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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.

-Richard P. Feynman

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What Is Necessary For

Richard P. Feynman

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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.

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

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

It Does Not Make Any Difference How Beautiful Your Guess Is. It Does Not Make Any Difference How Smart You Are, Who Made The Guess, Or What His Name Is If It Disagrees With Experiment It Is Wrong. That Is All There Is To It.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

As Usual, Nature's Imagination Far Surpasses Our Own, As We Have Seen From The Other Theories Which Are Subtle And Deep.

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.

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

Absolute Certainty

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

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.

Turbulence Is The Most Important Unsolved Problem Of Classical Physics.

We've Learned From Experience That The Truth Will Out. Other Experimenters Will Repeat Your Experiment And Find Out Whether You Were Wrong Or Right. Nature's Phenomena Will Agree Or They'll Disagree With Your Theory. And, Although You May Gain Some Temporary Fame And Excitement, You Will Not Gain A Good Reputation As A Scientist If You Haven't Tried To Be Very Careful In This Kind Of Work. And It's This Type Of Integrity, This Kind Of Care Not To Fool Yourself, That Is Missing To A Large Extent In Much Of The Research In Cargo Cult Science.

When 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.

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

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?

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

I 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.

Any Schemes - Such As 'think Of Symmetry Laws', Or 'put The Information In Mathematical Form', Or 'guess Equations'- Are Known To Everybody Now, And They Are All Tried All The Time. When You Are Stuck, The Answer Cannot Be One Of These, Because You Will Have Tried These Right Away...the Next Scheme, The New Discovery, Is Going To Be Made In A Completely Different Way.

Nature...cannot Be Fooled!

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.

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.

The Test Of All Knowledge Is Experiment.

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.

'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.

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 All Of This, All The Life Of A Stream Of Water, Can Be Nothing But A Pile Of Atoms, How Much More Is Possible?

Work Hard To Find Something That Fascinates You.

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

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.

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

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.

The World Is A Dynamic Mess Of Jiggling Things

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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?"

Science Is Of Value Because It Can Produce Something.

Science Is Uncertain.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Few People Realize The Number Of Things That Are Possible.

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.

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.

The Same Equations Have The Same Solutions

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

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!

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.

You Say You Are A Nameless Man. You Are Not To Your Wife And To Your Child. You Will Not Long Remain So To Your Immediate Colleagues If You Can Answer Their Simple Questions When They Come Into Your Office. You Are Not Nameless To Me. Do Not Remain Nameless To Yourself — It Is Too Sad A Way To Be. Know Your Place In The World And Evaluate Yourself Fairly, Not In Terms Of The Naïve Ideals Of Your Own Youth, Nor In Terms Of What You Erroneously Imagine Your Teacher's Ideals Are.

If 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.

Science Is A Way Of Trying Not To Fool Yourself.

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

Inevitability Of Death

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

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Fooling Ourselves

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!

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!"

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Truth Will Come Out

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

You Do Not Know Anything Until You Have Practiced.

Teach Principles Not Formulas.

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.

The First Principle Is That You Must Not Fool Yourself—and You Are The Easiest Person To Fool. So You Have To Be Very Careful About That. After You’ve Not Fooled Yourself, It’s Easy Not To Fool Other Scientists. You Just Have To Be Honest In A Conventional Way After That.

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.

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

If It Disagrees With Experiment, It's Wrong.

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

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.

If There Is Something Very Slightly Wrong In Our Definition Of The Theories, Then The Full Mathematical Rigor May Convert These Errors Into Ridiculous Conclusions.

It Is Our Responsibility To Leave The People Of The Future A Free Hand.

What Do You Care What Other People Think?

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

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.

If You Have Any Talent, Or Any Occupation That Delights You, Do It, And Do It To The Hilt. Don't Ask Why, Or What Difficulties You May Get Into.

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

When The Problem [quantum Chromodynamics] Is Finally Solved, It Will All Be By Imagination. Then There Will Be Some Big Thing About The Great Way It Was Done. But It's Simple -it Will All Be By Imagination, And Persistence.

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Science Alone Of All The Subjects Contains Within Itself The Lesson Of The Danger Of Belief In The Infallibility Of The Greatest Teachers Of The Preceding Generation.

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

Scientific Method

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I Don't Believe I Can Really Do Without Teaching. The Reason Is, I Have To Have Something So That When I Don't Have Any Ideas And I'm Not Getting Anywhere, I Can Say To Myself, "at Least I'm Living; At Least I'm Doing Something. I'm Making Some Contribution." It's Just Psychological.

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

Physics Is To Mathematics What Sex Is To Masturbation.

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.

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.

Science Is A Way For Us To Not Fool Ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

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 Can Always Recognize Truth By Its Beauty And Simplicity.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Progress In Science Comes When Experiments Contradict Theory.

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

Physics Is Not The Most Important Thing. Love Is.

A Person Talks In Such Generalities That Everyone Can Understand Him And It's Considered To Be Some Deep Philosophy. However, I Would Like To Be Very Rather More Special And I Would Like To Be Understood In An Honest Way, Rather Than In A Vague Way.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

... 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

When A Scientist Doesn't Know The Answer To A Problem, He Is Ignorant. When He Has A Hunch As To What The Result Is, He Is Uncertain. And When He Is Pretty Darn Sure Of What The Result Is Going To Be, He Is Still In Some Doubt. We Have Found It Of Paramount Importance That In Order To Progress We Must Recognize Our Ignorance And Leave Room For Doubt. Scientific Knowledge Is A Body Of Statements Of Varying Degrees Of Certainty - Some Most Unsure, Some Nearly Sure, But None Absolutely Certain.

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

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?"

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

[b]eyond Poverty, Beyond The Point That The Material Needs Are Reasonably Satisfied, Only From Within Is Peace.

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.

All Mass Is Interaction.

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