Richard Feynman Quotes
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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.
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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.
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If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.
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Beyond poverty, beyond the point that the material needs are reasonably satisfied, only from within is peace.
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A great deal more is known than has been proved.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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Science is uncertain.
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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.
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I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys--but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!
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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!
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To not know math is a severe limitation to understanding the world.
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Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.
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The other thing that gives a scientific man the creeps in the world today are the methods of choosing leaders - in every nation. Today, for example, in the United States, the two political parties have decided to employ public relations men, that is, advertising men, who are trained in the necessary methods of telling the truth or lying in order to develop a product.
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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.
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If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 1 in 100,000, I know he's full of crap.
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I don't believe I can really do without teaching.
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What did you ASK at school today?
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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!"
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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.
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The electron is a theory. But the theory is so good we can almost consider them real.
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As you know, a theory in physics is not useful unless it is able to predict underlined effects which we would otherwise expect.
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Nature does not care what we call it, she just keeps on doing it.