Richard Feynman Quotes
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To develop working ideas efficiently, I try to fail as fast as I can.
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We decided that 'trivial' means 'proved'. So we joked with the mathematicians: We have a new theorem- that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that's proved is trivial.
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It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.
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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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I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.
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But see that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
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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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Science is what we do to keep us from lying to ourselves
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Unless a thing can be defined by measurement, it has no place in a theory. And since an accurate value of the momentum of a localized particle cannot be defined by measurement it therefore has no place in the theory.
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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.
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There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.
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Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.
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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.
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It is not unscientific to make a guess, although many people who are not in science think it is.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You can always recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.
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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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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
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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.
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I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.
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Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn.
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The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth.