Richard Feynman Quotes
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It requires a much higher degree of imagination to understand the electromagnetic field than to understand invisible angels. ... I speak of the E and B fields and wave my arms and you may imagine that I can see them ... but I cannot really make a picture that is even nearly like the true waves.
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Winning a Nobel Prize is no big deal, but winning it with an IQ of 124 is really something.
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Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.
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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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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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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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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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So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?" "No," I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely." At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?" But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible.
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My friends and I had taken dancing lessons, although none of us would ever admit it. In those depression days, a friend of my mother was trying to make a living by teaching dancing in the evening, in an upstairs dance studio. There was a back door to the place, and she arranged it so the young men could come up through the back way without being seen.
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In its efforts to learn as much as possible about nature, modern physics has found that certain things can never be "known" with certainty. Much of our knowledge must always remain uncertain. The most we can know is in terms of probabilities.
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The "paradox" is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be."
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Whenever you see a sweeping statement that a tremendous amount can come from a very small number of assumptions, you always find that it is false. There are usually a large number of implied assumptions that are far from obvious if you think about them sufficiently carefully.
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By honest I don't mean that you only tell what's true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind.
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Science is uncertain.
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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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In fact, the science of thermodynamics began with an analysis, by the great engineer Sadi Carnot, of the problem of how to build the best and most efficient engine, and this constitutes one of the few famous cases in which engineering has contributed to fundamental physical theory. Another example that comes to mind is the more recent analysis of information theory by Claude Shannon. These two analyses, incidentally, turn out to be closely related.
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There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt.
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The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things
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It is to be emphasized that no matter how many amplitude arrows we draw, add, or multiply, our objective is to calculate a single final arrow for the event . Mistakes are often made by physics students at first because they do not keep this important point in mind. They work for so long analyzing events involving a single photon that they begin to think that the arrow is somehow associated with the photon rather than with the event.
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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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Nature does not care what we call it, she just keeps on doing it.
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Therefore psychologically we must keep all the theories in our heads, and every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics.
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Work hard to find something that fascinates you.
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The basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual... the humility of the spirit.