Richard Feynman - Physics Quotes

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So far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, like Newton's equations, are reversible.

Richard Feynman
In order for physics to be useful to other sciences in a theoretical way, other than in the invention of instruments, the science in question must supply to the physicist a description of the object in a physicist's language.

Richard Feynman
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
Things happen faster in physics than in the book publishing business.

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
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
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. So theoretical physics has given up on that.

Richard Feynman
As you know, a theory in physics is not useful unless it is able to predict underlined effects which we would otherwise expect.

Richard Feynman
So right away I found out something about biology: it was very easy to find a question that was very interesting, and that nobody knew the answer to. In physics you had to go a little deeper before you could find an interesting question that people didn't know.

Richard Feynman
Physics is to mathematics what sex is to masturbation.

Richard Feynman
I am a successful lecturer in physics for popular audiences. The real entertainment gimmick is the excitement, drama and mystery of the subject matter. People love to learn something, they are 'entertained' enormously by being allowed to understand a little bit of something they never understood before. One must have faith in the subject and in people's interest in it.

Richard Feynman
There are those who are going to be disappointed when no life is found on other planets. Not I — I want to be reminded and delighted and surprised once again, through interplanetary exploration, with the infinite variety and novelty of phenomena that can be generated from such simple principles. The test of science is its ability to predict. Had you never visited the earth, could you predict the thunderstorms, the volcanoes, the ocean waves, the auroras, and the colorful sunset? A salutary lesson it will be when we learn of all that goes on on each of those dead planets — those eight or ten balls, each agglomerated from the same dust cloud and each obeying exactly the same laws of physics.

Richard Feynman
There are many interesting phenomena … which involve a mixture of physical phenomena and physiological processes, and the full appreciation of natural phenomena, as we see them, must go beyond physics in the usual sense. We make no apologies for making these excursions into other fields, because the separation of fields, as we have emphasized, is merely a human convenience, and an unnatural thing. Nature is not interested in our separations, and many of the interesting phenomena bridge the gaps between fields.

Richard Feynman
I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Richard Feynman
In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.

Richard Feynman
It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way.

Richard Feynman
There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.

Richard Feynman
It is to be emphasized that no matter how many [amplitude] arrows we draw, add, or multiply, our objective is to calculate a single final arrow for the event. Mistakes are often made by physics students at first because they do not keep this important point in mind. They work for so long analyzing events involving a single photon that they begin to think that the arrow is somehow associated with the photon [rather than with the event].

Richard Feynman
So we have these wide principles which sweep across all the different laws, and if one takes too seriously its derivations, and feels that this is only valid because this [assumed more fundamental principle] is valid, you cannot understand the interconnections of the different branches of physics. Some day, when physics is complete, then maybe with this kind of argument we'll know all the laws, then we can start with some axioms (and no doubt somebody will figure out a particular way of doing it) and then all the deductions will be made. But while we don't know all the laws, we can use some to make guesses at theorems which extend beyond the proof.

Richard Feynman
On the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.

Richard Feynman
So in order to understand the physics one must always have a neat balance and contain in his head all of the various propositions and their interelationships because the laws often extend beyond the range of their deductions. This will only have no importance when all the laws are known.

Richard Feynman
It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to π, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out — without putting it in secretly!

Richard Feynman
Now we have a problem. We can deduce, often, from one part of physics like the law of gravitation, a principle which turns out to be much more valid than the derivation. This doesn't happen in mathematics, that the theorems come out in places where they're not supposed to be!

Richard Feynman
Therefore psychologically we must keep all the theories in our heads, and every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics.

Richard Feynman
On the contrary, 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!

Richard Feynman
People say to me, "Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?" No, I'm not. I'm just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it; that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is!… And therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn't pre-decide what it is we are trying to do except to find out more about it… My interest in science is to simply find out more about the world.

Richard Feynman