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I'm trying to find out NOT how Nature could be, but how Nature IS.
Richard Feynman
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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
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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 Feynman
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Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question - to doubt - to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.
Richard Feynman
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There is no authority who decides what is a good idea. We have lost the need to go to an authority to find out whether an idea is true or not. We can read an authority and let him suggest something; we can try it out and find out if it is true or not. If it is not true, so much the worse — so the "authorities" lose some of their functions.
Richard Feynman
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A great deal more can be known than can be proved.
Richard Feynman
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Just as a poet often has license from the rules of grammar and pronunciation, we should like to ask for 'physicists' license from the rules of mathematics in order to express what we wish to say in as simple a manner as possible.
Richard Feynman
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We decided that "trivial" means "proved." So we joked with the mathematicians: "We have a new theorem — that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that's proved is trivial."
Richard Feynman
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People may come along and argue philosophically that they like one better than another; but we have learned from much experience that all philosophical intuitions about what nature is going to do fail.
Richard Feynman
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If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar - ajar only.
Richard Feynman
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There's so much distance between the fundamental rules and the final phenomenon, that it's almost unbelievable that the final variety of phenomenon can come from such a steady operation of such simple rules.
Richard Feynman
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When I see equations, I see the letters in colors — I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Ernde's book, with light-tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.
Richard Feynman
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With more knowledge comes a deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still. Never concerned that the answer may prove disappointing, with pleasure and confidence we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries — certainly a grand adventure.
Richard Feynman
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All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is a delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.
Richard Feynman
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I do believe that there is a conflict between science and religion... the spirit or attitude toward the facts is different in religion from what it is in science. The uncertainty that is necessary in order to appreciate nature is not easily correlated with the feeling of certainty in faith.
Richard Feynman
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When the scientist tells you he does not know the answer, his is an ignorant man. When he tells you he has a hunch about how it is going to work, he is uncertain about it. When he is pretty sure of how it is going to work, and he tells you, "This is the way it's going to work, I'll bet," he is still in some doubt.
Richard Feynman
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The fact that there are rules at all to be checked is a kind of miracle; that it is possible to find a rule, like the inverse square law of gravitation, is some sort of miracle. It is not understood at all, but it leads to the possibility of prediction — that means it tells you what you would expect to happen in an experiment you have not yet done.
Richard Feynman
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Things happen faster in physics than in the book publishing business.
Richard Feynman
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In those days, in Far Rockaway, there was a youth center for Jewish kids at the temple.... Somebody nominated me for president of the youth center. The elders began getting nervous, because I was an avowed atheist by that time.... I thought nature itself was so interesting that I didn't want it distorted like that. And so I gradually came to disbelieve the whole religion.
Richard Feynman
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Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities.
Richard Feynman
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I, a universe of atoms, an atom of the universe.
Richard Feynman
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There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before.
Richard Feynman
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When the problems in physics become difficult we may often look to the mathematician who may already have studied such things and have prepared a line of reasoning for us to follow. On the other hand they may not have, in which case we have to invent our own line of reasoning, which we then pass back to the mathematician.
Richard Feynman
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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
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We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of sub-atomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
Richard Feynman
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Quote of the day
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
Richard Feynman
Wikipedia
Born:
May 11, 1918
Died:
February 15, 1988
(aged 69)
Bio:
Richard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist.
Known for:
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985)
The Meaning of It All
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