Richard Feynman Quotes
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Physics is to mathematics what sex is to masturbation.
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The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.
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But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The only way to have real success in science, the field I'm familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory , you must try to explain what's good and what's bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty .
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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.
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As usual, nature's imagination far surpasses our own, as we have seen from the other theories which are subtle and deep.
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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.
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Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.
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Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
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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."
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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.
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We find that the statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known with different degrees of certainty: "It is very much more likely that so and so is true than that it is not true".
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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.
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I have to disregard everybody else, and then I can do my own work.
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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.
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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!"
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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.
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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?
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Tell your son to stop trying to fill your head with science - for to fill your heart with love is enough!
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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.
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'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.