Richard Feynman Quotes
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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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I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.
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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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Nature does not care what we call it, she just keeps on doing it.
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A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood... How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!
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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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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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Mathematics is not just a language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning.
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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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Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, "Is it reasonable?"
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To not know math is a severe limitation to understanding the world.
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The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth.
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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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As revealed by physics, the truth is so remarkable, so amazing!
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It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is
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If there is something very slightly wrong in our definition of the theories, then the full mathematical rigor may convert these errors into ridiculous conclusions.
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Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools-guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus-THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn't a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!
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I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.
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Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.
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We need to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed. It's OK to say, "I don't know."
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Progress in science comes when experiments contradict theory.
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If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.
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You should not fool the laymen when you're talking as a scientist... . I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, an integrity that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
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A scientist is never certain. ... We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning.