Richard P. Feynman
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas - which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science.Collection: Crazy
There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble.Collection: Health
Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this.Collection: Trying
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!" "Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.Collection: Cat
It is impossible, by the way, when picking one example of anything, to avoid picking one which is atypical in some sense.Collection: Example
There are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess.Collection: Law
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.Collection: Believe
My friends and I had taken dancing lessons, although none of us would ever admit it. In those depression days, a friend of my mother was trying to make a living by teaching dancing in the evening, in an upstairs dance studio. There was a back door to the place, and she arranged it so the young men could come up through the back way without being seen.Collection: Dance
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of stars-mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? ...What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it.Collection: Stars
I think Nature's imagination is so much greater than man's, she's never gonna let us relax!Collection: Men
The shell game that we play ... is technically called 'renormalization'. But no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It's surprising that the theory still hasn't been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate.Collection: Clever
There's plenty of room at the bottom.Collection: Rooms
One cannot understand... the universality of laws of nature, the relationship of things, without an understanding of mathematics. There is no other way to do it.Collection: Law
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.Collection: Life
It is not unscientific to make a guess, although many people who are not in science think it is.Collection: Thinking
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.Collection: Atheism
We find that the statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known with different degrees of certainty: "It is very much more likely that so and so is true than that it is not true".Collection: Humility
I don't believe I can really do without teaching.Collection: Believe
All the time you're saying to yourself, 'I could do that, but I won't,'--which is just another way of saying that you can't.Collection: Way
If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations.Collection: Generations
Winning a Nobel Prize is no big deal, but winning it with an IQ of 124 is really something.Collection: Winning
There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.Collection: Stars
Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that's the end of you.Collection: Mistake
If all of mathematics disappeared, physics would be set back by exactly one week.Collection: Would Be
Maybe that is why young people make success. They don't know enough.Collection: Children
The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things.Collection: Humorous
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.Collection: Possible And Impossible
It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.Collection: Beautiful
Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.Collection: Science
We cannot define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into the paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other, "You don't know what you are talking about!" The second one says, "What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you?"Collection: Mean
I learned from her that every woman is worried about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.Collection: Beautiful
I have to disregard everybody else, and then I can do my own work.Collection: Disregard
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.Collection: Philosophy
Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.Collection: Faith
Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.Collection: Problem
I love to think. I once considered taking drugs as an attempt to better understand an altered state of mind; however, I decided not to. I didn't want to chance ruining the machine.Collection: Thinking
For those who want some proof that physicists are human, the proof is in the idiocy of all the different units which they use for measuring energy.Collection: Science
The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling thingsCollection: World
It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy isCollection: Important
Some people think Wheeler's gotten crazy in his later years, but he's always been crazy.Collection: Crazy
If all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible?Collection: Water
Science is a way for us to not fool ourselves.Collection: Way
We scientists are clever — too clever — are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it!Collection: Clever
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Law
When the problem [quantum chromodynamics] is finally solved, it will all be by imagination. Then there will be some big thing about the great way it was done. But it's simple -it will all be by imagination, and persistence.Collection: Learning
One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much. I love only nature, and I hate mathematicians.Collection: Hate
This is the key of modern science and is the beginning of the true understanding of nature. This idea. That to look at the things, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained, may lie a clue to one or another of a possible theoretical interpretation.Collection: Lying