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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.

-Richard P. Feynman

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The Most Important Thing

Richard P. Feynman

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

There's Plenty Of Room At The Bottom.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Turbulence Is The Most Important Unsolved Problem Of Classical Physics.

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.

Work Hard To Find Something That Fascinates You.

I Have The Advantage Of Having Found Out How Hard It Is To Get To Really Know Something. How Careful You Have To Be About Checking Your Experiments. How Easy It Is To Make Mistakes And Fool Yourself. I Know What It Means To Know Something.

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!

[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.

Science Is A Way Of Trying Not To Fool Yourself.

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.

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

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?

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.

Physics Is To Mathematics What Sex Is To Masturbation.

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?

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

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 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.

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

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.

No One Really Understands Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics

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?"

The Exception Tests The Rule.

Exception To The Rule

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The World Is A Dynamic Mess Of Jiggling Things

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

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.

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 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.

Science Is Of Value Because It Can Produce Something.

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.

In Those Days, In Far Rockaway, There Was A Youth Center For Jewish Kids At The Temple.... Somebody Nominated Me For President Of The Youth Center. The Elders Began Getting Nervous, Because I Was An Avowed Atheist By That Time.... I Thought Nature Itself Was So Interesting That I Didn't Want It Distorted Like That. And So I Gradually Came To Disbelieve The Whole Religion.

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

I Would Rather Have Questions That Can't Be Answered Than Answers That Can't Be Questioned.

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

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.

What Is Not Surrounded By Uncertainty Cannot Be The Truth.

Philosophy Of Science Is About As Useful To Scientists As Ornithology Is To Birds.

It Is Surprising That People Do Not Believe That There Is Imagination In Science. It Is A Very Interesting Kind Of Imagination, Unlike That Of The Artist. The Great Difficulty Is In Trying To Imagine Something That You Have Never Seen, That Is Consistent In Every Detail With What Has Already Been Seen, And That Is Different From What Has Been Thought Of; Furthermore, It Must Be Definite And Not A Vague Proposition. That Is Indeed Difficult.

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

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

I Love Only Nature, And I Hate Mathematicians.

You Can Always Recognize Truth By Its Beauty And Simplicity.

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.

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

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!

This Is The Key Of Modern Science And Is The Beginning Of The True Understanding Of Nature. This Idea. That To Look At The Things, To Record The Details, And To Hope That In The Information Thus Obtained, May Lie A Clue To One Or Another Of A Possible Theoretical Interpretation.

There’s 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.

Fall In Love With Some Activity, And Do It! Nobody Ever Figures Out What Life Is All About, And It Doesn't Matter.

Falling In Love

Few People Realize The Number Of Things That Are Possible.

Know How To Solve Every Problem That Has Been Solved.

What I Can't Create I Don't Understand

Computer Programming

Programming Languages

Computer Language

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.

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

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?"

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

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

Fooling Ourselves

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!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Things You Like

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

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

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.

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

What Did You Ask At School Today?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Scientists Are Explorers. Philosophers Are Tourists.

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

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.

(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

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

Inevitability Of Death

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

This Is Not Yet A Scientific Age.

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

You Do Not Know Anything Until You Have Practiced.

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

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

I Learned A Lot Of Different Things From Different Schools. Mit Is A Very Good Place…. It Has Developed For Itself A Spirit, So That Every Member Of The Whole Place Thinks That It’s The Most Wonderful Place In The World—it’s The Center, Somehow, Of Scientific And Technological Development In The United States, If Not The World … And While You Don’t Get A Good Sense Of Proportion There, You Do Get An Excellent Sense Of Being With It And In It, And Having Motivation And Desire To Keep On

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

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.

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.

Only Realistic Flight Schedules Should Be Proposed, Schedules That Have A Reasonable Chance Of Being Met. If In This Way The Government Would Not Support Them, Then So Be It. Nasa Owes It To The Citizens From Whom It Asks Support To Be Frank, Honest, And Informative.

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

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.

Nature's Imagination Far Surpasses Our Own.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Absolute Certainty

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Science Is Uncertain.

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

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

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.

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

Science Is A Way For Us To Not Fool Ourselves.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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

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

Scientific Method

Science Is The Belief In The Ignorance Of Experts.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Scientific Knowledge Is An Enabling Power To Do Either Good Or Bad — But It Does Not Carry Instructions On How To Use It.

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

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

Don't Pay Attention To "authorities," Think For Yourself.

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?

Thank You Very Much, I Enjoyed Myself

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

Truth Will Come Out

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

If You Thought That Science Was Certain - Well, That Is Just An Error On Your Part.

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

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The Shell Game That We Play ... Is Technically Called 'renormalization'. But No Matter How Clever The Word, It Is Still What I Would Call A Dippy Process! Having To Resort To Such Hocus-pocus Has Prevented Us From Proving That The Theory Of Quantum Electrodynamics Is Mathematically Self-consistent. It's Surprising That The Theory Still Hasn't Been Proved Self-consistent One Way Or The Other By Now; I Suspect That Renormalization Is Not Mathematically Legitimate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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