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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.

-Richard P. Feynman

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One Of The Ways

Richard P. Feynman

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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

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

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.

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

Nature...cannot Be Fooled!

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

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

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

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

The World Is A Dynamic Mess Of Jiggling Things

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

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!

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.

This Attitude Of Mind - This Attitude Of Uncertainty - Is Vital To The Scientist, And It Is This Attitude Of Mind Which The Student Must First Acquire. It Becomes A Habit Of Thought. Once Acquired, We Cannot Retreat From It Anymore.

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!

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

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

Absolute Certainty

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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.

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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.

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I Don't Like Honors. ... I've Already Got The Prize: The Prize Is The Pleasure Of Finding The Thing Out, The Kick In The Discovery, The Observation That Other People Use It. Those Are The Real Things.

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

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

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

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

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

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Falling In Love

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

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.

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

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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.

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

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

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

... 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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 .

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.

Science Is The Organized Skepticism In The Reliability Of Expert Opinion

What I Cannot Create, I Do Not Understand.

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.

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.

The Same Equations Have The Same Solutions

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

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

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.

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.

What Do I Advise? Forget It All. Don't Be Afraid. Do What You Get The Most Pleasure From. Is It To Build A Cloud Chamber? Then Go On Doing Things Like That. Develop Your Talents Wherever They May Lead. Damn The Torpedoes - Full Speed Ahead!if You Have Any Talent,or Any Occupation That Delights You,do It, And Do It To The Hilt

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

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.

If It Disagrees With Experiment, It's Wrong.

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.

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

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.

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

Scientific Method

Poets Say Science Takes Away From The Beauty Of Stars-mere Globs Of Gas Atoms. Nothing Is "mere". I Too See The Stars On A Desert Night, And Feel Them. But Do I See Less Or More? ...what Is The Pattern, Or The Meaning, Or The Why? It Does Not Do Harm To The Mystery To Know A Little More About It. For Far More Marvelous Is The Truth Than Any Artists Of The Past Imagined It.

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

To Do Any Important Work In Physics A Very Good Mathematical Ability And Aptitude Are Required. Some Work In Applications Can Be Done Without This, But It Will Not Be Very Inspired. If You Must Satisfy Your "personal Curiosity Concerning The Mysteries Of Nature" What Will Happen If These Mysteries Turn Out To Be Laws Expressed In Mathematical Terms (as They Do Turn Out To Be)? You Cannot Understand The Physical World In Any Deep Or Satisfying Way Without Using Mathematical Reasoning With Facility.

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

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

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

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?"

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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!

What Do You Care What Other People Think?

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

Truth Will Come Out

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.

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

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

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 I Can't Create I Don't Understand

Computer Programming

Programming Languages

Computer Language

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.

Thank You Very Much, I Enjoyed Myself

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 May Come Along And Argue Philosophically That They Like One Better Than Another; But We Have Learned From Much Experience That All Philosophical Intuitions About What Nature Is Going To Do Fail.

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

I Do Believe That There Is A Conflict Between Science And Religion ... The Spirit Or Attitude Toward The Facts Is Different In Religion From What It Is In Science. The Uncertainty That Is Necessary In Order To Appreciate Nature Is Not Easily Correlated With The Feeling Of Certainty In Faith.

Light Is Something Like Raindrops Each Little Lump Of Light Is Called A Photon And If The Light Is All One Color, All The "raindrops" Are The Same.

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.

This Is Not Yet A Scientific Age.

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

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

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

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.

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

Things You Like

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.

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.

So, Ultimately, In Order To Understand Nature It May Be Necessary To Have A Deeper Understanding Of Mathematical Relationships. But The Real Reason Is That The Subject Is Enjoyable, And Although We Humans Cut Nature Up In Different Ways, And We Have Different Courses In Different Departments, Such Compartmentaliz Ation Is Really Artificial, And We Should Take Our Intellectual Pleasures Where We Find Them.

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.

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

Turbulence Is The Most Important Unsolved Problem Of Classical Physics.

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

What Did You Ask At School Today?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Science Is A Way To Teach How Something Gets To Be Known, What Is Not Known, To What Extent Things Are Known (for Nothing Is Known Absolutely), How To Handle Doubt And Uncertainty, What The Rules Of Evidence Are, How To Think About Things So That Judgments Can Be Made, How To Distinguish Truth From Fraud, And From Show.

Science Is A Way For Us To Not Fool Ourselves.

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.

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

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