Quotes About Feynman

The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was such a lauded lecturer in large part because, like Hui Tzu, he was skilled in finding the right analogies to illustrate his explanations of extremely abstract-and extremely difficult-concepts. He once compared a drop of water magnified 2,000 times to "a kind of teeming...like a crowd at a football game as seen from a very great distance." That description has all the precision of good physics and good poetry.

The adult Feynman asked: If all scientific knowledge were lost in a cataclysm, what single statement would preserve the most information for the next generations of creatures?

I love only nature, and I hate mathematicians.

On one assessment there should be no doubt: Newton was the greatest creative genius physics has ever seen. None of the other candidates for the superlative (Einstein, Maxwell, Boltzmann, Gibbs, and Feynman) has matched Newton's combined achievements as theoretician, experimentalist, and mathematician.

I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.

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.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

There are great science books that were conceived as books. Feynman's famous introductory lectures in physics, which have a beginning and an end, which are written with style.

Paul Dirac was notoriously a man of few words. Dick Feynman told the story that when he first met Dirac at a conference, Dirac said after a long silence, "I have an equation; do you have one too?

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.

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.

Richard Feynman showed that anti-matter is identical, mathematically, to ordinary matter traveling backward in time. He

The nanites are like the wildest dreams of Richard Feynman come to life.

the goal was a mental flash, achieved somewhere below consciousness. In these ideal instants one did not strain toward an answer as much as relax toward it." —Richard Feynman (Nobel Laureate, Physics)

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.

Feynman once said, 'Science is imagination in a straitjacket.' It is ironic that in the case of quantum mechanics, the people without the straitjackets are generally the nuts.

He's not Richard Feynman-just an artificial persona, a program meant to mimic the original.

It's the way I study - to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

In 1965, physicist Richard Feynman opined, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," and the sentiment is equally applicable today.

According to Feynman, a system has not just one history but every possible history.

Until the advent of modern physics it was generally thought that all knowledge of the world could be obtained through direct observation, that things are what they seem, as perceived through our senses. But the spectacular success of modern physics, which is based upon concepts such as Feynman's that clash with everyday experience, has shown that that is not the case. The naive view of reality therefore is not compatible with modern physics.

Some people make a great mystery of this idea, sometimes called the multiverse concept, but these are just different expressions of the Feynman sum over histories.

Según Feynman, un sistema no tiene una sola historia, sino todas las historias posibles.

I got a signed document from Bullock's saying that they had such-and-such drawings on consignment. Of course, nobody bought any of them, but otherwise, I was a big success: I had my drawings on sale at Bullock's!