Richard Feynman Quotes

283 Sourced Quotes

If you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid-not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked-to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Richard Feynman
SAGREDO: My brain already reels. My mind, like a cloud momentarily illuminated by a lightening-flash, is for an instant filled with an unusual light, which now beckons to me and which now suddenly mingles and obscures strange, crude ideas.

Richard Feynman
It is the fact that the electrons cannot all get on top of each other that makes tables and everything else solid.

Richard Feynman
This is common to all our laws; they all turn out to be simple things, although complex in their actual actions.

Richard 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 Feynman
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
Another thing I must point out is that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong.

Richard Feynman
A philosopher once said "It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results." Well, they do not.

Richard Feynman
We call these quanta gluons, and say that besides quarks there must be gluons to hold the quarks together.

Richard Feynman
The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.

Richard Feynman
I am not interested in what today's mathematicians find interesting.

Richard Feynman
If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions - for the fun of it - then one day you'll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one! And that's the way to become a computer scientist.

Richard Feynman
What is the fundamental hypothesis of science, the fundamental philosophy? We stated it in the first chapter: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment.... If we are told that the same experiment will always produce the same result, that is all very well, but if when we try it, it does not, then it does not. We just have to take what we see, and then formulate all the rest of our ideas in terms of our actual experience.

Richard Feynman
The other thing that gives a scientific man the creeps in the world today are the methods of choosing leaders - in every nation. Today, for example, in the United States, the two political parties have decided to employ public relations men, that is, advertising men, who are trained in the necessary methods of telling the truth or lying in order to develop a product.

Richard Feynman
In its efforts to learn as much as possible about nature, modern physics has found that certain things can never be "known" with certainty. Much of our knowledge must always remain uncertain. The most we can know is in terms of probabilities.

Richard Feynman
We must, incidentally, make it clear from the beginning that if a thing is not a science, it is not necessarily bad. For example, love is not a science. So, if something is said not to be a science, it does not mean that there is something wrong with it; it just means that it is not a science.

Richard Feynman
Knowledge is of no real value if all you can tell me is what happened yesterday. It is necessary to tell what will happen tomorrow if you do something.... You must be willing to stick your neck out.

Richard Feynman
Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.

Richard Feynman
I don't believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere, I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something. I'm making some contribution." It's just psychological.

Richard Feynman
It is not unscientific to make a guess, although many people who are not in science think it is.

Richard Feynman
The proteins of bacteria and the proteins of humans are the same. In fact it has recently been found that the protein-making machinery in the bacteria can be given orders from the red cells to produce red cell proteins. So close is life to life.

Richard Feynman
There was a moment when I knew how nature worked. It had elegance and beauty. The goddamn thing was gleaming.

Richard Feynman
You know... there are about a hundred billion stars in the galaxy — ten to the eleventh power. That used to be considered a huge number. Today it's less than the national debt. We ought to call them "economical numbers."

Richard Feynman
A professor of theoretical physics always has to be told what to look for. He just uses his knowledge to explain the observations of the experimenters!"

Richard Feynman
The problem of creating something new, but which is consistent with everything which has been seen before, is one of extreme difficulty.

Richard Feynman
One of the consequences is that things which we used to consider as waves also behave like particles, and particles behave like waves; in fact everything behaves the same way. There is no distinction between a wave and a particle. So quantum mechanics unifies the idea of the field and its waves, and the particles, all into one.

Richard Feynman
There are great ideas developed in the history of man, and these ideas do not last unless they are passed purposely and clearly from generation to generation.

Richard Feynman
I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.

Richard Feynman
It is imperative in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress of science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature.

Richard Feynman
Science is of value because it can produce something.

Richard Feynman