Quotes & Sayings About Feynman

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. — Richard P. Feynman

This is not yet a scientific age. — Richard P. Feynman

People who wish to analyze nature without using mathematics must settle for a reduced understanding. — Richard P. Feynman

On the contrary, it's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics . It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about! — Richard P. Feynman

It is interesting that this thoroughness, which is a virtue, is often misunderstood. When someone says a thing has been done scientifically, often all he means is that it has been done thoroughly. I have heard people talk of the "scientific" extermination of the Jews in Germany. There was nothing scientific about it. It was only thorough. There was no question of making observations and then checking them in order to determine something. In that sense, there were "scientific" exterminations of people in Roman times and in other periods when science was not so far developed as it is today and not much attention was paid to observation. In such cases, people should say "thorough" or "thoroughgoing," instead of "scientific. — Richard Feynman

Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. — Richard P. Feynman

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]. — Richard P. Feynman

Progress in science comes when experiments contradict theory. — Richard P. Feynman

Quarks came in a number of varieties - in fact, at first, only three were needed to explain all the hundreds of particles and the different kinds of quarks - they are called u-type, d-type, s-type. — Richard P. Feynman

I have argued flying saucers with lots of people. I was interested in possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it's possible or not but whether it's going on or not. — Richard P. Feynman

Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence. — Richard P. Feynman

Take this neat little equation here. It tells me all the ways an electron can make itself comfortable in or around an atom. That's the logic of it. The poetry of it is that the equation tells me how shiny gold is, how come rocks are hard, what makes grass green, and why you can't see the wind. And a million other things besides, about the way nature works. — Richard Feynman

If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize. — Richard P. Feynman

Suppose we had some kind of device with particles moving with a certain definite symmetry, and suppose their movements were bilaterally symmetrical (fig. 20). Then, following the laws of physics, with all the movements and collisions, you could expect, and rightly, that if you look at the same picture later on it will still be bilaterally symmetrical. So there is a kind of conservation, the conservation of the symmetry character. This should be in the table, but it is not like a number that you measure, and we will discuss it in much more detail in the next lecture. The reason this is not very interesting in classical physics is because the times when there are such nicely symmetrical initial conditions are very rare, and it is therefore a not very important or practical conservation law. But — Richard Feynman

I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me. — Richard Feynman

All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it. — Richard P. Feynman

After reading the salary, I've decided that I must refuse. The reason I have to refuse a salary like that is I would be able to do what I've always wanted to do- -get a wonderful mistress, put her up in an apartment, buy her nice things.. With the salary you have offered, I could actually do that, and I know what would happen to me. I'd worry about her, what she's doing; I'd get into arguments when I come home, and so on. All this bother would make me uncomfortable and unhappy. I wouldn't be able to do physics well, and it would be a big mess! What I've always wanted to do would be bad for me, so I've decided that I can't accept your offer. — Richard Feynman

The difference between solids and liquids is, then, that in a solid the atoms are arranged in some kind of an array, called a crystalline array, and they do not have a random position at long distances; the position of the atoms on one side of the crystal is determined by that of other atoms millions of atoms away on the other side of the crystal. — Richard Feynman

No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race. — Richard Feynman

Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this. — Richard P. Feynman

What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them? — Richard P. Feynman

Life behind him by this time (he died in 1988), so he could reflect on his experiences and accomplishments with the — Richard Feynman

It's the way I study - to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself. — Richard P. Feynman

I think nature's imagination Is so much greater than man's, she's never going to let us relax — Richard Feynman

When I bike to work int he fall, I see beauty in the trees tinged with red, orange and gold. But seeing these trees through the lens of physics reveals even more beauty, captured by the Feynman quote that opens this chapter. And the deeper I look, the more elegance I glimpse: we'll see in Chapter 3 how the trees ultimately come from stars, and we'll see in Chapter 8 how studying their building blocks suggests their existence in parallel universes. — Max Tegmark

Turbulence is the most important unsolved problem of classical physics. — Richard P. Feynman

The late Richard Feynman, a superb physicist, said once as we talked about the laser that the way to tell a great idea is that, when people hear it, they say, 'Gee, I could have thought of that.' — Charles Hard Townes

Few people realize the number of things that are possible. — Richard P. Feynman

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. — Richard P. Feynman

The only thing that can be predicted is the probability of different events. — Richard Feynman

What I cannot build. I do not understand. — Richard Feynman

If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There's a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. Um ... off the top of my head I can't think of where to find something about how it's an ideal of science to settle things by experiment instead of arguments - — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Is science of any value? 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. — Richard P. Feynman

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?" — Richard P. Feynman

It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do? — Richard Feynman

It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about we can discuss. — Richard P. Feynman

If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell 'friend,' I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend. — Richard P. Feynman

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!"
"Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes. — Richard Feynman

Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile. — Richard Feynman

The first demonstration of the law of conservation of energy was not by a physicist but by a medical man. He demonstrated with rats. If you burn food you can find out how much heat is generated. If you then feed the same amount of food to rats it is converted, with oxygen, into carbon dioxide, in the same way as in burning. When you measure the energy in each case you find out that living creatures do exactly the same as non-living creatures. The law for conservation of energy is as true for life as for other phenomena. Incidentally, — Richard Feynman

The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life? — Richard P. Feynman

God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. — Richard P. Feynman

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. — Richard P. Feynman

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next? - RICHARD P. FEYNMAN — James Gleick

Anything can happen, in spite of what you're pretty sure should happen. — Richard Feynman

We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. — Richard P. Feynman

There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble. — Richard P. Feynman

As you know, a theory in physics is not useful unless it is able to predict underlined effects which we would otherwise expect. — Richard P. Feynman

I learned from her that every woman is worried
about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is. — Richard Feynman

That was a very good way to get educated, working on the senior problems and learning how to pronounce things. — Richard Feynman

This is not very important what I'm doing. I'm just proving something. — Richard P. Feynman

What do I advise? Forget it all. Don't be afraid. Do what you get the most pleasure from. Is it to build a cloud chamber? Then go on doing things like that. Develop your talents wherever they may lead. Damn the torpedoes - full speed ahead!
If you have any talent,or any occupation that delights you,do it, and do it to the hilt — Richard Feynman

I think we can safely assume that no one understands quantum mechanics. — Richard P. Feynman

The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination, in a tight straightjacket. — Richard Feynman

What one fool can understand, another can. — Richard P. Feynman

Now, let's look again at the partial reflection of light by a layer of glass. How does it work? I talked about light reflected from the front surface and the back surface. This idea of surfaces was a simplification I made in order to keep things easy at the beginning. Light is really not affected by surfaces. An incoming photon is scattered by the electrons in the atoms inside the glass, and a new photon comes back up to the detector. It's interesting that instead of adding up all the billions of tiny arrows that represent the amplitude for all the electrons inside the glass to scatter an incoming photon, we can add just two arrows-for the "front surface" and "back surface" reflections-and come out with the same answer. Let's see why. — Richard Feynman

Physics is to mathematics like sex is to masturbation. — Richard Feynman

Just as a poet often has license from the rules of grammar and pronunciation, we should like to ask for 'physicists' license from the rules of mathematics in order to express what we wish to say in as simple a manner as possible. — Richard P. Feynman

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 — Richard P. Feynman

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! — Richard Feynman

Science is uncertain. — Richard P. Feynman

Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going," wrote Feynman, "but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly. — Richard P. Feynman

Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation. — Richard Feynman

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that. — Richard P. Feynman

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. — Richard P. Feynman

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation? — Richard P. Feynman

A great deal more is known than has been proved. — Richard P. Feynman

Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty
some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain. — Richard P. Feynman

I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there. — Richard P. Feynman

If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations. — Richard P. Feynman

Nature has a great simplicity and therefore a great beauty — Richard Feynman

If we were not able or did not desire to look in any new direction, if we did not have a doubt or recognize ignorance, we would not get any new ideas. — Richard Feynman

The reason Dick's physics was so hard for ordinary people to grasp was that he did not use equations. The usual theoretical physics was done since the time of Newton was to begin by writing down some equations and then to work hard calculating solutions of the equations. This was the way Hans and Oppy and Julian Schwinger did physics. Dick just wrote down the solutions out of his head without ever writing down the equations. He had a physical picture of the way things happen, and the picture gave him the solutions directly with a minimum of calculation. It was no wonder that people who had spent their lives solving equations were baffled by him. Their minds were analytical; his was pictorial. — Freeman Dyson

The most important thing I found out from [my father] is that if you asked any question and pursued it deeply enough, then at the end there was a glorious discovery of a general and beautiful kind. — Richard P. Feynman

Figure 18. As the thickness of a layer increases, the two surfaces produce a partial reflection of monochromatic light whose probability fluctuates in a cycle from 0% to 16%. Since the speed of the imaginary stopwatch hand is different for different colors of light, the cycle repeats itself at different rates. Thus when two colors such as pure red and pure blue are aimed at the layer, a given thickness will reflect only red, only blue, both red and blue in different proportions (which produce various hues of violet), or neither color (black). If the layer is of varying thicknesses, such as a drop of oil spreading out on a mud puddle, all of the combinations will occur. In sunlight, which consists of all colors, all sorts of combinations occur, which produce lots of colors. — Richard Feynman

The shell game that we play ... is technically called 'renormalization'. But no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It's surprising that the theory still hasn't been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate. — Richard P. Feynman

What we need is imagination, but imagination in a terrible strait-jacket. — Richard P. Feynman

This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you! — Richard Feynman

If one cannot see gravitation acting here, he has no soul. — Richard Feynman

All ordinary phenomena can be explained by the actions and the motions of particles. For — Richard Feynman

But the motion to keep the planet going in a straight line has no known reason. The reason why things coast for ever has never been found out. The law of inertia has no known origin. Although — Richard Feynman

The Feynman quip is not without a philosopher's tu quoque: "most scientists tend to understand little more about science than fish about hydrodynamics" (Lakatos 1978:62 n.2). — Robert Nola

That's the trouble with not being in your own field: You don't take it seriously. — Richard Feynman

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. — Richard Feynman

I wonder how Feynman would feel if he had to be talking to not just a few nuts of this kind but e.g. to 2,500 similar nuts who would be moreover described by the media as good scientists, if not the best ones in the world. ;-) Good for him that he managed to die in time. — Lubos Motl

There's so much distance between the fundamental rules and the final phenomenon, that it's almost unbelievable that the final variety of phenomenon can come from such a steady operation of such simple rules. — Richard P. Feynman

I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned. — Richard Feynman

THE QUESTION IS, OF COURSE, IS IT GOING TO BE POSSIBLE TO AMALGAMATE EVERYTHING,
AND MERELY DISCOVER THAT THIS WORLD REPRESENTS DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF ONE THING? — Richard Feynman

When I entered graduate school I had carried out the instructions given to me by my father and had knocked on both Murray Gell-Mann's and Feynman's doors and asked them what they were currently doing. Murray wrote down the partition function for the three-dimensional Ising model and said it would be nice if I could solve it (at least that is how I remember the conversation). Feynman's answer was 'nothing'. — Kenneth G. Wilson

(Incidentally, they had a fire in that room, because of all the chaotic mess that they had - too many wires - and it destroyed the cyclotron. But I'd better not tell about that!) (When — Richard Feynman

There is a physical problem that is common to many fields, that is very old, and that has not been solved. It is not the problem of finding new fundamental particles, but something left over from a long time ago - over a hundred years. Nobody in physics has really been able to analyze it mathematically satisfactorily in spite of its importance to the sister sciences. It is the analysis of circulating or turbulent fluids. — Richard Feynman

It is not unscientific to make a guess, although many people who are not in science think it is. — Richard P. Feynman

Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate. — Richard P. Feynman

It was thought in the Middle Ages that people simply make many observations, and the observations themselves suggest the laws. But it does not work that way. It takes much more imagination than that.So the next thing we have to talk about is where the new ideas come from. Actually, it does not make any difference, as long as they come. — Richard Feynman

The same equations have the same solutions — Richard P. Feynman

The prize is in the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it [my work]
those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me. — Richard Feynman

If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern, again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from place to place, with different kinds of atoms arranged in many ways, continually changing, not repeating, how much more marvelously is it possible that this thing might behave? Is it possible that that "thing" walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you, is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement, such that the sheer complexity of it staggers the imagination as to what it can do? When we say we are a pile of atoms, we do not mean we are merely a pile of atoms, because a pile of atoms which is not repeated from one to the other might well have the possibilities which you see before you in the mirror. — Richard Feynman

The exception proves that the rule is wrong. That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong. — Richard Feynman

In those days, in Far Rockaway, there was a youth center for Jewish kids at the temple ... Somebody nominated me for president of the youth center. The elders began getting nervous, because I was an avowed atheist by that time ... I thought nature itself was so interesting that I didn't want it distorted like that. And so I gradually came to disbelieve the whole religion. — Richard P. Feynman

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible. — Richard Feynman