[T]he size of the arrow depends upon the... materials... [Y]ou make an arrow, and depending upon the time it takes for the light to get from the sour… - Richard Feynman
" "[T]he size of the arrow depends upon the... materials... [Y]ou make an arrow, and depending upon the time it takes for the light to get from the source to... where you... count it, you turn that arrow like a clock... round, round, depending on how much time it takes... every second it goes around... 1 followed by 15 zeros [<math>10^{15}</math>] times... It doesn't take light very long to get from the source... but it still turns a lot of times... It's like the roulette wheel and just the moment it hits the counter, it happens to be setting at some angle... It can look like a small angle when you're done, but you had to turn... like a clock hand after 25 years... it can start at 2:00 and end up at 2:15. ...That's ...the arrow for the first surface. Now the arrow for the second surface. Rule: same as the arrow for the first surface... [rotated] in the... opposite direction... When you go from air to glass it's one way... glass to air you change it around. ...You start this way for the second surface, and you turn this [arrow]... for the time, and when you get finished with this roulette wheel in the second one it comes out so. And now you add them together... and that's the laws of... light, and that will tell you whether it reflects or doesn't reflect.
About Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist. He is known for the work he did in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and in particle physics, for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga. Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world.
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Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed His pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out — without putting it in secretly!