Richard P. Feynman Quotes
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.
The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way someday.
That is the logical tight-rope on which we have to walk if we wish to interpret nature.
All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it.
I think Nature's imagination is so much greater than man's, she's never gonna let us relax!
No man is rich who is unsatisfied, but who wants nothing possess his heart's desire.
It is the fact that the electrons cannot all get on top of each other that makes tables and everything else solid.
To test whether you have learned an idea or a definition, rephrase what you just learned without using the new word.
The unanswerable mysteries... the attitude that all is uncertain... to summarize it - the humility of the intellect.
There are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess.
It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about we can discuss.
Some things that satisfy the rules of algebra can be interesting to mathematicians even though they don't always represent a real situation.
In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.
The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment.
When you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you've told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway.
I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.
I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.
If you don't like it, go somewhere else, to another universe where the rules are simpler.
If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery.
As you know, a theory in physics is not useful unless it is able to predict underlined effects which we would otherwise expect.
The problem of creating something new, but which is consistent with everything which has been seen before, is one of extreme difficulty.
To decide upon the answer is not scientific. In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar ajar only.
But see that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
In fact the total amount that a physicist knows is very little. He has only to remember the rules to get him from one place to another and he is all right.
There are thousands of years in the past, and there is an unknown amount of time in the future. There are all kinds of opportunities, and there are all kinds of dangers.
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.
You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I don't want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick.
It is impossible, by the way, when picking one example of anything, to avoid picking one which is atypical in some sense.
Every instrument that has been designed to be sensitive enough to detect weak light has always ended up discovering that the same thing: light is made of particles.
Outside of their particular area of expertise scientists are just as dumb as the next person.
We can deduce, often, from one part of physics like the law of gravitation, a principle which turns out to be much more valid than the derivation.
One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much. I love only nature, and I hate mathematicians.