Richard Feynman Quotes
-
People who wish to analyze nature without using mathematics must settle for a reduced understanding.
-
Victory usually goes to those green enough to underestimate the monumental hurdles they are facing.
-
There is no harm in doubt and skepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made.
-
No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.
-
I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder.
-
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.
-
Science is what we do to keep us from lying to ourselves
-
The problem of creating something new, but which is consistent with everything which has been seen before, is one of extreme difficulty.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
... 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.
-
The electron is a theory. But the theory is so good we can almost consider them real.
-
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.
-
The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.
-
Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it
-
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
-
All we know so far is what doesn't work.
-
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 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.
-
If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.
-
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.
-
You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.
-
I learned from her that every woman is worried about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.