Richard Feynman

Quotes

• “Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman d...”
• “A [physics student] ... discovers unpublished lecture notes by Richard Feynman, circulating samizdat style. He asks Gell...”
• “The first one has to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. A...”
• “Richard Feynman has related that at a meeting of the American Physical Society, likely sometime in 1956, he was chatting...”
• “Feynman's grasp of the big picture, coupled with his love for knowing first-hand of practical details - from low-level p...”
• “There was no way, without full understanding, that one could have confidence that conditions the next time might not pro...”
• “When I say he didn't like philosophy I meant he didn't like a certain style of thinking that was full of jargon, full of...”
• “I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have f...”
• “Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete tru...”
• “There has never been a satisfactory model of the very simple process of reflection of light from thin surfaces or... for...”
• “It is to be emphasized that no matter how many [amplitude] arrows we draw, add, or multiply, our objective is to calcula...”
• “I took this stuff I got out of your [O-ring] seal and I put it in ice water, and I discovered that when you put some pre...”
• “That was the beginning and the idea seemed so obvious to me that I fell deeply in love with it. And, like falling in lov...”
• “So, ultimately, in order to understand nature it may be necessary to have a deeper understanding of mathematical relatio...”
• “Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absol...”
• “The chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off-chance that it is in another direct...”
• “Feynman uses Dirac's notation to describe the quantum mechanics of stimulated emission. ... He applies that physics to s...”
• “The next question was - what makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by...”
• “Feynman has no interest in scholastic arguments. He is concerned only with human problems. He has a deep respect for rel...”
• “The different colored light... correspond to particles of different energy, that is energy comes in lumps and these lump...”
• “There were certain things I didn't like, such as tipping. I thought we should be paid more, and not have to have any tip...”
• “If we are to replace standard numerical probability usage with engineering judgment, why do we find such an enormous dis...”
• “And then I thought to myself, "You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it's impossible to live up to it. You h...”
• “Thirty-one years ago [1948], Dick Feynman told me about his "sum over histories" version of quantum mechanics. "The elec...”
• “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in thr...”
• “Even when Richard didn't understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us. And whatever he understo...”
• “Once I asked him to explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin-1/2 particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Gaug...”
• “[John] von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in. So I...”
• “We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover ...”
• “I don't know about philosophy of Mayans. We have very little information due to the efficiency of the Spanish es and... ...”
• “Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools-guys who are fools and a...”
• “You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely n...”
• “We cannot define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers,...”
• “The only way to have real success in science, the field I'm familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully wi...”
• “He surrounded himself with a cloud of myth, and he spent a great deal of time and energy generating anecdotes about hims...”
• “Mathematics is not just a language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning. It's like a language plus logic. Mathemati...”
• “Anyway, I have to argue about flying saucers on the beach with people, you know. And I was interested in this: they keep...”
• “So I have just one wish for you-the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I hav...”
• “It requires a much higher degree of imagination to understand the electromagnetic field than to understand invisible ang...”
• “One time I was in the men's room of the bar and there was a guy at the urinal. He was kind of drunk, and said to me in a...”
• “Probably a misattribution which instead originated with David Mermin; in "Could Feynman Have Said This?", by N. David Me...”
• “The probability of an event is always... the square of an amplitude... the size [area] of a circle corresponding to an a...”
• “So in order to understand the physics one must always have a neat balance and contain in his head all of the various pro...”
• “A truer description would have said that Feynman was all genius and all buffoon. The deep thinking and the joyful clowni...”
• “This is the key of modern science and is the beginning of the true understanding of nature. This idea. That to look at t...”
• “The idea of quantum mechanics that I want to describe now is a positive thing. It's a way that we actually use to make c...”
• “Whenever you see a sweeping statement that a tremendous amount can come from a very small number of assumptions, you alw...”
• “Now we have a problem. We can deduce, often, from one part of physics like the law of gravitation, a principle which tur...”
• “Note to the mother of Marcus Chown, who had admired the profile of Feynman presented in the BBC TV Horizon program "The ...”
• “It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of h...”