Richard Feynman Quantum Quotes & Sayings

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

As an author, I don't really think too much about being a celebrity. It's not like being a movie star or a TV star. It's not as if people recognize me when I walk down the street. That hardly ever happens, and it's just as well. But it is great when people know my books, when I walk through an airport and see them in the bookstore, or when I see someone reading a book on a plane or on a train, and it's something I've written. That's a wonderful feeling. — Rick Riordan

Love happens in the strangest places at the strangest times. — Andrew Sturm

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

I do think I paid a price as an artist, and I am trying to make up for it now - I work six days a week in the studio, and I've never been happier. — Michael Craig-Martin

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

Don't you worry your pretty little mind, people throw rocks at things that shine — Taylor Swift

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

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

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

What a man can take with a sword, a woman can give by her flesh alone. Life. — Robin Hobb

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

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

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

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

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

[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

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

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

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