Richard P. Feynman
Physicist
1918-05-11
Quotes by Richard P. Feynman
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We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.
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I was terrible in English. I couldn't stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention - it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.
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The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.
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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.
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First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense.
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Because the theory of quantum mechanics could explain all of chemistry and the various properties of substances, it was a tremendous success. But still there was the problem of the interaction of light and matter.
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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. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.
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People often think I'm a faker, but I'm usually honest, in a certain way - in such a way that often nobody believes me!
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Once you have a computer that can do a few things - strictly speaking, one that has a certain 'sufficient set' of basic procedures - it can do basically anything any other computer can do. This, loosely, is the basis of the great principle of 'Universality'.
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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.
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I don't understand what it's all about or what's worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.
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The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.
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For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
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What goes on inside a star is better understood than one might guess from the difficulty of having to look at a little dot of light through a telescope, because we can calculate what the atoms in the stars should do in most circumstances.
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If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, 'Oh, I forgot that bit,' then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you've figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!
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All the evidence, experimental and even a little theoretical, seems to indicate that it is the energy content which is involved in gravitation, and therefore, since matter and antimatter both represent positive energies, gravitation makes no distinction.
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Einstein's gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea.
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When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get 'Calculus for the Practical Man.' By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.
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The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?
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The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.
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