Richard P. Feynman

Quotes

1. [T]he total amount that a physicist knows is very little. He has only to remember the rules to get him from one place to another...

   p. 45

2. 

   So in order to understand the physics one must always have a neat balance and contain in his head all of the various propositions and their interelationships because the laws often extend beyond the range of their deductions. This will only have no importance when all the laws are known.

3. 

   While I am describing to you how Nature works, you won't understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that.

   p. 10

4. 

   It is to be emphasized that no matter how many [Probability amplitude] arrows we draw, add, or multiply, our objective is to calculate a single final arrow for the event. Mistakes are often made by physics students at first because they do not keep this important point in mind. They work for so long analyzing events involving a single photon that they begin to think that the arrow is somehow associated with the photon [rather than with the event].

   p. 75

5. 

   For those who want some proof that physicists are human, the proof is in the idiocy of all the different units which they use for measuring energy.

   p. 75

6. 

   The most shocking characteristic of... [QED] is the crazy framework of amplitudes..! [P]hysicist have been fiddling with amplitudes for... fifty years... and have gotten... used to it. ...[A]ll new particles and... phenomena... we... observe fit perfectly with everything... deduced from... a framework of amplitudes, in which the probability of an event is the square of the final arrow... So this... has no experimental doubt..: you can have... philosophical worries... as to what the amplitudes mean... but because physics is an experimental science and the framework agrees with experiment, it's good enough...

   p. 124

7. 

   When a photon comes down, it interacts with electrons throughout the glass, not just on the surface. The photon and electrons do some kind of dance, the net result of which is the same as if the photon hit only on the surface.

   p. 17

8. 

   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.

   p. 13

9. 

   Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get "down the drain", into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

   p. 129

10. 

    [T]he experimentally measured m, and... charge, e, of the electron are different from the numbers in our calculations, n and j.

    p. 126

11. 

    If we have confidence in a law, then if something appears to be wrong it can suggest to us another phenomenon.

    p. 23

12. 

    A person talks in such generalities that everyone can understand him and it's considered to be some deep philosophy. However, I would like to be very rather more special and I would like to be understood in an honest way, rather than in a vague way.

    p. 13