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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?

-Richard P. Feynman

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For Far More Marvelous

Richard P. Feynman

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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?

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

The World Is A Dynamic Mess Of Jiggling Things

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Absolute Certainty

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

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?

If You Can't Explain Something To A First Year Student, Then You Haven't Really Understood .

My Rule Is, When You Are Unhappy, Think About It. But When You're Happy, Don't. Why Spoil It? You're Probably Happy For Some Ridiculous Reason And You'd Just Spoil It To Know It.

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

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.

Progress In Science Comes When Experiments Contradict Theory.

Our Imagination Is Stretched To The Utmost, Not, As In Fiction, To Imagine Things Which Are Not Really There, But Just To Comprehend Those Things Which Are There.

Scientific Knowledge Is An Enabling Power To Do Either Good Or Bad — But It Does Not Carry Instructions On How To Use It.

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!

If There Is Something Very Slightly Wrong In Our Definition Of The Theories, Then The Full Mathematical Rigor May Convert These Errors Into Ridiculous Conclusions.

It Doesn't Seem To Me That This Fantastically Marvelous Universe, This Tremendous Range Of Time And Space And Different Kinds Of Animals, And All The Different Planets, And All These Atoms With All Their Motions, And So On, All This Complicated Thing Can Merely Be A Stage So That God Can Watch Human Beings Struggle For Good And Evil - Which Is The View That Religion Has. The Stage Is Too Big For The Drama.

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.

I Think It's Much More Interesting To Live Not Knowing Than To Have Answers Which Might Be Wrong.

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

Truth Will Come Out

Learn What The Rest Of The World Is Like. The Variety Is Worthwhile.

I Learned Very Early The Difference Between Knowing The Name Of Something And Knowing Something.

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.

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

The Real Question Of Government Versus Private Enterprise Is Argued On Too Philosophical And Abstract A Basis. Theoretically, Planning May Be Good. But Nobody Has Ever Figured Out The Cause Of Government Stupidity—and Until They Do (and Find The Cure), All Ideal Plans Will Fall Into Quicksand.

I Think A Power To Do Something Is Of Value. Whether The Result Is A Good Thing Or A Bad Thing Depends On How It Is Used, But The Power Is A Value.

I Find That Teaching And The Students Keep Life Going, And I Would Never Accept Any Position In Which Somebody Has Invented A Happy Situation For Me Where I Don't Have To Teach. Never.

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

Teach Principles Not Formulas.

Whenever You See A Sweeping Statement That A Tremendous Amount Can Come From A Very Small Number Of Assumptions, You Always Find That It Is False. There Are Usually A Large Number Of Implied Assumptions That Are Far From Obvious If You Think About Them Sufficiently Carefully.

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.

I'm Trying To Find Out Not How Nature Could Be, But How Nature Is.

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.

What Do You Care What Other People Think?

So, Ultimately, In Order To Understand Nature It May Be Necessary To Have A Deeper Understanding Of Mathematical Relationships. But The Real Reason Is That The Subject Is Enjoyable, And Although We Humans Cut Nature Up In Different Ways, And We Have Different Courses In Different Departments, Such Compartmentaliz Ation Is Really Artificial, And We Should Take Our Intellectual Pleasures Where We Find Them.

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?

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... How Vivid Is The Claret, Pressing Its Existence Into The Consciousness That Watches It! If Our Small Minds, For Some Convenience, Divide This Glass Of Wine, This Universe, Into Parts - Physics, Biology, Geology, Astronomy, Psychology, And So On - Remember That Nature Does Not Know It! So Let Us Put It All Back Together, Not Forgetting Ultimately What It Is For. Let It Give Us One More Final Pleasure: Drink It And Forget It All!

If You Know That You Are Not Sure, You Have A Chance To Improve The Situation. I Want To Demand This Freedom For Future Generations.

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?

Today's Brains Are Yesterday's Mashed Potatoes.

I Love To Think. I Once Considered Taking Drugs As An Attempt To Better Understand An Altered State Of Mind; However, I Decided Not To. I Didn't Want To Chance Ruining The Machine.

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

Victory Usually Goes To Those Green Enough To Underestimate The Monumental Hurdles They Are Facing.

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.

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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.

There's Plenty Of Room At The Bottom.

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.

Scientists Are Explorers. Philosophers Are Tourists.

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Have No Respect Whatsoever For Authority; Forget Who Said It And Instead Look What He Starts With, Where He Ends Up, And Ask Yourself, "is It Reasonable?"

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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.

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Mysterious Universe

What We Need Is Imagination, But Imagination In A Terrible Strait-jacket.

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I Have To Disregard Everybody Else, And Then I Can Do My Own Work.

Looking Back At The Worst Times, It Always Seems That They Were Times In Which There Were People Who Believed With Absolute Faith And Absolute Dogmatism In Something. And They Were So Serious In This Matter That They Insisted That The Rest Of The World Agree With Them. And Then They Would Do Things That Were Directly Inconsistent With Their Own Beliefs In Order To Maintain That What They Said Was True.

I Am Going To Tell You What Nature Behaves Like. If You Will Simply Admit That Maybe She Does Behave Like This, You Will Find Her A Delightful, Entrancing Thing. Do Not Keep Saying To Yourself, If You Can Possibly Avoid It, 'but How Can It Be Like That?' ...nobody Knows How It Can Be Like That.

We Scientists Are Clever — Too Clever — Are You Not Satisfied? Is Four Square Miles In One Bomb Not Enough? Men Are Still Thinking. Just Tell Us How Big You Want It!

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.

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.

I Don't Think That The Laws Can Be Considered To Be Like God Because They Have Been Figured Out.

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.

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.

It Is Scientific Only To Say What Is More Likely And What Less Likely, And Not To Be Proving All The Time The Possible And Impossible.

Possible And Impossible

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.

Physics Is Like Sex: Sure, It May Give Some Practical Results, But That's Not Why We Do It.

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.

There Is No Authority Who Decides What Is A Good Idea.

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

If You Think You Understand Quantum Mechanics, You Don't Understand Quantum Mechanics.

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.

The Test Of All Knowledge Is Experiment.

What I Can't Create I Don't Understand

Computer Programming

Programming Languages

Computer Language

No One Really Understands Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics

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.

I Have A Friend Who's An Artist, And He Sometimes Takes A View Which I Don't Agree With. He'll Hold Up A Flower And Say, "look How Beautiful It Is," And I'll Agree. But Then He'll Say, "i, As An Artist, Can See How Beautiful A Flower Is. But You, As A Scientist, Take It All Apart And It Becomes Dull." I Think He's Kind Of Nutty. [...] 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. It Only Adds. I Don't Understand How It Subtracts.

Everything Is Made Of Atoms.

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

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.

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

Science Is Of Value Because It Can Produce Something.

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.

People Who Wish To Analyze Nature Without Using Mathematics Must Settle For A Reduced Understanding.

Another Thing I Must Point Out Is That You Cannot Prove A Vague Theory Wrong.

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!

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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

You Can Always Recognize Truth By Its Beauty And Simplicity.

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

We Never Are Definitely Right, We Can Only Be Sure We Are Wrong.

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.

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.

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.

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 Love Only Nature, And I Hate Mathematicians.

But The Real Glory Of Science Is That We Can Find A Way Of Thinking Such That The Law Is Evident.

Thank You Very Much, I Enjoyed Myself

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

You Do Not Know Anything Until You Have Practiced.

[quantum Mechanics] Describes Nature As Absurd From The Point Of View Of Common Sense. And Yet It Fully Agrees With Experiment. So I Hope You Can Accept Nature As She Is - Absurd.

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

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

Things You Like

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

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

There Is Enough Energy In A Single Cubic Meter Of Space To Boil All The Oceans In The World.

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.

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.

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

I Have To Keep Going To Find Out Ultimately What Is The Matter With It In The End.

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.

This Is Not Yet A Scientific Age.

If An Apple Was Magnified To The Size Of The Earth, Then The Atoms In The Apple Would Be Approximately The Size Of The Original Apple.

The Only Way To Deep Happiness Is To Do Something You Love To The Best Of Your Ability

When I Found Out That Santa Claus Wasn't Real, I Wasn't Upset; Rather, I Was Relieved That There Was A Much Simpler Phenomenon To Explain How So Many Children All Over The World Got Presents On The Same Night! The Story Had Been Getting Pretty Complicated -- It Was Getting Out Of Hand.

We Are Very Lucky To Be Living In An Age In Which We Are Still Making Discoveries. It Is Like The Discovery Of America-you Only Discover It Once. The Age In Which We Live Is The Age In Which We Are Discovering The Fundamental Laws Of Nature, And That Day Will Never Come Again. It Is Very Exciting, It Is Marvelous, But This Excitement Will Have To Go.

Don't Pay Attention To "authorities," Think For Yourself.

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 Electron Is A Theory. But The Theory Is So Good We Can Almost Consider Them Real.

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.

First You Guess. Don't Laugh, This Is The Most Important Step. Then You Compute The Consequences. Compare The Consequences To Experience. If It Disagrees With Experience, The Guess Is Wrong. In That Simple Statement Is The Key To Science. It Doesn't Matter How Beautiful Your Guess Is Or How Smart You Are Or What Your Name Is. If It Disagrees With Experience, It's Wrong. That's All There Is To It.

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

I Don't Have To Be Good Because They Think I'm Going To Be Good.

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.

I, A Universe Of Atoms, An Atom In The Universe.

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.

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.

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

Turbulence Is The Most Important Unsolved Problem Of Classical Physics.

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.

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

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

If We Will Only Allow That, As We Progress, We Remain Unsure, We Will Leave Opportunities For Alternatives.

We Have This Terrible Struggle To Try To Explain Things To People Who Have No Reason To Want To Know.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Those Days, In Far Rockaway, There Was A Youth Center For Jewish Kids At The Temple.... Somebody Nominated Me For President Of The Youth Center. The Elders Began Getting Nervous, Because I Was An Avowed Atheist By That Time.... I Thought Nature Itself Was So Interesting That I Didn't Want It Distorted Like That. And So I Gradually Came To Disbelieve The Whole Religion.

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.

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?"

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!

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.

The Same Equations Have The Same Solutions

If You Thought That Science Was Certain - Well, That Is Just An Error On Your Part.

A Philosopher Once Said, 'it Is Necessary For The Very Existence Of Science That The Same Conditions Always Produce The Same Results.' Well, They Don't!

We Are Not To Tell Nature What She’s Gotta Be... She's Always Got Better Imagination Than We Have.

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.

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

Only Realistic Flight Schedules Should Be Proposed, Schedules That Have A Reasonable Chance Of Being Met. If In This Way The Government Would Not Support Them, Then So Be It. Nasa Owes It To The Citizens From Whom It Asks Support To Be Frank, Honest, And Informative.

Know How To Solve Every Problem That Has Been Solved.

It Is Not Unscientific To Make A Guess, Although Many People Who Are Not In Science Think It Is.

Phenomena Complex-laws Simple....know What To Leave Out.

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.

If A Guy Tells Me The Probability Of Failure Is 1 In 100,000, I Know He's Full Of Crap.

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.

Work Hard To Find Something That Fascinates You.

Physics Is To Mathematics What Sex Is To Masturbation.

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.

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.

In A Way, The Nobel Prize Has Been Something Of A Pain In The Neck, Though There Was At Least One Time That I Got Some Fun Out Of It, Shortly After I Won The Prize, Gweneth And I Received An Invitation From The Brazilian Government To Be The Guests Of Honor At The Carnaval Celebrations In Rio.

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!

Science Is A Way For Us To Not Fool Ourselves.

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.

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

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.

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

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

To Those Who Do Not Know Mathematics It Is Difficult To Get Across A Real Feeling As To The Beauty, The Deepest Beauty, Of Nature ... If You Want To Learn About Nature, To Appreciate Nature, It Is Necessary To Understand The Language That She Speaks In.

I Was Terrible In English. I Couldn't Stand The Subject. It Seemed To Me Ridiculous To Worry About Whether You Spelled Something Wrong Or Not, Because English Spelling Is Just A Human Convention--it Has Nothing To Do With Anything Real, Anything From Nature. Any Word Can Be Spelled Just As Well A Different Way.

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

Science Is Uncertain.

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.

Theoretical Physics

John Von Neumann Gave Me An Interesting Idea: That You Don't Have To Be Responsible For The World That You're In. So I Have Developed A Very Powerful Sense Of Social Irresponsibility As A Result Of Von Neumann's Advice. It's Made Me A Very Happy Man Ever Since. But It Was Von Neumann Who Put The Seed In That Grew Into My Active Irresponsibility!

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

I Always Do That, Get Into Something And See How Far I Can Go.

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

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 Have A Limited Intelligence And I've Used It In A Particular Direction.

We Have Been Led To Imagine All Sorts Of Things Infinitely More Marvelous Than The Imagining Of Poets And Dreamers Of The Past. It Shows That The Imagination Of Nature Is Far, Far Greater Than The Imagination Of Man. For Instance, How Much More Remarkable It Is For Us All To Be Stuck-half Of Us Upside Down-by A Mysterious Attraction, To A Spinning Ball That Has Been Swinging In Space For Billions Of Years, Than To Be Carried On The Back Of An Elephant Supported On A Tortoise Swimming In A Bottomless Sea.

So My Antagonist Said, "is It Impossible That There Are Flying Saucers? Can You Prove That It's Impossible?" "no," I Said, "i Can't Prove It's Impossible. It's Just Very Unlikely." At That He Said, "you Are Very Unscientific. If You Can't Prove It Impossible Then How Can You Say That It's Unlikely?" But That Is The Way That Is Scientific. It Is Scientific Only To Say What Is More Likely And What Less Likely, And Not To Be Proving All The Time The Possible And Impossible.

Possible And Impossible

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.

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!

Thus We Can Get The Correct Answer For The Probability Of Partial Reflection By Imagining (falsely) That All Reflection Comes From Only The Front And Back Surfaces. In This Intuitively Easy Analysis, The 'front Surface' And 'back Surface' Arrows Are Mathematical Constructions That Give Us The Right Answer, Whereas .... A More Accurate Representation Of What Is Really Going On: Partial Reflection Is The Scattering Of Light By Electrons Inside The Glass.

The First Principle Is That You Must Not Fool Yourself—and You Are The Easiest Person To Fool. So You Have To Be Very Careful About That. After You’ve Not Fooled Yourself, It’s Easy Not To Fool Other Scientists. You Just Have To Be Honest In A Conventional Way After That.

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

The Work I Have Done Has, Already, Been Adequately Rewarded And Recognized. Imagination Reaches Out Repeatedly Trying To Achieve Some Higher Level Of Understanding, Until Suddenly I Find Myself Momentarily Alone Before One New Corner Of Nature's Pattern Of Beauty And True Majesty Revealed. That Was My Reward.

Science Is A Way Of Trying Not To Fool Yourself.

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