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(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

-Richard P. Feynman

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(joan,1941) She Wrote Me

Richard P. Feynman

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(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

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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.

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.

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

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

I Don't Like Honors. I'm Appreciated For The Work That I Did, And For People Who Appreciate It, And I Notice That Other Physicists Use My Work. I Don't Need Anything Else. I Don't Think There's Any Sense To Anything Else.... I've Already Got The Prize. The Prize Is The Pleasure Of Finding The Thing Out, The Kick In The Discovery, The Observation That Other People Use It. Those Are The Real Things. The Honors Are Unreal To Me. I Don't Believe In Honors... I Can't Stand It, It Hurts Me.

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

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

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.

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.

One Cannot Understand... The Universality Of Laws Of Nature, The Relationship Of Things, Without An Understanding Of Mathematics. There Is No Other Way To Do It.

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.

I Don't Feel Frightened By Not Knowing Things.

Mysterious Universe

Physics Is Not The Most Important Thing. Love Is.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Know How To Solve Every Problem That Has Been Solved.

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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!

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

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

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.

What I Cannot Create, I Do Not Understand.

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.

Science Is Uncertain.

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

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

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 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.

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!

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Everything Is Made Of Atoms.

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

Fooling Ourselves

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.

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

The Test Of All Knowledge Is Experiment.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

There's Plenty Of Room At The Bottom.

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

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.

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!

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.

Today's Brains Are Yesterday's Mashed Potatoes.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Scientific Method

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.

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

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

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.

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.

... 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.

Science Is The Organized Skepticism In The Reliability Of Expert Opinion

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I 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.

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.

What Did You Ask At School Today?

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

You Can Always Recognize Truth By Its Beauty And Simplicity.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

What Is Not Surrounded By Uncertainty Cannot Be The Truth.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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