Feynman Quantum Quotes & Sayings

I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism, having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people. — Joseph Pulitzer

The strange feature of partial reflection by two surfaces has forced physicists away form making absolute predictions to merely calculating the probability of an event. Quantum electrodynamics provides a method for doing this-drawing little arrows on a piece of paper. The probability of an event is represented by the area of the square of an arrow. For example, an arrow representing a probability of 0.04 (4%) has a length of 0.2. — Richard Feynman

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this. — Richard P. Feynman

If I say [electrons] behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before. — Richard P. Feynman

Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times. — James Gleick

The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity. — Richard P. Feynman

The Quantum Universe has a quotation from me in every chapter - but it's a damn good book anyway. — Richard P. Feynman

I did all the musicals in my high school; I was in a pop group signed to Cash Money Records in college. Music has always been a really big part of my life. — Janina Gavankar

The uncertainty principle "protects" quantum mechanics. Heisenberg recognized that if it were possible to measure the momentum and the position simultaneously with a greater accuracy, the quantum mechanics would collapse. So he proposed that it must be impossible. — Richard Feynman

If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics. — Richard P. Feynman

No phenomenon directly involving a frequency has yet been detected above approximately 10^12 cycles per second. We only deduce the higher frequencies from the energy of the particles, by a rule which assumes that the particle-wave idea of quantum mechanics is valid. — Richard Feynman

Feynman once said, 'Science is imagination in a straitjacket.' It is ironic that in the case of quantum mechanics, the people without the straitjackets are generally the nuts. — Lawrence M. Krauss

You bring yourself to every role, it doesn't matter who it is, it doesn't matter if it's a mass murderer, you can bring something to it. — Keira Knightley

You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think. — Dorothy Parker

[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is - absurd. — Richard Feynman

I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will go "down the drain" into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. - Nobel physicist Richard Feynman — Robert Lanza

When the problem [quantum chromodynamics] is finally solved, it will all be by imagination. Then there will be some big thing about the great way it was done. But it's simple -it will all be by imagination, and persistence. — Richard P. Feynman

My wife and I have never been able to have kids of our own. Physically, it's impossible. The doctor checked. So we tend to unofficially adopt lots of twenty-somethings. I have a real soft spot in my heart for youth. — Doug Jones

The chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off chance that it is in another direction - a direction obvious from an unfashionable view of field theory - who will find it? Only someone who has sacrificed himself by teaching himself quantum electrodynamics from a peculiar and unfashionable point of view; one that he may have to invent for himself. — Richard P. Feynman

With the exception of gravitation and radioactivity, all of the phenomena known to physicists and chemists in 1911 have their ultimate explanation in the laws of quantum electrodynamics. — Richard P. Feynman

No one really understands quantum mechanics. — Richard P. Feynman

Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it's a wonderful problem, because it doesn't look so easy. — Richard P. Feynman

In 1965, physicist Richard Feynman opined, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," and the sentiment is equally applicable today. — Sean Carroll

Because the theory of quantum mechanics could explain all of chemistry and the various properties of substances, it was a tremendous success. But still there was the problem of the interaction of light and matter. — Richard P. Feynman

Like the Dove, the Lamb, and the Cock adorning our church towers. Yet all this does not alter the fact that in childhood we go through a phase when archaic thinking and feeling once more rise up in us, and that all through our lives we possess, side by side with our newly acquired directed and adapted thinking, a fantasy-thinking which corresponds to the antique state of mind. Just as our bodies still retain vestiges of obsolete functions and conditions in many of their organs, so our minds, which have apparently outgrown those archaic impulses, still bear the marks of the evolutionary stages we have traversed, and re-echo the dim bygone in dreams and fantasies. — C. G. Jung

Well, you can go ahead and hang your head out the car window if you feel like it."
Luke laughed. "I'm a werewolf, not a golden retriever."
-Clary & Luke, pg.415- — Cassandra Clare

Hummingbirds certainly communicate important things to humankind about our world_including the power, grace and beauty that can be found in a very small being. — Leslie Forsberg

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

Time has stopped; time is racing. Lochie's lips are rough yet smooth, hard yet gentle. His fingers are strong: I feel them in my hair and on my neck and down my arms and against my back. And I never want him to let me go. — Tabitha Suzuma

Feynman once wrote, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. — Stephen Hawking

It is a curious historical fact that modern quantum mechanics began with two quite different mathematical formulations: the differential equation of Schroedinger and the matrix algebra of Heisenberg. The two apparently dissimilar approaches were proved to be mathematically equivalent. — Richard P. Feynman

You got style, you got class, you got the lips to kiss my ass. — Stephen King

The situation today is, we haven't got a good model to explain partial reflection by two surfaces; we just calculate the probability that a particular photomultiplier will be hit by a photon reflected from a sheet of glass. I have chosen this calculation as our first example of the method provided by theory of quantum electrodynamics. I am going to show you "how we count the beans"-what the physicists do to get the right answer. I am not going to explain how the photons actually "decide" whether to bounce back or go through; that is not known. (Probably the question has no meaning.) I will only show you how to calculate the correct probability that light will be reflected from glass of a given thickness, because that's the only thing physicists know how to do! What we do to get the answer to this problem is analogous to the things we have to do to get the answer to every other problem explained by quantum electrodynamics. — Richard Feynman

There were several possible solutions of the difficulty of classical electrodynamics, any one of which might serve as a good starting point to the solution of the difficulties of quantum electrodynamics. — Richard P. Feynman

You need to remember that you are worth defending. You need to have courage, in the moment of attack, to take action. You might not like those actions. Hurting someone else doesn't come naturally to most of us. But in that moment, you need to remember that you have a God-given right to defend yourself and do it unflinchingly. — Scarlett Cole

Africa and indeed Nigeria has always been a paradox, an inexplicable contraction of a blessed land with a poor masses — Fela Durotoye

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

I recognize that I'm probably the luckiest novelist in recent memory, because Sherman Alexie, a writer I greatly admire, raved about my book on 'The Colbert Report,' and then Mr. Colbert himself urged his viewers to buy it - on his show and on Twitter. — Edan Lepucki

Self importance is pride of a soul. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation — Robert Motherwell