Quotes About Feynman

His colleague Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particles partons16, as in Dolly, but was over-ruled. Instead they became known as quarks.

Their colleagues soon nicknamed Feynman "The Mosquito" and Bethe "The Battleship.

Richard Feynman, an incorrigible practical joker, had his own way of dealing with security regulations. When the censors complained that his wife, Arline, now a patient at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Albuquerque, was sending him letters in code and asked for the code, Feynman explained that he didn't have the key to it—it was a game he played with his wife to practice his code-breaking.

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.

Feynman once wrote, quantum mechanics "describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is–absurd.

As Feynman once wrote, "[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is—absurd.

I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing, and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions.

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.

Feynman asked Wouk if he knew calculus. No, Wouk admitted, he didn't. "You had better learn it," said Feynman. "It's the language God talks.

Feynman was adamant in avoiding administrative duties because he knew they would only decrease his ability to do the one thing that mattered most in his professional life: "to do real good physics work.

Richard Feynman, who more than anyone has known how to juggle with the theory, has written: "I think I can state that nobody really understands quantum mechanics.

But our relationship to these infinite pasts and futures isn't random—plausibility throws its weight around, per some freaky quantum mechanics stuff that Dr. Oda calls Feynman Diagram History Pachinko.

Feynman resented the polished myths of most scientific history, submerging the false steps and halting uncertainties under a surface of orderly intellectual progress, but he created a myth of his own.

By the time Carl was four, Feynman was actively lobbying against a first-grade science book proposed for California schools. It began with pictures of a mechanical wind-up dog, a real dog, and a motorcycle, and for each the same question: "What makes it move?" The proposed answer—"Energy makes it move"—enraged him.

Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times.

Or so Feynman argued: the philosophers themselves, he said, were always a tempo behind, like tourists moving in after the explorers have left.

The great quantum theorist Richard P. Feynman expressed this feeling. "It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do?

Feynman—mystifyingly brilliant at calculating, strangely ignorant of the literature, passionate about physics, reckless about proof—had for once overestimated his ability to charm and persuade these great physicists.

They reached Albuquerque, Dyson seeing for the first time the deceptively clear air and the red desert beneath still snowy peaks. Feynman bore into town at 70 miles per hour and was immediately arrested for a rapid sequence of traffic violations. The justice of the peace announced that the fine he handed down was a personal record.

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.

The ugly truth is that other than Feynman's sum-over theories there is no believable explanation of quantum mechanics that does not involve human consciousness. Of course this raises the questions as to how it managed to get along without us.

The withdrawal of philosophy into a professional shell of its own has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth – and this is the fault of the very same idea of professionalism which you are now defending.