Feynman Lectures Quotes & Sayings

Look, if you're going to insist that I've taught you something, I guess I should give you a final exam." "Really?" "One question." "Sure." "Go look at an electron microscope photograph of an atom, okay? Don't just glance at it. It is very important that you examine it very closely. Think about what it means." "Okay." "And then answer this question. Does it make your heart flutter?" "Does it make my heart flutter?" "Yes or no. It's a yes or no question. No equations allowed." "All right, I'll let you know." "Don't be dense. I don't need to know. You need to know. This exam is self-graded. And it's not the answer that counts, it's what you do with the information." We locked eyes. His younger face flashed in my mind. The energetic, smiling bongo drum player I had seen pictured in the front of his book, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. A question popped from my lips. — Anonymous

CURIOSITY DEMANDS THAT WE ASK QUESTIONS,
THAT WE TRY TO PUT THINGS TOGETHER AND TRY TO UNDERSTAND THIS MULTITUDE OF ASPECTS
AS PERHAPS RESULTING FROM THE ACTION OF A RELATIVELY SMALL NUMBER OF ELEMENTAL
THINGS AND FORCES ACTING IN AN INFINITE VARIETY OF COMBINATIONS — 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

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

Throughout these lectures I have delighted in showing you that the price of gaining such an accurate theory has been the erosion of our common sense. We must accept some very bizarre behavior: the amplification and suppression of probabilities, light reflecting from all parts of a mirror, light travelling in paths other than a straight line, photons going faster or slower than the conventional speed of light, electrons going backwards in time, photons suddenly disintegrating into a positron-electron pair, and so on. That we must do, in order to appreciate what Nature is really doing underneath nearly all the phenomena we see in the world. — Richard Feynman