Mr Feynman Quotes

When you're young, you have all these things to worry about - should
you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but
then something else comes up. It's much easier to just plain decide. Never
mind - nothing is going to change your mind. ~ Richard Feynman

I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never. ~ Richard P. Feynman

I took a little walk outside for a while. I was surprised that I wasn't feeling what I thought people were supposed to feel under the circumstances. May be I was fooling myself. I wasn't delighted, but I didn't feel terribly upset, perhaps because we had known for a long time that it was going to happen.

It's hard to explain. If a Martian(who, we'll imagine never dies except by accident) came to Earth and saw this peculiar race of creatures-these humans who live about seventy or eighty years, knowing that death is going to come--it would look to hi like a terrible problem of psychology to live under those circumstances, knowing that life is only temporary Well, we humans somehow figure out how to live despite this problem: we laugh, we joke, we live.

The only difference for me and Arlene was, instead of fifty years, it was five years. It was only a quantitative difference--the psychological problem was just the same. The only way it would have become any different is if we had said to ourselves, "But those other people have it better, because they might live fifty years." But that's crazy. Why make yourself miserable saying things like, "Why do we have such bad luck? What has God done to us? What have we done to deserve this?"--all of which, if you understand reality and take it completely into your heart, are irrelevant and unsolvable. They are just things that nobody can know. Your situation is just an accident of life..

We had a hell of goo ~ Richard P. Feynman

The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things ... ~ Richard P. Feynman

Since then I never pay attention to anything by "experts". I calculate everything myself. ~ Richard P. Feynman

Few people realize the number of things that are possible. ~ Richard P. Feynman

The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life. ~ Richard P. Feynman

So I started to think: "How can that happen?" ... So the guy says, "What are you doing? You come fix the radio, but you're only walking back and forth!" I say, "I'm thinking! ~ Richard Feynman

If a law does not work even in one place where it ought to, it is just wrong. ~ Richard Feynman

A person talks in such generalities that everyone can understand him and it's considered to be some deep philosophy . However, I would like to be very rather more special and I would like to be understood in an honest way, rather than in a vague way. ~ Richard P. Feynman

It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is ~ Richard P. Feynman

Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot. ~ Richard P. Feynman

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it. ~ Richard Feynman

Thank you very Much, I enjoyed myself ~ Richard Feynman

You should not fool the laymen when you're talking as a scientist ... I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen. ~ Richard P. Feynman

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt. ~ Richard Feynman

There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty chair at their table and sat down.
She turned to me and said, "Oh! You're one of the Nobel-Prize-winners. In what field did you do your work?"
"In physics," I said.
"Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can't talk about it."
"On the contrary," I answered. "It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance--gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood--so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!"
I don't know how they do it. There's a way of forming ice on the surface of the face, and she did it! ~ Richard Feynman

The beauty that is there is also available for me, too. But I see a deeper beauty that isn't so readily available to others ... I don't see how studying a flower ever detracts from its beauty. It only adds ~ Richard P. Feynman

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

One time I went to Vancouver to talk to the students there, and they had a party with a real hot rock-type band playing down in the basement. The band was very nice: they had an extra cowbell lying around, and they encouraged me to play it. So I started to play a little bit, and since their music was very rhythmic (and the cowbell is just an accompaniment - you can't screw it up) I really got hot. After the party was over, the guy who organized the party told me that the bandleader said, "Geez! Who was that guy who came down and played on the cowbell! He can really knock out a rhythm on that thing! And by the way, that big shot this party was supposed to be for - you know, he never came down here; I never did see who it was! ~ Richard Feynman

It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about we can discuss. ~ Richard P. Feynman

I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something. How careful you have to be about checking your experiments. How easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something. ~ Richard P. Feynman

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. ~ Richard P. Feynman

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas - he's the controller - and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land. ~ Richard Feynman

There were a lot of fools at that conference - pompous fools - and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. ~ Richard Feynman

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. ~ Richard Feynman

If we were not able or did not desire to look in any new direction, if we did not have a doubt or recognize ignorance, we would not get any new ideas. ~ Richard Feynman

There are very remarkable mysteries about the fact that we're able to do so many more things than apparently animals can do, and other questions like that, but those are mysteries I want to investigate without knowing the answer to them, and so altogether I can't believe theses special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be too simple, too connected, too local, too provincial. ~ Richard P. Feynman

It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another. ~ Richard P. Feynman

What I cannot build. I do not understand. ~ Richard Feynman

Once we were driving in the midwest and we pulled into a McDonald's. Someone came up to me and asked me why I have Feynman diagrams all over my van. I replied, "Because I am Feynman!" The young man went, "Ahhhhh!" ~ Richard P. Feynman

A source of white light-many colors mixed together-emits photons in a chaotic manner: the angle of the amplitude changes abruptly and irregularly in fits and starts. But when we construct a monochromatic source, we are making a device that has been carefully arranged so that the amplitude for a photon to be emitted at a certain time is easily calculated: it changes its angle at a constant speed, like a stopwatch hand. (Actually, this arrow turns at the same speed as the imaginary stopwatch we used before, but in the opposite direction-see Fig. 67.) ~ Richard Feynman

I got a signed document from Bullock's saying that they had such-and-such drawings on consignment. Of course, nobody bought any of them, but otherwise, I was a big success: I had my drawings on sale at Bullock's! ~ Richard P. Feynman

In fact the total amount that a physicist knows is very little. He has only to remember the rules to get him from one place to another and he is all right ... ~ Richard Feynman

To understand this better, we need to know that the cycle of zero to 16% partial reflection by two surfaces repeats more quickly for blue light than for red light. Thus at certain thicknesses, one or the other or both colors are strongly reflected, while at other thicknesses, reflections of both colors is cancelled out (see Fig. 18). The cycles of reflection repeat at different rates because the stopwatch hand turns around faster when it times a blue photon than it does when timing a red photon. In fact, that's the only difference between a red photon and a blue photon (or a photon of any other color, including radio waves, X-rays, and so on)-the speed of the stopwatch hand. ~ Richard Feynman

I think we should teach them [the people] wonders and that the purpose of knowledge is to appreciate wonders even more. ~ Richard Feynman

The uncertainty principle "protects" quantum mechanics. Heisenberg recognized that if it were possible to measure the momentum and the position simultaneously with a greater accuracy, the quantum mechanics would collapse. So he proposed that it must be impossible. ~ Richard Feynman

and dynamic dance. ~ Richard Feynman

To guess what to keep and what to throw away takes considerable skill. Actually it is probably merely a matter of luck, but it looks as if it takes considerable skill. ~ Richard P. Feynman

The chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off chance that it is in another direction - a direction obvious from an unfashionable view of field theory - who will find it? Only someone who has sacrificed himself by teaching himself quantum electrodynamics from a peculiar and unfashionable point of view; one that he may have to invent for himself. ~ Richard P. Feynman