Richard Feynman - QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985)

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Some things that satisfy the rules of algebra can be interesting to mathematicians even though they don't always represent a real situation.

Richard Feynman
The limited imagination of physicists: When we see a new phenomenon we try to fit it into the framework we already have... It's not because Nature is really similar; it's because the physicists have only been able to think of the same damn thing, over and over again.

Richard Feynman
Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities.

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

Richard Feynman
Nature seems to keep piling on these particles [having the same properties but heavier masses] as if to drug us.

Richard Feynman
You see, the chemists have a complicated way of counting: instead of saying "one, two, three, four, five protons", they say, "hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron."

Richard Feynman
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
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
The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you accept Nature as She is — absurd.

Richard Feynman
When a photon comes down, it interacts with electrons throughout the glass, not just on the surface. The photon and electrons do some kind of dance, the net result of which is the same as if the photon hit only on the surface.

Richard Feynman
While I am describing to you how Nature works, you won't understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that.

Richard Feynman
You will have to brace yourselves for this — not because it is difficult to understand, but because it is absolutely ridiculous: All we do is draw little arrows on a piece of paper — that's all!

Richard Feynman
Light is something like raindrops — each little lump of light is called a photon — and if the light is all one color, all the "raindrops" are the same.

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
The scale of light can be described by numbers — called the frequency — and as the numbers get higher, the light goes from red to blue to ultraviolet. We can't see ultraviolet light, but it can affect photographic plates. It's still light — only the number is different.

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
Will you understand what I'm going to tell you? … No, you're not going to be able to understand it. … That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.

Richard Feynman
People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don't give us a chance to tell them anything about what we know pretty well. They always want to know the things we don't know.

Richard Feynman
Every instrument that has been designed to be sensitive enough to detect weak light has always ended up discovering that the same thing: light is made of particles.

Richard Feynman