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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.

-Richard P. Feynman

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One Does Not, By

Richard P. Feynman

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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.

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

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

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.

No One Really Understands Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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?

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 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.

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.

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

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

You Do Not Know Anything Until You Have Practiced.

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.

Work Hard To Find Something That Fascinates You.

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.

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.

To Guess What To Keep And What To Throw Away Takes Considerable Skill. Actually It Is Probably Merely A Matter Of Luck, But It Looks As If It Takes Considerable Skill.

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.

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?"

Thank You Very Much, I Enjoyed Myself

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

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

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

We Can Deduce, Often, From One Part Of Physics Like The Law Of Gravitation, A Principle Which Turns Out To Be Much More Valid Than The Derivation.

I Love Only Nature, And I Hate Mathematicians.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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?"

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

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

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

'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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Scientists Are Explorers. Philosophers Are Tourists.

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.

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.

Progress In Science Comes When Experiments Contradict Theory.

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.

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

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

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

What Is The Fundamental Hypothesis Of Science, The Fundamental Philosophy? We Stated It In The First Chapter: The Sole Test Of The Validity Of Any Idea Is Experiment. ... If We Are Told That The Same Experiment Will Always Produce The Same Result, That Is All Very Well, But If When We Try It, It Does Not, Then It Does Not. We Just Have To Take What We See, And Then Formulate All The Rest Of Our Ideas In Terms Of Our Actual Experience.

Doubt Is Clearly A Value In Science. It Is Important To Doubt And That The Doubt Is Not A Fearful Thing, But A Thing Of Great Value.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Just As A Poet Often Has License From The Rules Of Grammar And Pronunciation, We Should Like To Ask For 'physicists' License From The Rules Of Mathematics In Order To Express What We Wish To Say In As Simple A Manner As Possible.

I Don't Feel Frightened By Not Knowing Things, By Being Lost In The Mysterious Universe Without Any Purpose - Which Is The Way It Really Is, As Far As I Can Tell. Possibly. It Doesn't Frighten Me.

If You Keep Proving Stuff That Others Have Done, Getting Confidence, Increasing The Complexities Of Your Solutions - For The Fun Of It - Then One Day You'll Turn Around And Discover That Nobody Actually Did That One! And That's The Way To Become A Computer Scientist.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

On The Contrary, It's Because Somebody Knows Something About It That We Can't Talk About Physics . It's The Things That Nobody Knows Anything About That We Can Discuss. We Can Talk About The Weather; We Can Talk About Social Problems; We Can Talk About Psychology; We Can Talk About International Finance Gold Transfers We Can't Talk About, Because Those Are Understood So It's The Subject That Nobody Knows Anything About That We Can All Talk About!

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

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?

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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

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

Fooling Ourselves

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Exception Tests The Rule.

Exception To The Rule

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Strange! I Don't Understand How It Is That We Can Write Mathematical Expressions And Calculate What The Thing Is Going To Do Without Being Able To Picture It.

It 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].

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.

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

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.

Know How To Solve Every Problem That Has Been Solved.

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

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."

The Beauty That Is There Is Also Available For Me, Too. But I See A Deeper Beauty That Isn't So Readily Available To Others.... I Don't See How Studying A Flower Ever Detracts From Its Beauty. It Only Adds

The Same Equations Have The Same Solutions

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

Science Is A Way Of Trying Not To Fool Yourself.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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.

It's Amazing How Many People Even Today Use A Computer To Do Something You Can Do With A Pencil And Paper In Less Time.

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.

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

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

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!

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

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.

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.

I Don't Feel Frightened By Not Knowing Things.

Mysterious Universe

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.

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

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

Today's Brains Are Yesterday's Mashed Potatoes.

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!"

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.

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.

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

Scientific Method

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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.

In Any Organization There Ought To Be The Possibility Of Discussion... Fence Sitting Is An Art, And It's Difficult, And It's Important To Do, Rather Than To Go Headlong In One Direction Or The Other. It's Just Better To Have Action, Isn't It Than To Sit On The Fence? Not If You're Not Sure Which Way To Go, It Isn't.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Physics Is Not The Most Important Thing. Love Is.

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.

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!

Nature...cannot Be Fooled!

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.

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.

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.

All Mass Is Interaction.

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

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

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.

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

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.

... 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.

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

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

If You're Doing An Experiment, You Should Report Everything That You Think Might Make It Invalid - Not Only What You Think Is Right About It; Other Causes That Could Possibly Explain Your Results; And Things You Thought Of That You've Eliminated By Some Other Experiment, And How They Worked -to Make Sure The Other Fellow Can Tell They Have Been Eliminated.

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.

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

Science Is Uncertain.

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

Science Is The Belief In The Ignorance Of Experts.

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

It Doesn't Matter How Beautiful Your Theory Is, It Doesn't Matter How Smart You Are. If It Doesn't Agree With Experiment, It's Wrong.

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.

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

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.

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

Most Interesting

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

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 .

Unless A Thing Can Be Defined By Measurement, It Has No Place In A Theory. And Since An Accurate Value Of The Momentum Of A Localized Particle Cannot Be Defined By Measurement It Therefore Has No Place In The Theory.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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