Quotes by Richard P. Feynman

If you realize all the time whats kind of wonderful - that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience - every once in a while, we have these integrations when everythings pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards.

All the evidence, experimental and even a little theoretical, seems to indicate that it is the energy content which is involved in gravitation, and therefore, since matter and antimatter both represent positive energies, gravitation makes no distinction.

Youre unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

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

“All the time youre saying to yourself, I could do that, but I wont, — which is just another way of saying that you cant.”

“We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.”

“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it. ”

“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.”

“So my antagonist said, Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that its impossible? No, I said, I cant prove its impossible. Its just very unlikely. At that he said, You are very unscientific. If you cant prove it impossible then how can you say that its 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.”

“What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you dont understand it. You see my physics students dont understand it... That is because I dont understand it. Nobody does.”

“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”

“We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.”

“We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really dont know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.”

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but thats not why we do it.”

“It doesnt matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesnt matter how smart you are. If it doesnt agree with experiment, its wrong.”

“If you thought you were trying to find out more about it because youre gonna get an answer to some deep philosophical question...you may be wrong! It may be that you cant get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature. But my interest in science is to simply find out about the world.”

“[Doubt] is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men who made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas bought in - a trial-and-error system. This method was a result of the fact that science was already showing itself to be a successful venture at the end of the eighteenth century. Even then it was clear to socially minded people that the openness of possibilities was an opportunity, and that doubt and discussion were essential to progress into the unknown. If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar...doubt is not to be feared, but welcomed and discussed.”