Richard Feynman Quotes
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I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
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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.
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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.
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If you can't explain something to a first year student, then you haven't really understood .
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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.
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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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There is no authority who decides what is a good idea.
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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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... 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.
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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.
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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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To not know math is a severe limitation to understanding the world.
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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.
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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.
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As revealed by physics, the truth is so remarkable, so amazing!
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What Do You Care What Other People Think?
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What is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.
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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.
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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!
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We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.
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I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
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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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If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.
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I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder.