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[quantum Mechanics] Describes Nature As Absurd From The Point Of View Of Common Sense. And Yet It Fully Agrees With Experiment. So I Hope You Can Accept Nature As She Is - Absurd.

-Richard P. Feynman

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[quantum Mechanics] Describes Nature

Richard P. Feynman

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[quantum Mechanics] Describes Nature As Absurd From The Point Of View Of Common Sense. And Yet It Fully Agrees With Experiment. So I Hope You Can Accept Nature As She Is - Absurd.

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The Idea That No One Really Knew How To Run A Government Led To The Idea That We Should Arrange A System By Which New Ideas Could Be Developed, Tried Out, And Tossed Out If Necessary, With More New Ideas Brought In - A Trial And Error System.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

We Are Not To Tell Nature What She’s Gotta Be... She's Always Got Better Imagination Than We Have.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Nature's Imagination Far Surpasses Our Own.

Science Is Uncertain.

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.

You Have No Responsibility To Live Up To What Other People Think You Ought To Accomplish. I Have No Responsibility To Be Like They Expect Me To Be. It's Their Mistake, Not My Failing.

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

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.

(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

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

Fall In Love With Some Activity, And Do It! Nobody Ever Figures Out What Life Is All About, And It Doesn't Matter. Explore The World. Nearly Everything Is Really Interesting If You Go Into It Deeply Enough. Work As Hard And As Much As You Want To On The Things You Like To Do The Best. Don't Think About What You Want To Be, But What You Want To Do. Keep Up Some Kind Of A Minimum With Other Things So That Society Doesn't Stop You From Doing Anything At All.

Falling In Love

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

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?

What I Cannot Create, I Do Not Understand.

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

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

It Is In The Admission Of Ignorance And The Admission Of Uncertainty That There Is A Hope For The Continuous Motion Of Human Beings In Some Direction That Doesn't Get Confined, Permanently Blocked, As It Has So Many Times Before In Various Periods In The History Of Man.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

Few People Realize The Number Of Things That Are Possible.

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

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 .

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

Nature...cannot Be Fooled!

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!"

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I Love Only Nature, And I Hate Mathematicians.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

We Decided That 'trivial' Means 'proved'. So We Joked With The Mathematicians: We Have A New Theorem- That Mathematicians Can Prove Only Trivial Theorems, Because Every Theorem That's Proved Is Trivial.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

The Test Of All Knowledge Is Experiment.

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

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

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.

Know How To Solve Every Problem That Has Been Solved.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

So My Antagonist Said, "is It Impossible That There Are Flying Saucers? Can You Prove That It's Impossible?" "no," I Said, "i Can't Prove It's Impossible. It's Just Very Unlikely." At That He Said, "you Are Very Unscientific. If You Can't Prove It Impossible Then How Can You Say That It's Unlikely?" But That Is The Way That Is Scientific. 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

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.

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

Everything Is Made Of Atoms.

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!

Work Hard To Find Something That Fascinates You.

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

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.

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.

Therefore Psychologically We Must Keep All The Theories In Our Heads, And Every Theoretical Physicist Who Is Any Good Knows Six Or Seven Different Theoretical Representations For Exactly The Same Physics.

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

Poets Say Science Takes Away From The Beauty Of The Stars - Mere Globs Of Gas Atoms. I, Too, Can See The Stars On A Desert Night, And Feel Them. But Do I See Less Or More?

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.

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

Inevitability Of Death

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.

For Far More Marvelous Is The Truth Than Any Artists Of The Past Imagined It. Why Do The Poets Of The Present Not Speak Of It? What Men Are Poets Who Can Speak Of Jupiter If He Were A Man, But If He Is An Immense Spinning Sphere Of Methane And Ammonia Must Be Silent?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

If You'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.

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

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.

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.

One Of The Ways Of Stopping Science Would Be Only To Do Experiments In The Region Where You Know The Law. But Experimenters Search Most Diligently, And With The Greatest Effort, In Exactly Those Places Where It Seems Most Likely That We Can Prove Our Theories Wrong. In Other Words, We Are Trying To Prove Ourselves Wrong As Quickly As Possible, Because Only In That Way Can We Find Progress.

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

Science Is Of Value Because It Can Produce Something.

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.

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

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.

Turbulence Is The Most Important Unsolved Problem Of Classical Physics.

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.

When It Came Time For Me To Give My Talk On The Subject, I Started Off By Drawing An Outline Of The Cat And Began To Name The Various Muscles. The Other Students In The Class Interrupt Me: "we *know* All That!" "oh," I Say, "you *do*? Then No *wonder* I Can Catch Up With You So Fast After You've Had Four Years Of Biology." They Had Wasted All Their Time Memorizing Stuff Like That, When It Could Be Looked Up In Fifteen Minutes.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The World Is A Dynamic Mess Of Jiggling Things

Progress In Science Comes When Experiments Contradict Theory.

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.

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

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

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

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!

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

In Fact The Total Amount That A Physicist Knows Is Very Little. He Has Only To Remember The Rules To Get Him From One Place To Another And He Is All Right.

A Poet Once Said, "the Whole Universe Is In A Glass Of Wine." We Will Probably Never Know In What Sense He Meant That, For Poets Do Not Write To Be Understood. But It Is True That If We Look At A Glass Of Wine Closely Enough We See The Entire Universe.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Scientists Are Explorers. Philosophers Are Tourists.

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.

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

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

You Can Always Recognize Truth By Its Beauty And Simplicity.

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.

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

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.

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

What Do You Care What Other People Think?

I Don't Feel Frightened By Not Knowing Things.

Mysterious Universe

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

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 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.

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!

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