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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.

-Richard P. Feynman

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It Does Not Matter

Richard P. Feynman

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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.

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More From Richard P. Feynman

Science Is Uncertain.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

That Is The Logical Tight-rope On Which We Have To Walk If We Wish To Interpret Nature.

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

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

'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.

If You Can Find Any Other View Of The World Which Agrees Over The Entire Range Where Things Have Already Been Observed, But Disagrees Somewhere Else, You Have Made A Great Discovery.

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

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.

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

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

I 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.

The Real Problem In Speech Is Not Precise Language. The Problem Is Clear Language.

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

Outside Of Their Particular Area Of Expertise Scientists Are Just As Dumb As The Next Person.

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.

The Female Mind Is Capable Of Understanding Analytic Geometry... The Difficulty May Just Be That We Have Never Yet Discovered A Way To Communicate With The Female Mind. If It Is Done In The Right Way, You May Be Able To Get Something Out Of It.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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!

Physics Is To Mathematics What Sex Is To Masturbation.

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

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.

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.

We Need To Teach How Doubt Is Not To Be Feared But Welcomed. It's Ok To Say, "i Don't Know."

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Truth Will Come Out

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.

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.

This Is Not Yet A Scientific Age.

Today's Brains Are Yesterday's Mashed Potatoes.

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

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.

What I Cannot Create, I Do Not Understand.

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!"

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 I Have Just One Wish For You – The Good Luck To Be Somewhere Where You Are Free To Maintain The Kind Of Integrity I Have Described, And Where You Do Not Feel Forced By A Need To Maintain Your Position In The Organization, Or Financial Support, Or So On, To Lose Your Integrity. May You Have That Freedom.

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

A Very Great Deal More Truth Can Become Known Than Can Be Proven.

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

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

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.

I Think We Can Safely Assume That No One Understands Quantum Mechanics.

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

Scientists Are Explorers. Philosophers Are Tourists.

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

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

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.

No Government Has The Right To Decide On The Truth Of Scientific Principles, Nor To Prescribe In Any Way The Character Of The Questions Investigated. Neither May A Government Determine The Aesthetic Value Of Artistic Creations, Nor Limit The Forms Of Literacy Or Artistic Expression. Nor Should It Pronounce On The Validity Of Economic, Historic, Religious, Or Philosophical Doctrines. Instead It Has A Duty To Its Citizens To Maintain The Freedom, To Let Those Citizens Contribute To The Further Adventure And The Development Of The Human Race.

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

(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

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!

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

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

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

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.

Few People Realize The Number Of Things That Are Possible.

Work Hard To Find Something That Fascinates You.

Science Is Of Value Because It Can Produce Something.

What Is Not Surrounded By Uncertainty Cannot Be The Truth.

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

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

[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.

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.

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

Science Is A Way For Us To Not Fool Ourselves.

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

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!

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!

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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 In Some Doubt.

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

Most Interesting

Science Is The Organized Skepticism In The Reliability Of Expert Opinion

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.

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

Nature's Imagination Far Surpasses Our Own.

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.

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

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

No One Really Understands Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics

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.

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

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

You Can Always Recognize Truth By Its Beauty And Simplicity.

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.

When You Get As Old As I Am, You Start To Realize That You've Told Most Of The Good Stuff You Know To Other People Anyway.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's Plenty Of Room At The Bottom.

What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Teach Principles Not Formulas.

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

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

Science Is A Way Of Trying Not To Fool Yourself.

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.

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

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

Progress In Science Comes When Experiments Contradict Theory.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Scientific Views End In Awe And Mystery, Lost At The Edge In Uncertainty, But They Appear To Be So Deep And So Impressive That The Theory That It Is All Arranged As A Stage For God To Watch Man's Struggle For Good And Evil Seems Inadequate.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Turbulence Is The Most Important Unsolved Problem Of Classical Physics.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

You Do Not Know Anything Until You Have Practiced.

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.

The World Is A Dynamic Mess Of Jiggling Things

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

Physics Is Not The Most Important Thing. Love Is.

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.

All Mass Is Interaction.

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.

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!

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

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