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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.

-Richard P. Feynman

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I Don't Feel Frightened

Richard P. Feynman

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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.

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More From Richard P. Feynman

If It Disagrees With Experiment, It's Wrong.

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!"

You Do Not Know Anything Until You Have Practiced.

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

Science Is Of Value Because It Can Produce Something.

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.

As You Know, A Theory In Physics Is Not Useful Unless It Is Able To Predict Underlined Effects Which We Would Otherwise Expect.

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

What Did You Ask At School Today?

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

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

You Can’t Say A Is Made Of B Or Vice Versa. All Mass Is Interaction.

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

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.

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.

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 Still In Some Doubt. We Have Found It Of Paramount Importance That In Order To Progress We Must Recognize Our Ignorance And Leave Room For Doubt. Scientific Knowledge Is A Body Of Statements Of Varying Degrees Of Certainty - Some Most Unsure, Some Nearly Sure, But None Absolutely Certain.

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

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.

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!

Words Can Be Meaningless. If They Are Used In Such A Way That No Sharp Conclusions Can Be Drawn.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Things You Like

My Friends And I Had Taken Dancing Lessons, Although None Of Us Would Ever Admit It. In Those Depression Days, A Friend Of My Mother Was Trying To Make A Living By Teaching Dancing In The Evening, In An Upstairs Dance Studio. There Was A Back Door To The Place, And She Arranged It So The Young Men Could Come Up Through The Back Way Without Being Seen.

What Is Not Surrounded By Uncertainty Cannot Be The Truth.

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.

So This Piece Of Dirt Waits Four And A Half Billion Years And Evolves And Changes, And Now A Strange Creature Stands Here With Instruments And Talks To The Strange Creatures In The Audience. What A Wonderful World!

Thank You Very Much, I Enjoyed Myself

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.

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.

Science Is A Way For Us To Not Fool Ourselves.

You Can Always Recognize Truth By Its Beauty And Simplicity.

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

Most Interesting

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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.

I'm Going To Play With Physics, Whenever I Want To, Without Worrying About Any Importance Whatsoever.

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.

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.

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

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

In Fact The Total Amount That A Physicist Knows Is Very Little. He Has Only To Remember The Rules To Get Him From One Place To Another And He Is All Right.

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?"

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.

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

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

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

Turbulence Is The Most Important Unsolved Problem Of Classical Physics.

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

Listen, I Mean That From My Knowledge Of The World That I See Around Me, I Think That It Is Much More Likely That The Reports Of Flying Saucers Are The Results Of The Known Irrational Characteristics Of Terrestrial Intelligence Than Of The Unknown Rational Efforts Of Extra-terrestrial Intelligence.

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

Physics Is To Mathematics What Sex Is To Masturbation.

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.

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?

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.

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?

During The Middle Ages There Were All Kinds Of Crazy Ideas, Such As That A Piece Of Rhinoceros Horn Would Increase Potency. Then A Method Was Discovered For Separating The Ideas - Which Was To Try One To See If It Worked, And If It Didn't Work, To Eliminate It. This Method Became Organized, Of Course, Into Science.

We Absolutely Must Leave Room For Doubt Or There Is No Progress And There Is 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. People Are Terrified — How Can You Live And Not Know? It Is Not Odd At All. You Only Think You Know, As A Matter Of Fact. And Most Of Your Actions Are Based On Incomplete Knowledge And You Really Don’t Know What It Is All About, Or What The Purpose Of The World Is, Or Know A Great Deal Of Other Things. It Is Possible To Live And Not Know.

Incomplete Knowledge

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.

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.

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

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

The Theoretical Broadening Which Comes From Having Many Humanities Subjects On The Campus Is Offset By The General Dopiness Of The People Who Study These Things.

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

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!

Science Is The Organized Skepticism In The Reliability Of Expert Opinion

There Are Theoretical Physicists Who Imagine, Deduce, And Guess At New Laws, But Do Not Experiment; And Then There Are Experimental Physicists Who Experiment, Imagine, Deduce, And Guess.

Know How To Solve Every Problem That Has Been Solved.

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

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

Absolute Certainty

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

The Problem Of Creating Something New, But Which Is Consistent With Everything Which Has Been Seen Before, Is One Of Extreme Difficulty.

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."

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!

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

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

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.

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.

Everything Is Made Of Atoms.

Experiment Is The Sole Judge Of The Validity Of Any Idea.

I Don't Feel Frightened By Not Knowing Things.

Mysterious Universe

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.

What I Can't Create I Don't Understand

Computer Programming

Programming Languages

Computer Language

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

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

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

Poets Say Science Takes Away From The Beauty Of The Stars - Mere Globs Of Gas Atoms. I, Too, Can See The Stars On A Desert Night, And Feel Them. But Do I See Less Or More?

It Turns Out That All Life Is Interconnected With All Other Life.

There Is Nothing In Biology Yet Found That Indicates The Inevitability Of Death. This Suggests To Me That It Is Not At All Inevitable And That It Is Only A Matter Of Time Before Biologists Discover What It Is That Is Causing Us The Trouble.

Inevitability Of Death

But There Is Nothing In Biology Yet Found That Indicates The Inevitability Of Death.

Inevitability Of Death

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.

We've Learned From Experience That The Truth Will Out. Other Experimenters Will Repeat Your Experiment And Find Out Whether You Were Wrong Or Right. Nature's Phenomena Will Agree Or They'll Disagree With Your Theory. And, Although You May Gain Some Temporary Fame And Excitement, You Will Not Gain A Good Reputation As A Scientist If You Haven't Tried To Be Very Careful In This Kind Of Work. And It's This Type Of Integrity, This Kind Of Care Not To Fool Yourself, That Is Missing To A Large Extent In Much Of The Research In Cargo Cult Science.

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?

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.

Don't Worry About Anything. Go Out And Have A Good Time.

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 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.

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.

Winning A Nobel Prize Is No Big Deal, But Winning It With An Iq Of 124 Is Really Something.

(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

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

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.

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.

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

Scientific Method

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.

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.

Religion Is A Culture Of Faith; Science Is A Culture Of Doubt.

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

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.

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

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 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.

This Is Not Yet A Scientific Age.

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

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

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.

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!

Scientists Are Explorers. Philosophers Are Tourists.

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

No One Really Understands Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics

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.

It Is To Be Emphasized That No Matter How Many [amplitude] Arrows We Draw, Add, Or Multiply, Our Objective Is To Calculate A Single Final Arrow For The Event . Mistakes Are Often Made By Physics Students At First Because They Do Not Keep This Important Point In Mind. They Work For So Long Analyzing Events Involving A Single Photon That They Begin To Think That The Arrow Is Somehow Associated With The Photon [rather Than With The Event].

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The Present Situation In Physics Is As If We Know Chess, But We Don't Know One Or Two Rules.

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.

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?"

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

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.

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

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

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.

You See, I Get Such Fun Out Of Thinking That I Don't Want To Destroy This Most Pleasant Machine That Makes Life Such A Big Kick.

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.

We Have Found It Of Paramount Importance That In Order To Progress, We Must Recognize Our Ignorance And Leave Room For Doubt.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Highest Forms Of Understanding We Can Achieve Are Laughter And Human Compassion.

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.

'conservation' (the Conservation Law) Means This ... That There Is A Number, Which You Can Calculate, At One Moment-and As Nature Undergoes Its Multitude Of Changes, This Number Doesn't Change. That Is, If You Calculate Again, This Quantity, It'll Be The Same As It Was Before. An Example Is The Conservation Of Energy: There's A Quantity That You Can Calculate According To A Certain Rule, And It Comes Out The Same Answer After, No Matter What Happens, Happens.

... It Is Impossible To Explain Honestly The Beauties Of The Laws Of Nature In A Way That People Can Feel, Without Their Having Some Deep Understanding Of Mathematics. I Am Sorry, But This Seems To Be The Case.

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.

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

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.

[when A Young Person Loses Faith In His Religion Because He Begins To Study Science And Its Methodology] It Isn't That [through The Obtaining Of Real Knowledge That] He Knows It All, But He Suddenly Realizes That He Doesn't Know It All.

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.

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.

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!

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.

I Think It's Much More Interesting To Live Not Knowing Than To Have Answers Which Might Be Wrong. I Have Approximate Answers, And Possible Beliefs, And Different Degrees Of Uncertainty About Different Things, But I Am Not Absolutely Sure Of Anything. There Are Many Things I Don't Know Anything About, Such As Whether It Means Anything To Ask "why Are We Here?" I Might Think About It A Little Bit, And If I Can't Figure It Out Then I Go On To Something Else. But I Don't Have To Know An Answer. I Don't Feel Frightened By Not Knowing Things, By Being Lost In The Mysterious Universe Without Having Any Purpose - Which Is The Way It Really Is, As Far As I Can Tell.

But See That The Imagination Of Nature Is Far, Far Greater Than The Imagination Of Man.

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.

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

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.

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.

Science Is A Process For Learning About Nature In Which Competing Ideas About How The World Works Are Measured Against Observations.

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.

Teach Principles Not Formulas.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Philosophy Of Science Is About As Useful To Scientists As Ornithology Is To Birds.

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.

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.

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

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.

Nature Has A Great Simplicity And Therefore A Great Beauty.

From A Long View Of The History Of Mankind, Seen From, Say, Ten Thousand Years From Now, There Can Be Little Doubt That The Most Significant Event Of The 19th Century Will Be Judged As Maxwell's Discovery Of The Laws Of Electrodynamics. The American Civil War Will Pale Into Provincial Insignificance In Comparison With This Important Scientific Event Of The Same Decade.

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

Fooling Ourselves

The Same Equations Have The Same Solutions

It Is Surprising That People Do Not Believe That There Is Imagination In Science. It Is A Very Interesting Kind Of Imagination, Unlike That Of The Artist. The Great Difficulty Is In Trying To Imagine Something That You Have Never Seen, That Is Consistent In Every Detail With What Has Already Been Seen, And That Is Different From What Has Been Thought Of; Furthermore, It Must Be Definite And Not A Vague Proposition. That Is Indeed Difficult.

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

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