Richard Feynman Quotes

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

Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation. ~ Richard Feynman

I happen to know this, and I happen to know that, and maybe I know that;and I work everything out from there. Tomorrow I may forgot that this is true, but remember that something else is true, so I can reconstruct it all again. I am never quite sure of where I am supposed to begin or where I am supposed to end. I just remember enough all the time so that as the memory fades and some of the pieces fall out I can put the thing back together again every day ~ Richard Feynman

Throughout these lectures I have delighted in showing you that the price of gaining such an accurate theory has been the erosion of our common sense. We must accept some very bizarre behavior: the amplification and suppression of probabilities, light reflecting from all parts of a mirror, light travelling in paths other than a straight line, photons going faster or slower than the conventional speed of light, electrons going backwards in time, photons suddenly disintegrating into a positron-electron pair, and so on. That we must do, in order to appreciate what Nature is really doing underneath nearly all the phenomena we see in the world. ~ Richard Feynman

Raios cubicos!" he says, with a vengeance. Cube roots! ~ 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

Physics is to mathematics like sex is to masturbation. ~ Richard Feynman

That's the trouble with not being in your own field: You don't take it seriously. ~ Richard Feynman

If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There's a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. Um ... off the top of my head I can't think of where to find something about how it's an ideal of science to settle things by experiment instead of arguments - ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

There is also a rhythm and a pattern between the phenomena of nature which is not apparent to the eye, but only to the eye of analysis; and it is these rhythms and patterns which we call Physical Laws. What ~ Richard Feynman

I believe there's nothing in hallucinations that has anything to do with anything external to the internal psychological state of the person who's got the hallucination. ~ Richard P. Feynman

It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do? ~ Richard 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

[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

Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth. ~ Bill Bryson

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

You can't say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction. ~ Richard Feynman

The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination, in a tight straightjacket. ~ Richard Feynman

You keep on learning and learning, and pretty soon you learn something no one has learned before. ~ Richard Feynman

When sunlight, which contains red, yellow, green, and blue light, shines on a mud puddle with oil on it, the areas that strongly reflect each of those colors overlap and produce all kinds of combinations which our eyes see as different colors ... This phenomenon of colors produced by the partial reflection of white light by two surfaces is called iridescence, and can be found in many places ... the more you see how strangely Nature behaves, the harder it is to make a model that explains how even the simplest phenomena actually work. ~ Richard 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

If a piece of steel or a piece of salt, consisting of atoms one next to the other, can have such interesting properties; if water - which is nothing but these little blobs, mile upon mile of the same thing over the earth - can form waves and foam, and make rushing noises and strange patterns as it runs over cement; if all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible? If ~ Richard Feynman

If someone were to propose that the planets go around the sun because all planet matter has a kind of tendency for movement, a kind of motility, let us call it an 'oomph,' this theory could explain a number of other phenomena as well. So this is a good theory, is it not? No. It is nowhere near as good as the proposition that the planets move around the sun under the influence of a central force which varies exactly inversely as the square of the distance from the center. The second theory is better because it is so specific; it is so obviously unlikely to be the result of chance. It is so definite that the barest error in the movement can show that it is wrong; but the planets could wobble all over the place, and, according to the first theory, you could say, 'Well, that is the funny behavior of the 'oomph. ~ Richard 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

Western civilization, it seems to me, stands by two great heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure - the adventure into the unknown, an unknown that must be recognized as unknown in order to be explored, the demand that the unanswerable mysteries of the universe remain unanswered, the attitude that all is uncertain. To summarize it: humility of the intellect. ~ Richard Feynman

The attempts to try to represent the electric field as the motion of some kind of gear wheels, or in terms of lines, or of stresses in some kind of material have used up more effort of physicists than it would have taken simply to get the right answers about electrodynamics. It is interesting that the correct equations for the behavior of light were worked out by MacCullagh in 1839. But people said to him: 'Yes, but there is no real material whose mechanical properties could possibly satisfy those equations, and since light is an oscillation that must vibrate in something, we cannot believe this abstract equation business'. ~ Richard Feynman

How much do you value life?" "Sixty-four. ~ Richard Feynman

This is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men that 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 brought in - a trial and error system. ~ Richard Feynman

When we add all the numbers together, from all the different forms of energy, it always gives the same total. But as far as we know there are no real units, no little ballbearings. It ~ Richard Feynman

You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight ... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing! ~ Richard Feynman

So we see that what looks like a dead, uninteresting thing - a glass of water with a cover, that has been sitting there for perhaps twenty years - really contains a dynamic and interesting phenomenon which is going on all the time. To ~ Richard Feynman

I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts. ~ Richard Feynman

Damn deez doilies! ~ Richard Feynman

I've found out since that such people don't know what they're doing, and get insulted when you make some suggestion or criticism. ~ Richard Feynman

Figure 36. A "trick" can be played on Nature by slowing down the light that takes shorter paths: glass of just the right thickness is inserted so that all the paths will take exactly the same time. This causes all of the arrows to point in the same direction, and to produce a whopping final arrow-lots of light! Such a piece of glass made to greatly increase the probability of light getting from a source to a single point is called a focusing lens. ~ Richard Feynman

This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you! ~ Richard Feynman

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

For instance, the mass of an object changes when it moves, because of the conservation of energy. Because of the relation of mass and energy the energy associated with the motion appears as an extra mass, so things get heavier when they move. Newton ~ Richard Feynman

I want to build a billion tiny factories, models of each other, which are manufacturing simultaneously ... The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it has not been done because we are too big. ~ Richard Feynman

His colleague Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particles partons16, as in Dolly, but was over-ruled. Instead they became known as quarks. ~ Bill Bryson

You have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen. ~ Richard Feynman

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

It's all generated, maybe, by the fact that the attitude of the populace is to try to find the answer instead of trying to find a man who has a way of getting at the answer. ~ Richard Feynman

The exception proves that the rule is wrong. That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong. ~ Richard Feynman

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

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

We find that energy is conserved no matter how complex the process, even when we do not know the detailed laws. ~ Richard Feynman

Anything can happen, in spite of what you're pretty sure should happen. ~ Richard Feynman

All things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In ~ Richard Feynman

I have a serious affliction: loving you forever.

[Letter to Arline Feynman] ~ Richard Feynman

Throughout this entire story there remains one especially unsatisfactory feature: the observed masses of the particles, m. There is no theory that adequately explains these numbers. We use the numbers in all our theories, but we don't understand them-what they are, or where they come from. I believe that from a fundamental point of view, this is a very interesting and serious problem. ~ Richard Feynman

You see, I get so much fun out of thinking that I don't want to destroy this pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick. ~ Richard Feynman

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong. ~ Richard Feynman

We are so used to looking at the world from the point of view of living things that we cannot understand what it means not to be alive, and yet most of the time the world had nothing alive on it. And in most places in the universe today there probably is nothing alive. ~ Richard Feynman

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

If you try once or twice to communicate and get pushed back, pretty soon you decide, To hell with it. ~ Richard Feynman

There are thousands of years in the past, and there is an unknown amount of time in the future. There are all kinds of opportunities, and there are all kinds of dangers. ~ Richard Feynman

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part ... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? ~ Richard Feynman

To our eyes, our crude eyes, nothing is changing, but if we could see it a billion times magnified, we would see that from its own point of view it is always changing: molecules are leaving the surface, molecules are coming back. ~ Richard Feynman

The little cathedral made with matchsticks is attracted to the earth, so to make a comparison the big cathedral should be attracted to an even bigger earth. Too bad. A bigger earth would attract it even more, and the sticks would break even more surely! ~ Richard Feynman

The things that mattered were honesty, independence, willingness to admit ignorance. ~ Richard Feynman

I learned from her that every woman is worried
about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is. ~ Richard Feynman

(Joan,1941) She wrote me a letter asking,"How can I read it?,Its so hard." I told her to start at the beginning and read as far as you can get until you're lost. Then start again at the beginning and keep working through until you can understand the whole book. And thats what she did ~ Richard Feynman

I suddenly remembered that Murray Gell-Mann and I were supposed to give talks at that conference on the present situation of high-energy physics. My talk was set for the plenary session, so I asked the guide, "Sir, where would the talks for the plenary session of the conference be?"

"Back in that room that we just came through."

"Oh!" I said in delight. "Then I'm gonna give a speech in that room!"

The guide looked down at my dirty pants and my sloppy shirt. I realized how dumb that remark must have sounded to him, but it was genuine surprise and delight on my part.

We went along a little bit farther, and the guide said, "This is a lounge for the various delegates, where they often hold informal discussions." They were some small, square windows in the doors to the lounge that you could look through, so people looked in. There were a few men sitting there talking.

I looked through the windows and saw Igor Tamm, a physicist from Russia that I know. "Oh!" I said. "I know that guy!" and I started through the door.

The guide screamed, "No, no! Don't go in there!" By this time he was sure he had a maniac on his hands, but he couldn't chase me because he wasn't allowed to go through the door himself! ~ Richard P. Feynman

From a long view of the history of mankind, seen from, say, ten thousand years from now, there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade. ~ Richard Feynman

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

Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves. ~ Richard Feynman

Underneath so many of the phenomena we see every day are only three basic actions: one is described by the simple coupling number, j; the other two by functions-P(A to B) and E(A to B)- both of which are closely related. That's all there is to it, and from it all the rest of the laws of physics come. ~ Richard 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

In 1965, physicist Richard Feynman opined, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," and the sentiment is equally applicable today. ~ Sean Carroll

Mathematics is a language plus reasoning; it is like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning. ~ Richard Feynman

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 love to think. I once considered taking drugs as an attempt to better understand an altered state of mind; however, I decided not to. I didn't want to chance ruining the machine. ~ 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

Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth." But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations - to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess. This imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in physics: there are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess. ~ Richard Feynman

I mumbled something about how it was easy to calculate e to any power using that series (you just substitute the power for x). "Oh yeah?" they said, "Well, then, what's e to the 3.3?" said some joker - I think it was Tukey. I say, "That's easy. It's 27.11." Tukey knows it isn't so easy to compute all that in your head. "Hey! How'd you do that?" Another guy says, "You know Feynman, he's just faking it. It's not really right." They go to get a table, and while they're doing that, I put on a few more figures: "27.1126," I say. They find it in the table. "It's right! But how'd you do it!" "I just summed the series." "Nobody can sum the series that fast. You must just happen to know that one. How about e to the 3?" "Look," I say. "It's hard work! Only one a day!" "Hah! It's a fake!" they say, happily. "All right," I say, "It's 20.085. ~ 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

Don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote, ~ Richard Feynman

Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that's the end of you. ~ Richard Feynman

If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern, again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from place to place, with different kinds of atoms arranged in many ways, continually changing, not repeating, how much more marvelously is it possible that this thing might behave? Is it possible that that "thing" walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you, is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement, such that the sheer complexity of it staggers the imagination as to what it can do? When we say we are a pile of atoms, we do not mean we are merely a pile of atoms, because a pile of atoms which is not repeated from one to the other might well have the possibilities which you see before you in the mirror. ~ Richard Feynman

Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is. ~ Richard Feynman

There are other conservation laws. They are not as interesting as those I have described, and do not deal exactly with the conservation of numbers. Suppose ~ 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

The trouble with playing a trick on a highly intelligent man like Mr. Teller is that the time it takes him to figure out from the moment that he sees there is something wrong till he understands exactly what happened is too damn small to give you any pleasure! ~ 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 was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there. - Richard Feynman ~ James Gleick

You can't fool nature. ~ Richard Feynman

I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth ... How far from here was 34th street? ... All those buildings, all smashed - and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.
But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead. ~ Richard Feynman

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. ~ Richard Feynman

But one man, I remember, Bob Wilson, was just sitting there moping. I said, "What are you moping about?" He said, "It's a terrible thing that we made." I said, "But you started it. You got us into it." You see, what happened to me - what happened to the rest of us - is we started for a good reason, then you're working very hard to accomplish something and it's a pleasure, it's excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just stop. Bob Wilson was the only one who was still thinking about it, at that moment. I ~ Richard Feynman

Keep an open mind - but not so open that your brain falls out. ~ Richard Feynman

I said, There's a long tradition behind life in India that comes from a religion and philosophy that is thousands of years old. And although these people are not in India, they still pass on those traditions about what's important in life - trying to build for the future and supporting their children in the effort - which have come down to them for centuries. ~ Richard Feynman

I USED to cross the United States in my automobile every summer, trying to make it to the Pacific Ocean. But, for various reasons, I would always get stuck somewhere - usually in Las Vegas. ~ Richard Feynman

What I got out of that story was something still very new to me: I understood at last what art is really for, at least in certain respects. It gives somebody, individually, pleasure. You can make something that somebody likes so much that they're depressed, or they're happy, on account of that damn thing you made! In science, it's sort of general and large: You don't know the individuals who have appreciated it directly. I understood that to sell a drawing is not to make money, but to be sure that it's in the home of someone who really wants it; someone who would feel bad if they didn't have it. This was interesting. ~ Richard Feynman

(Incidentally, they had a fire in that room, because of all the chaotic mess that they had - too many wires - and it destroyed the cyclotron. But I'd better not tell about that!) (When ~ Richard Feynman

Now that I am burned out and I'll never
accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching
classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for
pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without
worrying about any importance whatsoever. ~ Richard Feynman

CURIOSITY DEMANDS THAT WE ASK QUESTIONS,
THAT WE TRY TO PUT THINGS TOGETHER AND TRY TO UNDERSTAND THIS MULTITUDE OF ASPECTS
AS PERHAPS RESULTING FROM THE ACTION OF A RELATIVELY SMALL NUMBER OF ELEMENTAL
THINGS AND FORCES ACTING IN AN INFINITE VARIETY OF COMBINATIONS ~ Richard Feynman

I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something you're more familiar with, because I do not understand it in terms of something you are more familiar with. ~ Richard Feynman

My rule is, when you are unhappy, think about it. But when you're unhappy, don't. Why spoil it? You're probably happy for some ridiculous reason and you'd just spoil it to know it. ~ Richard Feynman

You know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it. ~ Richard Feynman