Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
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.
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."
Is science of any value? 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.
Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.
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.
Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants.
Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.
My rule is, when you are unhappy, think about it. But when you're happy, don't. Why spoil it? You're probably happy for some ridiculous reason and you'd just spoil it to know it.
When things are going well, something will go wrong. / When things just can't get any worse, they will. / Anytime things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.
[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is - absurd.
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.
If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery.
Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.
We're always, by the way, in fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don't understand the conclusions. After we've checked them enough, we're okay.
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.
Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going," wrote Feynman, "but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly.
I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.
The situation in the sciences is this: A concept or an idea which cannot be measured or cannot be referred directly to experiment may or may not be useful. It need not exist in a theory.
With the exception of gravitation and radioactivity, all of the phenomena known to physicists and chemists in 1911 have their ultimate explanation in the laws of quantum electrodynamics.
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.
It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.
In any decision for action, when you have to make up your mind what to do, there is always a 'should' involved, and this cannot be worked out from, 'If I do this, what will happen?' alone.
The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
You're unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things.
The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity.
Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it's a wonderful problem, because it doesn't look so easy.
Often one postulates that a priori, all states are equally probable. This is not true in the world as we see it. This world is not correctly described by the physics which assumes this postulate.
The most important thing I found out from my father is that if you asked any question and pursued it deeply enough, then at the end there was a glorious discovery of a general and beautiful kind.
I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without any purpose - which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me.
Quarks came in a number of varieties - in fact, at first, only three were needed to explain all the hundreds of particles and the different kinds of quarks - they are called u-type, d-type, s-type.
I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn't want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn't supposed to be able to draw - isn't that wonderful - so I made up a false name.
I don't like honors. ... I've already got the prize: the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things.
Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience, it is very difficult to get used to, and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone - both to the novice and to the experienced physicist.
The first amazing fact about gravitation is that the ratio of inertial mass to gravitational mass is constant wherever we have checked it. The second amazing thing about gravitation is how weak it is.
People may come along and argue philosophically that they like one better than another; but we have learned from much experience that all philosophical intuitions about what nature is going to do fail.
The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to... No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.
We decided that 'trivial' means 'proved'. So we joked with the mathematicians: We have a new theorem- that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that's proved is trivial.
There were several possible solutions of the difficulty of classical electrodynamics, any one of which might serve as a good starting point to the solution of the difficulties of quantum electrodynamics.
Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected.
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.
I have argued flying saucers with lots of people. I was interested in 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.
Although it is uncertain, it is necessary to make science useful. Science is only useful if it tells you about some experiment that has not been done; it is not good if it only tells you what just went on.
The beauty that is there is also available for me, too. But I see a deeper beauty that isn't so readily available to others.... I don't see how studying a flower ever detracts from its beauty. It only adds
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.
There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!
There’s so much distance between the fundamental rules and the final phenomenon, that it’s almost unbelievable that the final variety of phenomenon can come from such a steady operation of such simple rules.
It is odd, but 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.
You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things... It doesn't frighten me.
... it is impossible to explain honestly the beauties of the laws of nature in a way that people can feel, without their having some deep understanding of mathematics. I am sorry, but this seems to be the case.