R P Feynman Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science is uncertain. — Richard P. Feynman

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