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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.

-Richard P. Feynman

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In Those Days, In

Richard P. Feynman

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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.

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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.

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

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!"

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

Everything We Know Is Only Some Kind Of Approximation, Because We Know That We Do Not Know All The Laws Yet. Therefore, Things Must Be Learned Only To Be Unlearned Again Or, More Likely, To Be Corrected.

Scientists Are Explorers. Philosophers Are Tourists.

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

The Same Equations Have The Same Solutions

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

You Can Know The Name Of A Bird In All The Languages Of The World, But When You're Finished, You'll Know Absolutely Nothing Whatever About The Bird... So Let's Look At The Bird And See What It's Doing -- That's What Counts.

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.

(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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

When The Problem [quantum Chromodynamics] Is Finally Solved, It Will All Be By Imagination. Then There Will Be Some Big Thing About The Great Way It Was Done. But It's Simple -it Will All Be By Imagination, And Persistence.

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

Fooling Ourselves

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

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

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.

Know How To Solve Every Problem That Has Been Solved.

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

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!

Although It Is Uncertain, It Is Necessary To Make Science Useful. Science Is Only Useful If It Tells You About Some Experiment That Has Not Been Done; It Is Not Good If It Only Tells You What Just Went On.

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.

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

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.

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.

In Its Efforts To Learn As Much As Possible About Nature, Modern Physics Has Found That Certain Things Can Never Be "known" With Certainty. Much Of Our Knowledge Must Always Remain Uncertain. The Most We Can Know Is In Terms Of Probabilities.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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

Today's Brains Are Yesterday's Mashed Potatoes.

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?"

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

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.

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

Most Interesting

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

The World Is A Dynamic Mess Of Jiggling Things

What I Can't Create I Don't Understand

Computer Programming

Programming Languages

Computer Language

Nature Has A Great Simplicity And Therefore A Great Beauty.

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.

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.

No One Really Understands Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics

... 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.

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.

What Is Not Surrounded By Uncertainty Cannot Be The Truth.

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

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 Very Important What I'm Doing. I'm Just Proving Something.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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].

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!

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

Truth Will Come Out

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The Basis Of Action On Love, The Brotherhood Of All Men, The Value Of The Individual... The Humility Of The Spirit.

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

You Can Recognize Truth By Its Beauty And Simplicity. When You Get It Right, It Is Obvious That It Is Right -- At Least If You Have Any Experience -- Because Usually What Happens Is That More Comes Out Than Goes In.

[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.

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.

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.

The Test Of All Knowledge Is Experiment.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

Nature...cannot Be Fooled!

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.

[b]eyond Poverty, Beyond The Point That The Material Needs Are Reasonably Satisfied, Only From Within Is Peace.

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.

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!

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.

When A Caltech Student Asked The Eminent Cosmologist Michael Turner What His "bias" Was In Favoring One Or Another Particle As A Likely Candidate To Compromise Dark Matter In The Universe, Feynmann Snapped, "why Do You Want To Know His Bias? Form Your Own Bias!"

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

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

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.

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.

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

You Do Not Know Anything Until You Have Practiced.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I Don't Feel Frightened By Not Knowing Things.

Mysterious Universe

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

We Are Trying To Prove Ourselves Wrong As Quickly As Possible, Because Only In That Way Can We Find Progress.

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.

Everything Is Made Of Atoms.

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

Physics Is Not The Most Important Thing. Love Is.

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.

Thank You Very Much, I Enjoyed Myself

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

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

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.

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

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 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!

To Decide Upon The Answer Is Not Scientific. In Order To Make Progress, One Must Leave The Door To The Unknown Ajar Ajar Only.

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?"

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.

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.

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!

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.

Teach Principles Not Formulas.

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.

Work Hard To Find Something That Fascinates You.

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

Science Is A Way Of Trying Not To Fool Yourself.

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

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.

Science Is The Organized Skepticism In The Reliability Of Expert Opinion

There Is No Learning Without Having To Pose A Question. And A Question Requires Doubt.

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.

[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.

All Mass Is Interaction.

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.

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

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

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!

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

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

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

Absolute Certainty

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