Of Man.

Don't Think About What You Want To Be, But What You Want To Do. Keep Up Some Kind Of A Minimum With Other Things So That Society Doesn't Stop You From Doing Anything At All.

There Are Thousands Of Years In The Past, And There Is An Unknown Amount Of Time In The Future. There Are All Kinds Of Opportunities, And There Are All Kinds Of Dangers.

We Absolutely Must Leave Room For Doubt Or There Is No Progress And No Learning. There Is No Learning Without Having To Pose A Question. And A Question Requires Doubt. People Search For Certainty. But There Is No Certainty.

I'm Smart Enough To Know That I'm Dumb.

What Do I Advise? Forget It All. Don't Be Afraid. Do What You Get The Most Pleasure From. Is It To Build A Cloud Chamber? Then Go On Doing Things Like That. Develop Your Talents Wherever They May Lead. Damn The Torpedoes - Full Speed Ahead!if You Have Any Talent,or Any Occupation That Delights You,do It, And Do It To The Hilt

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.

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.

I Don't Feel Frightened By Not Knowing Things.

Mysterious Universe

Science Is Uncertain.

It Does Not Matter Who You Are, Or How Smart You Are, Or What Title You Have, Or How Many Of You There Are, And Certainly Not How Many Papers Your Side Has Published, If Your Prediction Is Wrong Then Your Hypothesis Is Wrong. Period.

Energy Is A Very Subtle Concept. It Is Very, Very Difficult To Get Right.

The World Is A Dynamic Mess Of Jiggling Things

I Can Live With Doubt And Uncertainty And Not Knowing. I Think It Is Much More Interesting To Live Not Knowing Than To Have Answers That Might Be Wrong. If We Will Only Allow That, As We Progress, We Remain Unsure, We Will Leave Opportunities For Alternatives. We Will Not Become Enthusiastic For The Fact, The Knowledge, The Absolute Truth Of The Day, But Remain Always Uncertain … In Order To Make Progress, One Must Leave The Door To The Unknown Ajar.

In Physics The Truth Is Rarely Perfectly Clear, And That Is Certainly Universally The Case In Human Affairs. Hence, What Is Not Surrounded By Uncertainty Cannot Be The Truth.

I Learned From Her That Every Woman Is Worried About Her Looks, No Matter How Beautiful She Is.

No Man Is Rich Who Is Unsatisfied, But Who Wants Nothing Possess His Heart's Desire.

What Do You Care What Other People Think?

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.

The Fact That You Are Not Sure Means That It Is Possible That There Is Another Way Someday.

To Develop Working Ideas Efficiently, I Try To Fail As Fast As I Can.

A Scientist Is Never Certain. ... We Absolutely Must Leave Room For Doubt Or There Is No Progress And There Is No Learning.

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.

It Appears That There Are Enormous Differences Of Opinion As To The Probability Of A Failure With Loss Of Vehicle And Of Human Life. The Estimates Range From Roughly 1 In 100 To 1 In 100,000. The Higher Figures Come From The Working Engineers, And The Very Low Figures From Management.

I Couldn't Claim That I Was Smarter Than Sixty-five Other Guys--but The Average Of Sixty-five Other Guys, Certainly!

There In Wine Is Found The Great Generalization: All Life Is Fermentation.

We Have A Habit In Writing Articles Published In Scientific Journals To Make The Work As Finished As Possible, To Cover Up All The Tracks, To Not Worry About The Blind Alleys Or Describe How You Had The Wrong Idea First, And So On. So There Isn't Any Place To Publish, In A Dignified Manner, What You Actually Did In Order To Get To Do The Work, Although, There Has Been In These Days, Some Interest In This Kind Of Thing.

One Of The Ways Of Stopping Science Would Be Only To Do Experiments In The Region Where You Know The Law. But Experimenters Search Most Diligently, And With The Greatest Effort, In Exactly Those Places Where It Seems Most Likely That We Can Prove Our Theories Wrong. In Other Words, We Are Trying To Prove Ourselves Wrong As Quickly As Possible, Because Only In That Way Can We Find Progress.

If You Have Any Talent, Or Any Occupation That Delights You, Do It, And Do It To The Hilt. Don't Ask Why, Or What Difficulties You May Get Into.

Our Responsibility Is To Do What We Can, Learn What We Can, Improve The Solutions, And Pass Them On.

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."

If We Want To Solve A Problem That We Have Never Solved Before, We Must Leave The Door To The Unknown Ajar.

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.

We Cannot Define Anything Precisely. If We Attempt To, We Get Into The Paralysis Of Thought That Comes To Philosophers, Who Sit Opposite Each Other, One Saying To The Other, "you Don't Know What You Are Talking About!" The Second One Says, "what Do You Mean By Know? What Do You Mean By Talking? What Do You Mean By You?"

When A Photon Comes Down, It Interacts With Electrons Throughout The Glass, Not Just On The Surface. The Photon And Electrons Do Some Kind Of Dance, The Net Result Of Which Is The Same As If The Photon Hit Only On The Surface.

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.

This Is Not Very Important What I'm Doing. I'm Just Proving Something.

It Is Impossible, By The Way, When Picking One Example Of Anything, To Avoid Picking One Which Is Atypical In Some Sense.

So Far As We Know, All The Fundamental Laws Of Physics, Like Newton's Equations, Are Reversible.

The Whole Question Of Imagination In Science Is Often Misunderstood By People In Other Disciplines. ... They Overlook The Fact That Whatever We Are Allowed To Imagine In Science Must Be Consistent With Everything Else We Know.

I Learned A Lot Of Different Things From Different Schools. Mit Is A Very Good Place…. It Has Developed For Itself A Spirit, So That Every Member Of The Whole Place Thinks That It’s The Most Wonderful Place In The World—it’s The Center, Somehow, Of Scientific And Technological Development In The United States, If Not The World … And While You Don’t Get A Good Sense Of Proportion There, You Do Get An Excellent Sense Of Being With It And In It, And Having Motivation And Desire To Keep On

If You're Doing An Experiment, You Should Report Everything That You Think Might Make It Invalid - Not Only What You Think Is Right About It; Other Causes That Could Possibly Explain Your Results; And Things You Thought Of That You've Eliminated By Some Other Experiment, And How They Worked -to Make Sure The Other Fellow Can Tell They Have Been Eliminated.

People May Come Along And Argue Philosophically That They Like One Better Than Another; But We Have Learned From Much Experience That All Philosophical Intuitions About What Nature Is Going To Do Fail.

What Would Happen If We Could Arrange The Atoms One By One The Way We Want Them?

Science Is What We Do To Keep Us From Lying To Ourselves

Nobody Ever Figures Out What Life Is All About, And It Doesn't Matter. Explore The World. Nearly Everything Is Really Interesting If You Go Into It Deeply Enough.

Ordinary Fools Are All Right; You Can Talk To Them, And Try To Help Them Out. But Pompous Fools-guys Who Are Fools And Are Covering It All Over And Impressing People As To How Wonderful They Are With All This Hocus Pocus-that, I Cannot Stand! An Ordinary Fool Isn't A Faker; An Honest Fool Is All Right. But A Dishonest Fool Is Terrible!

I Was Born Not Knowing And Have Had Only A Little Time To Change That Here And There.

As Usual, Nature's Imagination Far Surpasses Our Own, As We Have Seen From The Other Theories Which Are Subtle And Deep.

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.

Einstein Was A Giant. His Head Was In The Clouds, But His Feet Were On The Ground. But Those Of Us Who Are Not That Tall Have To Choose!

Fall In Love With Some Activity, And Do It! Nobody Ever Figures Out What Life Is All About, And It Doesn't Matter. Explore The World. Nearly Everything Is Really Interesting If You Go Into It Deeply Enough. Work As Hard And As Much As You Want To On The Things You Like To Do The Best. Don't Think About What You Want To Be, But What You Want To Do. Keep Up Some Kind Of A Minimum With Other Things So That Society Doesn't Stop You From Doing Anything At All.

Falling In Love

I Am A Successful Lecturer In Physics For Popular Audiences. The Real Entertainment Gimmick Is The Excitement, Drama And Mystery Of The Subject Matter. People Love To Learn Something, They Are 'entertained' Enormously By Being Allowed To Understand A Little Bit Of Something They Never Understood Before. One Must Have Faith In The Subject And In People's Interest In It.

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.

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.

What Is Not Surrounded By Uncertainty Cannot Be The Truth.

To Test Whether You Have Learned An Idea Or A Definition, Rephrase What You Just Learned Without Using The New Word.

If All Of Mathematics Disappeared, Physics Would Be Set Back By Exactly One Week.

You Do Not Know Anything Until You Have Practiced.

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!

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.

Mathematics Is A Language Plus Reasoning. It's Like A Language Plus Logic. Mathematics Is A Tool For Reasoning.

Our Freedom To Doubt Was Born Out Of A Struggle Against Authority In The Early Days Of Science. It Was A Very Deep And Strong Struggle: Permit Us To Question - To Doubt - To Not Be Sure. I Think That It Is Important That We Do Not Forget This Struggle And Thus Perhaps Lose What We Have Gained.

Some Things That Satisfy The Rules Of Algebra Can Be Interesting To Mathematicians Even Though They Don't Always Represent A Real Situation.

If You Thought You Were Trying To Find Out More About It Because You're Gonna Get An Answer To Some Deep Philosophical Question...you May Be Wrong! It May Be That You Can't Get An Answer To That Particular Question By Finding Out More About The Character Of Nature. But My Interest In Science Is To Simply Find Out About The World.

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.

It Requires A Much Higher Degree Of Imagination To Understand The Electromagnetic Field Than To Understand Invisible Angels. ... I Speak Of The E And B Fields And Wave My Arms And You May Imagine That I Can See Them ... [but] I Cannot Really Make A Picture That Is Even Nearly Like The True Waves.

There Are 10^11 Stars In The Galaxy. That Used To Be A Huge Number. But It's Only A Hundred Billion. It's Less Than The National Deficit! We Used To Call Them Astronomical Numbers. Now We Should Call Them Economical Numbers.

When Things Are Going Well, Something Will Go Wrong. / When Things Just Can't Get Any Worse, They Will. / Anytime Things Appear To Be Going Better, You Have Overlooked Something.

What Is The Fundamental Hypothesis Of Science, The Fundamental Philosophy? We Stated It In The First Chapter: The Sole Test Of The Validity Of Any Idea Is Experiment. ... If We Are Told That The Same Experiment Will Always Produce The Same Result, That Is All Very Well, But If When We Try It, It Does Not, Then It Does Not. We Just Have To Take What We See, And Then Formulate All The Rest Of Our Ideas In Terms Of Our Actual Experience.

What I Am Going To Tell You About Is What We Teach Our Physics Students In The Third Or Fourth Year Of Graduate School... It Is My Task To Convince You Not To Turn Away Because You Don't Understand It. You See My Physics Students Don't Understand It... That Is Because I Don't Understand It. Nobody Does.

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.

All Things Are Made Of Atoms - Little Particles That Move Around In Perpetual Motion, Attracting Each Other When They Are A Little Distance Apart, But Repelling Upon Being Squeezed Into One Another. In That One Sentence, You Will See, There Is An Enormous Amount Of Information About The World, If Just A Little Imagination And Thinking Are Applied.

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.

Physics Is Not The Most Important Thing. Love Is.

Fall In Love With Some Activity, And Do It! Nobody Ever Figures Out What Life Is All About, And It Doesn't Matter.

Falling In Love

Nature Uses Only The Longest Threads To Weave Her Patterns, So That Each Small Piece Of Her Fabric Reveals The Organization Of The Entire Tapestry.

The Worthwhile Problems Are The Ones You Can Really Solve Or Help Solve, The Ones You Can Really Contribute Something To... No Problem Is Too Small Or Too Trivial If We Can Really Do Something About It.

What I Can't Create I Don't Understand

Computer Programming

Programming Languages

Computer Language

Few People Realize The Number Of Things That Are Possible.

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.

It Is Necessary For The Very Existence Of Science That Minds Exist Which Do Not Allow That Nature Must Satisfy Some Preconceived Conditions.

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.

Nature Has A Great Simplicity And Therefore A Great Beauty.

Scientists Are Explorers. Philosophers Are Tourists.

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.

Scientific Knowledge Is A Body Of Statements Of Varying Degrees Of Certainty -- Some Most Unsure, Some Nearly Sure, None Absolutely Certain.

Absolute Certainty

Observation, Reason, And Experiment Make Up What We Call The Scientific Method.

Scientific Method

We've Learned From Experience That The Truth Will Out.

Truth Will Come Out

Agnostic For Me Would Be Trying To Weasel Out And Sound A Little Nicer Than I Am About This.

To Not Know Math Is A Severe Limitation To Understanding The World.

The Exception Tests The Rule.

Exception To The Rule

There Is Nothing That Living Things Do That Cannot Be Understood From The Point Of View That They Are Made Of Atoms Acting According To The Laws Of Physics.

No! Not For A Second! I Immediately Began To Think How This Could Have Happened. And I Realized That The Clock Was Old And Was Always Breaking. That The Clock Probably Stopped Some Time Before And The Nurse Coming In To The Room To Record The Time Of Death Would Have Looked At The Clock And Jotted Down The Time From That. I Never Made Any Supernatural Connection, Not Even For A Second. I Just Wanted To Figure Out How It Happened.

I Am Not Interested In What Today's Mathematicians Find Interesting.

When A Scientist Doesn't Know The Answer To A Problem, He Is Ignorant. When He Has A Hunch As To What The Result Is, He Is Uncertain. And When He Is Pretty Darn Sure Of What The Result Is Going To Be, He Is In Some Doubt.

If You Think You Understand Quantum Mechanics, You Don't Understand 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. But It Is True That If We Look At A Glass Of Wine Closely Enough We See The Entire Universe.

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.

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.

You Should Not Fool The Laymen When You're Talking As A Scientist... . I'm Talking About A Specific, Extra Type Of Integrity That Is Not Lying, But Bending Over Backwards To Show How You're Maybe Wrong, [an Integrity] That You Ought To Have When Acting As A Scientist. And This Is Our Responsibility As Scientists, Certainly To Other Scientists, And I Think To Laymen.

For Far More Marvelous Is The Truth Than Any Artists Of The Past Imagined It. Why Do The Poets Of The Present Not Speak Of It? What Men Are Poets Who Can Speak Of Jupiter If He Were A Man, But If He Is An Immense Spinning Sphere Of Methane And Ammonia Must Be Silent?

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.

Today's Brains Are Yesterday's Mashed Potatoes.

It Is Going To Be Necessary That Everything That Happens In A Finite Volume Of Space And Time Would Have To Be Analyzable With A Finite Number Of Logical Operations. The Present Theory Of Physics Is Not That Way, Apparently. It Allows Space To Go Down Into Infinitesimal Distances, Wavelengths To Get Infinitely Great, Terms To Be Summed In Infinite Order, And So Forth; And Therefore, If This Proposition [that Physics Is Computer-simulatable] Is Right, Physical Law Is Wrong.

But Logic Is Not All, One Needs One's Heart To Follow An Idea.

Every Instrument That Has Been Designed To Be Sensitive Enough To Detect Weak Light Has Always Ended Up Discovering That The Same Thing: Light Is Made Of Particles.

Maybe That Is Why Young People Make Success. They Don't Know Enough.

Some People Think Wheeler's Gotten Crazy In His Later Years, But He's Always Been Crazy.

Nature...cannot Be Fooled!

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