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The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.

Richard P. Feynman

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Richard P. Feynman
Age: 69 †
Born: 1918
Born: May 11
Died: 1988
Died: February 15
Inventor
Percussionist
Physicist
Politician
Quantum Physicist
Science Communicator
Theoretical Physicist
University Teacher
Writer
Far Rockaway
New York
Richard Phillips Feynman
Richard P. Feynman
Ofey
Situation
Universe
Science
Two
Physics
Chess
Rules
Mystery
Present

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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!
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I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.
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(Joan,1941) She wrote me a letter asking,How can I read it?,Its so hard. I told her to start at the beginning and read as far as you can get until you're lost. Then start again at the beginning and keep working through until you can understand the whole book. And thats what she did
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This attitude of mind - this attitude of uncertainty - is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire. It becomes a habit of thought. Once acquired, we cannot retreat from it anymore.
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Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
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If all of mathematics disappeared, physics would be set back by exactly one week.
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The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas brought in - a trial and error system.
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Mathematics is not just a language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning.
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[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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't believe I can really do without teaching.
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All things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.
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I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
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We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.
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The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination in a straightjacket, which is this: that it has to agree with the known laws of physics. ... It requires imagination to think of what's possible, and then it requires an analysis back, checking to see whether it fits, whether its allowed, according to what's known, okay?
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From a long view of the history of mankind the most significant event of the nineteenth century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.
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When I found out that Santa Claus wasn't real, I wasn't upset rather, I was relieved that there was a much simpler phenomenon to explain how so many children all over the world got presents on the same night! The story had been getting pretty complicated -- it was getting out of hand.
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If I say [electrons] behave like particles I give the wrong impression also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before.
Richard P. Feynman
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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 P. Feynman