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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.

-Richard P. Feynman

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When You're Thinking About

Richard P. Feynman

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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.

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More From Richard P. Feynman

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.

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

Most Interesting

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A Philosopher Once Said, 'it Is Necessary For The Very Existence Of Science That The Same Conditions Always Produce The Same Results.' Well, They Don't!

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.

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.

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

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

Fooling Ourselves

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.

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.

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

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

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

Physics Is Not The Most Important Thing. Love Is.

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

Nature Has A Great Simplicity And Therefore A Great Beauty.

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

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

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.

Science Is Of Value Because It Can Produce Something.

Nature's Imagination Far Surpasses Our Own.

Science Is The Organized Skepticism In The Reliability Of Expert Opinion

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

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

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

It Is The Facts That Matter, Not The Proofs. Physics Can Progress Without The Proofs, But We Can't Go On Without The Facts ... If The Facts Are Right, Then The Proofs Are A Matter Of Playing Around With The Algebra Correctly.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

Once We Were Driving In The Midwest And We Pulled Into A Mcdonald's. Someone Came Up To Me And Asked Me Why I Have Feynman Diagrams All Over My Van. I Replied, "because I Am Feynman!" The Young Man Went, "ahhhhh!"

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The World Is A Dynamic Mess Of Jiggling Things

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.

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

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

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

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.

Work Hard To Find Something That Fascinates You.

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

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

Scientific Method

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.

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

Some People Think Wheeler's Gotten Crazy In His Later Years, But He's Always Been Crazy.

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

I Can Live With Doubt And Uncertainty And Not Knowing. I Think It Is Much More Interesting To Live Not Knowing Than To Have Answers That Might Be Wrong. If We Will Only Allow That, As We Progress, We Remain Unsure, We Will Leave Opportunities For Alternatives. We Will Not Become Enthusiastic For The Fact, The Knowledge, The Absolute Truth Of The Day, But Remain Always Uncertain … In Order To Make Progress, One Must Leave The Door To The Unknown Ajar.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Teach Principles Not Formulas.

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

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

No! Not For A Second! I Immediately Began To Think How This Could Have Happened. And I Realized That The Clock Was Old And Was Always Breaking. That The Clock Probably Stopped Some Time Before And The Nurse Coming In To The Room To Record The Time Of Death Would Have Looked At The Clock And Jotted Down The Time From That. I Never Made Any Supernatural Connection, Not Even For A Second. I Just Wanted To Figure Out How It Happened.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

Scientists Are Explorers. Philosophers Are Tourists.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Although It Is Uncertain, It Is Necessary To Make Science Useful. Science Is Only Useful If It Tells You About Some Experiment That Has Not Been Done; It Is Not Good If It Only Tells You What Just Went On.

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.

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!

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

Things You Like

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

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

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

I Don't Like Honors. I'm Appreciated For The Work That I Did, And For People Who Appreciate It, And I Notice That Other Physicists Use My Work. I Don't Need Anything Else. I Don't Think There's Any Sense To Anything Else.... 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. The Honors Are Unreal To Me. I Don't Believe In Honors... I Can't Stand It, It Hurts Me.

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.

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

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.

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

All Theoretical Chemistry Is Really Physics; And All Theoretical Chemists Know It.

You Do Not Know Anything Until You Have Practiced.

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.

You Know How It Always Is, Every New Idea, It Takes A Generation Or Two Until It Becomes Obvious That There's No Real Problem. It Has Not Yet Become Obvious To Me That There's No Real Problem. I Cannot Define The Real Problem, Therefore I Suspect There's No Real Problem, But I'm Not Sure There's No Real Problem.

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.

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.

Today's Brains Are Yesterday's Mashed Potatoes.

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

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

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

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

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.

Progress In Science Comes When Experiments Contradict Theory.

The Exception Tests The Rule.

Exception To The Rule

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thus We Can Get The Correct Answer For The Probability Of Partial Reflection By Imagining (falsely) That All Reflection Comes From Only The Front And Back Surfaces. In This Intuitively Easy Analysis, The 'front Surface' And 'back Surface' Arrows Are Mathematical Constructions That Give Us The Right Answer, Whereas .... A More Accurate Representation Of What Is Really Going On: Partial Reflection Is The Scattering Of Light By Electrons Inside The Glass.

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.

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

What Did You Ask At School Today?

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

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

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

What I Can't Create I Don't Understand

Computer Programming

Programming Languages

Computer Language

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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

Everything Is Made Of Atoms.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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."

No One Really Understands Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics

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.

Turbulence Is The Most Important Unsolved Problem Of Classical Physics.

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

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.

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

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

The Difficulty Really Is Psychological And Exists In The Perpetual Torment That Results From Your Saying To Yourself, "but How Can It Be Like That?" Which Is A Reflection Of Uncontrolled But Utterly Vain Desire To See It In Terms Of Something Familiar. ... If You Will Simply Admit That Maybe Nature Does Behave Like This, You Will Find Her A Delightful, Entrancing Thing. Do Not Keep Saying To Yourself, If You Can Possible Avoid It, "but How Can It Be Like That?" Because You Will Get 'down The Drain', Into A Blind Alley From Which Nobody Has Escaped. Nobody Knows How It Can Be Like That.

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

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

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.

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

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

Know How To Solve Every Problem That Has Been Solved.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

What Is Not Surrounded By Uncertainty Cannot Be The Truth.

'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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Nobody Ever Figures Out What Life Is All About, And It Doesn't Matter. Explore The World. Nearly Everything Is Really Interesting If You Go Into It Deeply Enough.

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

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.

I Think I Can Safely Say That Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics.

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

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.

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.

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

I Love Only Nature, And I Hate Mathematicians.

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.

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.

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!"

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

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

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.

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?

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

We Are Very Lucky To Be Living In An Age In Which We Are Still Making Discoveries. It Is Like The Discovery Of America-you Only Discover It Once. The Age In Which We Live Is The Age In Which We Are Discovering The Fundamental Laws Of Nature, And That Day Will Never Come Again. It Is Very Exciting, It Is Marvelous, But This Excitement Will Have To Go.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder

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