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In any organization there ought to be the possibility of discussion... fence sitting is an art, and it's difficult, and it's important to do, rather than to go headlong in one direction or the other. It's just better to have action, isn't it than to sit on the fence? Not if you're not sure which way to go, it isn't.
Richard Feynman
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This universe has been described by many, but it just goes on, with its edge as unknown as the bottom of the bottomless sea of the other ideas — just as mysterious, just as awe-inspiring, and just as incomplete as the poetic pictures that came before.
Richard Feynman
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The idea that it [science] takes away mystery or awe or wonder in nature is wrong. It's quite the opposite. It's much more wonderful to know what something's really like than to sit there and just simply, in ignorance, say, "Oooh, isn't it wonderful!"
Richard Feynman
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I am giving this winter two courses of lectures to three students, of which one is only moderately prepared, the other less than moderately, and the third lacks both preparation and ability. Such are the onera of a mathematical profession.
Richard Feynman
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The vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the perfect understanding of one single thing, and had truly tasted how knowledge is accomplished, would recognize that infinity of other truths of which he understands nothing.
Richard Feynman
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Perhaps a thing is simple if you can describe it fully in several different ways without immediately knowing that you are describing the same thing.
Richard Feynman
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The electron does anything it likes. It goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time, however it likes...
Richard Feynman
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I think the problem is not to find the best or most efficient method to proceed to a discovery, but to find any method at all.
Richard Feynman
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I want to emphasize that light comes in this form — particles. It is very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you who have gone to school, where you were probably told something about light behaving like waves. I'm telling you the way it does behave — like particles.
Richard Feynman
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Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative.
Richard Feynman
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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
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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
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It is the fact that the electrons cannot all get on top of each other that makes tables and everything else solid.
Richard Feynman
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This is common to all our laws; they all turn out to be simple things, although complex in their actual actions.
Richard Feynman
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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
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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
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Another thing I must point out is that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong.
Richard Feynman
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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
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We call these quanta gluons, and say that besides quarks there must be gluons to hold the quarks together.
Richard Feynman
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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
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I am not interested in what today's mathematicians find interesting.
Richard Feynman
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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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