It requires a much higher degree of imagination to understand the electromagnetic field than to understand invisible angels. ... I speak of the <b>E<… - Richard Feynman

I believe, therefore, that although it is not the case today, that there may some day come a time, I should hope, when it will fully appreciated that the power of governments should be limited; that governments ought not to be empowered to decide the validity of scientific theories, that this is a ridiculous thing for them to try to do; that they are not to decide the description of history or of economic theory or of philosophy.

The only way to have real success in science, the field I'm familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what's good and what's bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty.

Why are all the theories of physics so similar in their structure?

There are a number of possibilities. The first is the limited imagination of physicists: when we see a new phenomenon we try to fit it into the framework we already have-until we have made enough experiments, we don't know that it doesn't work.

Another possibility is that it is the same damn thing over and over again-that Nature has only one way of doing things, and She repeats her story from time to time.

A third possibility is that things look similar because they are aspects of the same thing- some larger picture underneath, from which things can be broken into parts that look different, like fingers on the same hand. Many physicists are working very hard trying to put together a grand picture that unifies everything into one super-duper model. It's a delightful game, but at the present time none of the speculators agree with any of the other speculators as to what the grand picture is.