Richard Feynman Quotes

Mathematics is not a science from our point of view, in the sense that it is not a natural science. The test of its validity is not experiment.

Nobody understands the world they’re in, but some people are better off at it than others.

It is probably better to realize that the probability concept is in a sense subjective, that it is always based on uncertain knowledge, and that its quantitative evaluation is subject to change as we obtain more information.

The prize is in the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it [my work] — those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me.

You ask me if an ordinary person — by studying hard — would get to be able to imagine these things like I imagine. Of course. I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There's no miracle people. It just happens they got interested in this thing, and they learned all this stuff. They're just people. There's no talent or special miracle ability to understand quantum mechanics or a miracle ability to imagine electromagnetic fields that comes without practice and reading and learning and study. So if you take an ordinary person who's willing to devote a great deal of time and study and work and thinking and mathematics, then he's become a scientist.

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

But one man, I remember, Bob Wilson, was just sitting there moping. I said, “What are you moping about?” He said, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.” I said, “But you started it. You got us into it.” You see, what happened to me — what happened to the rest of us — is we started for a good reason, then you’re working very hard to accomplish something and it’s a pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just stop. Bob Wilson was the only one who was still thinking about it, at that moment.

I don't know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

لا ينبغي أن نخشى من الشكّ بل يجب أن نرحّب به ونناقشه

CURIOSITY DEMANDS THAT WE ASK QUESTIONS,
THAT WE TRY TO PUT THINGS TOGETHER AND TRY TO UNDERSTAND THIS MULTITUDE OF ASPECTS
AS PERHAPS RESULTING FROM THE ACTION OF A RELATIVELY SMALL NUMBER OF ELEMENTAL
THINGS AND FORCES ACTING IN AN INFINITE VARIETY OF COMBINATIONS

To every man is given the key to Heaven. The same key opens the gates of Hell.

"If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern, again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from place to place, with different kinds of atoms arranged in many ways, continually changing, not repeating, how much more marvelously is it possible that this thing might behave? Is it possible that that "thing" walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you, is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement, such that the sheer complexity of it staggers the imagination as to what it can do? When we say we are a pile of atoms, we do not mean we are merely a pile of atoms, because a pile of atoms which is not repeated from one to the other might well have the possibilities which you see before you in the mirror."

The attempts to try to represent the electric field as the motion of some kind of gear wheels, or in terms of lines, or of stresses in some kind of material have used up more effort of physicists than it would have taken simply to get the right answers about electrodynamics. It is interesting that the correct equations for the behavior of light were worked out by MacCullagh in 1839. But people said to him: 'Yes, but there is no real material whose mechanical properties could possibly satisfy those equations, and since light is an oscillation that must vibrate in something, we cannot believe this abstract equation business'.

We cannot predict whether a given photon will arrive at A or B. All we can predict is that out of 100 photons that come down, an average of 4 will be reflected by the front surface. Does this mean that physics, a science of great exactitude, has been reduced to calculating only the probability of an event, and not predicting exactly what will happen? Yes. That's a retreat, but that's the way it is: Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities. Yet science has not collapsed.

I happen to know this, and I happen to know that, and maybe I know that;and I work everything out from there. Tomorrow I may forgot that this is true, but remember that something else is true, so I can reconstruct it all again. I am never quite sure of where I am supposed to begin or where I am supposed to end. I just remember enough all the time so that as the memory fades and some of the pieces fall out I can put the thing back together again every day