The voices / 79 fragments

Richard Feynman

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01Undated

What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.

Richard Feynman / quote

02Undated

I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.

Richard Feynman / quote

03Undated

Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.

Richard Feynman / quote

04Undated

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Richard Feynman / quote

05Undated

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!""Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

Richard Feynman / quote

06Undated

So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?" "No", I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely". At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?" But that is the way that is scientific. 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.

Richard Feynman / quote

07Undated

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

Richard Feynman / quote

08Undated

I have no responsibility to live up to what others expect of me. That's their mistake, not my failing.

Richard Feynman / quote

09Undated

[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is - absurd.

Richard Feynman / quote

10Undated

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.

Richard Feynman / quote

11Undated

[Doubt] is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men who made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas bought in - a trial-and-error system. This method was a result of the fact that science was already showing itself to be a successful venture at the end of the eighteenth century. Even then it was clear to socially minded people that the openness of possibilities was an opportunity, and that doubt and discussion were essential to progress into the unknown. If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar...doubt is not to be feared, but welcomed and discussed.

Richard Feynman / quote

12Undated

If you thought you were trying to find out more about it because you're gonna get an answer to some deep philosophical question...you may be wrong! It may be that you can't get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature. But my interest in science is to simply find out about the world.

Richard Feynman / quote

13Undated

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman / quote

14Undated

Science is a long history of learning how not to fool ourselves.

Richard Feynman / quote

15Undated

If one cannot see gravitation acting here, he has no soul.

Richard Feynman / quote

16Undated

For instance, the scientific article may say, 'The radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one- half in a period of two weeks.' Now what does that mean?It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat—and also in mine, and yours—is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced: the ones that were there before have gone away.So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week's potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago—a mind which has long ago been replaced. To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out—there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.

Richard Feynman / quote

17Undated

I think nature's imagination Is so much greater than man's, she's never going to let us relax

Richard Feynman / quote

18Undated

Take this neat little equation here. It tells me all the ways an electron can make itself comfortable in or around an atom. That's the logic of it. The poetry of it is that the equation tells me how shiny gold is, how come rocks are hard, what makes grass green, and why you can't see the wind. And a million other things besides, about the way nature works.

Richard Feynman / quote

19Undated

You can't fool nature.

Richard Feynman / quote

20Undated

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

Richard Feynman / quote

21Undated

I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

Richard Feynman / quote

22Undated

Of course, I am interested, but I would not dare to talk about them. In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself. In these days of specialization there are too few people who have such a deep understanding of two departments of our knowledge that they do not make fools of themselves in one or the other.

Richard Feynman / quote

23Undated

First of all there is matter—and, remarkably enough, all matter is the same. The matter of which the stars are made is known to be the same as the matter on the earth...The same kinds of atoms appear to be in living creatures as in non-living creatures.

Richard Feynman / quote

24Undated

…the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Richard Feynman / quote