Richard Feynman Quotes

I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is ... If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

The trouble with playing a trick on a highly intelligent man like Mr. Teller is that the time it takes him to figure out from the moment that he sees there is something wrong till he understands exactly what happened is too damn small to give you any pleasure!

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.

One of the miseries of life is that everybody names things a little bit wrong, and so it makes a little bit harder to understand things than it would have been if they had been named differently.

angular momentum appears in two forms : one of them is angular momentum of motion, and the other is angular momentum in electric and magnetic fields. There is angular momentum in the field around the magnet, although it does not appear as motion, and this has the opposite sign to the spin.

I love to think. I once considered taking drugs as an attempt to better understand an altered state of mind; however, I decided not to. I didn't want to chance ruining the machine.

Time comes, and this tremendous flash out there is so bright that I duck, and I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck. I said, “That’s not it. That’s an after-image.” So I look back up, and I see this white light changing into yellow and then into orange. Clouds form and disappear again — from the compression and expansion of the shock wave. Finally, a big ball of orange, the center that was so bright, becomes a ball of orange that starts to rise and billow a little bit and get a little black around the edges, and then you see it’s a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside of the fire going out, the heat. All this took about one minute. It was a series from bright to dark, and I had seen it. I am about the only guy who actually looked at the damn thing — the first Trinity test. Everybody else had dark glasses, and the people at six miles couldn’t see it because they were all told to lie on the floor. I’m probably the only guy who saw it with the human eye.

I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think.
There are the rushing waves
mountains of molecules
each stupidly minding its own business
trillions apart
yet forming white surf in unison.<p>Ages on ages
before any eyes could see
year after year
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?
On a dead planet
with no life to entertain.<p>Never at rest
tortured by energy
wasted prodigiously by the sun
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar. <p>Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.<p>Growing in size and complexity
living things
masses of atoms
DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.<p>Out of the cradle
onto dry land
here it is
standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.<p>Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

It doesn't make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn't make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong.

Suppose that physics, or rather nature, is considered analogous to a great chess game with millions of pieces in it, and we are trying to discover the laws by which the pieces move. The great gods who play this chess play it very rapidly, and it is hard to watch and difficult to see. However, we are catching on to some of the rules, and there are some rules which we can work out which do not require that we watch every move. For instance, suppose there is one bishop only, a red bishop, on the board, then since the bishop moves diagonally and therefore never changes the colour of its square, if we look away for a moment while the gods play and then look back again, we can expect that there will be still a red bishop on the board, maybe in a different place, but on the same colour square. This is in the nature of a conservation law. We do not need to watch the insides to know at least something about the game.

I learned from her that every woman is worried
about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.

If you want to master something, teach it. The more you teach, the better you learn. Teaching is a powerful tool to learning.

So, ultimately, in order to understand nature it may be necessary to have a deeper understanding of mathematical relationships. But the real reason is that the subject is enjoyable, and although we humans cut nature up in different ways, and we have different courses in different departments, such compartmentalization is really artificial, and we should take our intellectual pleasures where we find them.