Richard Feynman - The Meaning of It All

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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
Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen.

Richard Feynman
The universality of the deep chemistry of living things is indeed a fantastic and beautiful thing. And all the time we human beings have been too proud to even recognize our kinship with the animals.

Richard Feynman
The rules that describe nature seem to be mathematical.... Why nature is mathematical is, again, a mystery.

Richard Feynman
So this piece of dirt waits four and a half billion years and evolves and changes, and now a strange creature stands here with instruments and talks to the strange creatures in the audience. What a wonderful world!

Richard Feynman
See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. No one who did not have some inkling of this through observations could ever have imagined such a marvel as nature is.

Richard Feynman
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
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
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
No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated.

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
There is nothing more exciting than the truth, the pay dirt of the scientist, discovered by his painstaking efforts.

Richard Feynman
In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself. In these days of specialization there are too few people who have such a deep understanding of two departments of our knowledge that they do not make fools of themselves in one or the other.

Richard Feynman
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
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
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
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
Anyway, I have to argue about flying saucers on the beach with people, you know. And I was interested in this: they keep arguing that it is possible. And that's true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it's possible or not but whether it's going on or not.

Richard Feynman
By honest I don't mean that you only tell what's true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind.

Richard Feynman
It turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.

Richard Feynman
The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way someday.

Richard Feynman
If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell "friend," I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend.

Richard Feynman
The basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual... the humility of the spirit.

Richard Feynman
The first one has to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questions — that is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions — then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn't know the answer, if he is an honest man.

Richard Feynman
Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

Richard Feynman
There are thousands of years in the past, and there is an unknown amount of time in the future. There are all kinds of opportunities, and there are all kinds of dangers.

Richard Feynman
Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.

Richard Feynman
To solve any problem that has not been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right.

Richard Feynman
Some people say, "How can you live without knowing?" I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.

Richard Feynman
I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.

Richard Feynman