Richard Feynman

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Richard Phillips Feynman (11 May 1918 – 15 February 1988) American physicist; his surname is pronounced [ˈfaɪnmən], the first syllable sounding like "fine".

Contents 1 Sourced 1.1 Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985) 1.2 What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988) 1.3 The Meaning of it All (1999) 1.4 The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999) 2 The Feynman Lectures on Physics 3 Attributed 3.1 Feynman On Flying Saucers 4 Quotations of others on Feynman

Sourced

• There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in 'cargo cult science'... It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards... For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it... Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them.
  • Caltech commencement address (1974)

• You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing —that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
  • "What is Science?", presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, and printed in The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6, 1969, pp. 313-320.

• From a long view of the history of mankind - seen from, say, ten thousand years from now, there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade.
  • R. P. Feynman, Lectures on Physics, Vol. II, Addison-Wesley, 1964, page 1-11.

• If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that 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 an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.
  • The Feynman Lectures on Physics

• Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars— mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere'. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination— stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern— of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent.
  • Footnote in The Feynman Lectures on Physics

• So, ultimately, in order to understand nature it may be necessary to have a deeper understanding of mathematical relationships. But the real reason is that the subject is enjoyable, and although we humans cut nature up in different ways, and we have different courses in different departments, such compartmentalization is really artificial, and we should take our intellectual pleasures where we find them.
  • The Feynman Lectures on Physics

• I took this stuff I got out of your [O-ring] seal and I put it in ice water, and I discovered that when you put some pressure on it for a while and then undo it it doesn't stretch back. It stays the same dimension. In other words, for a few seconds at least, and more seconds than that, there is no resilience in this particular material when it is at a temperature of 32 degrees. I believe that has some significance for our problem.
  • Press conference of the presidential commission into the Challenger disaster. 10 Feb 1986.

• For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
  • Rogers' Commission Report into the Challenger Crash. Appendix F: Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle.

• I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring.
  • Last words

• 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.
  • This was said after he was introduced when giving the Messenger Lectures at Cornell Univ. 1964-5, and the introducer mentioned that Feynman played bongo drums.

• If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.
  • People 22 Jul 85

• Several conversations that Feynman and I had involved the remarkable abilities of other physicists. In one of these conversations, I remarked to Feynman that I was impressed by Steven Hawking's ability to do path integration in his head. Ahh, that's not so great, Feynman replied. It's much more interesting to come up with the technique like I did, rather than to be able to do the mechanics in your head. Feynman wasn't being immodest, he was quite right. The true secret to genius is in creativity, not in technical mechanics.
  • Al Seckel gave an anecdote concerning Feynman's perspective on Hawking's ability to do the mathematical equations that his work requires in his head [1].

• A poet once said "The whole universe is in a glass of wine". We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imaginations adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secret of the universe's age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are there in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that Nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!
  • The New Quantum Universe, Epilogue

• I think I can safely say that no one understands quantum mechanics.
  • "The New Quantum Universe"

• God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.
  • Page 208: Davies, Paul C. W. (January 1988). Julian R. Brown Ed. Superstrings : A Theory of Everything, 242 pages, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521354625.

• In fact, the science of thermodynamics began with an analysis, by the great engineer Sadi Carnot, of the problem of how to build the best and most efficient engine, and this constitutes one of the few famous cases in which engineering has contributed to fundamental physical theory. Another example that comes to mind is the more recent analysis of information theory by Claude Shannon. these two analyses, incidentally, turn out to be closely related.
  • The Laws of Thermodynamics,The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

ISBN 0393316041. A collection of reminiscences from taped interviews with fellow scientist and friend Ralph Leighton.

• I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that's the end of you.

• And this is medicine?
  • In chapter Uncle Sam Doesn't Need You, replying to the psychiatrist who was examining him and who had stated he studied medicine to become a psychiatrist.

• I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.
  • In chapter Los Alamos from Below, reflecting on his reaction to the use of the atomic bomb.

What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988)

• In particular, she had a wonderful sense of humor, and I learned from her that the highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.
  • Commenting on his mother's influence on himself.

The Meaning of it All (1999)

The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist, Perseus Publishing, paperback ISBN 0738201669. A collection of three guest lectures Feynman gave at the University of Washington.

• Some people say, "How can you live without knowing?" I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.
• It's a great game to look at the past, at an unscientific era, look at something there, and say have we got the same thing now, and where is it? So I would like to amuse myself with this game. First, we take witch doctors. The witch doctor says he knows how to cure. There are spirits inside which are trying to get out. ... Put a snakeskin on and take quinine from the bark of a tree. The quinine works. He doesn't know he's got the wrong theory of what happens. If I'm in the tribe and I'm sick, I go to the witch doctor. He knows more about it than anyone else. But I keep trying to tell him he doesn't know what he's doing and that someday when people investigate the thing freely and get free of all his complicated ideas they'll learn much better ways of doing it. Who are the witch doctors? Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, of course.
  • Third lecture. David Goodstein reports that the entire Psychology department walked out in a huff at this point [2].

• The third aspect of my subject is that of science as a method of finding things out. This method is based on the principle that observation is the judge of whether something is so or not. All other aspects and characteristics of science can be understood directly when we understand that observation is the ultimate and final judge of the truth of an idea. But "prove" used in this way really means "test," in the same way that a hundred-proof alcohol is a test of the alcohol, and for people today the idea really should be translated as, "The exception tests the rule." Or, put another way, "The exception proves that the rule is wrong." That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong.

• No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.
  • The Uncertainty of Values.

• "The first ... has to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questions--then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn't know the answer, if he is an honest man."
  • Page 65.

• "Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true."

• "The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way someday."

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999)

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out : The Best Short Works of Richard Feynman, edited by Jeffery Robbins, ISBN 0-14-029034-6.

• Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
  • From lecture "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society", given at the Galileo Symposium in Italy, 1964.

• Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation . . .Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
  • Pages 186-187. Based on transcriptions from an interview made in 1981.

• I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things; by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose— which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me.
  • Horizon: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics

• We can’t define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers…one saying to the other: ”you don’t know what you are talking about!”. The second one says: “what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?”
  • Volume I, 8-2

Attributed

• All fundamental processes are reversible.

• Dear Mrs. Chown, Ignore your son's attempts to teach you physics. Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is. Best wishes, Richard Feynman.

• 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.
  • The Character of Physical Law (Lecture 6: Probability and Uncertainity - the Quantum Mechanical view of Nature), about the apparent absurdities of Quantum behaviour.

• Don't worry about anything... Go out and have a good time.

• I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.

• I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.
  • On the idea that there is an inherent problem with Quantum Theory.

• Mathematics is not real, but it feels real. Where is this place?

• Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

• People say to me, "Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?" No, I'm not... If it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it— that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers... then that's the way it is.

• Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

• Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.

• Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

• It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.

• It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

• The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things.

• The chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off chance that it is in another direction— a direction obvious from an unfashionable view of field theory— who will find it? Only someone who has sacrificed himself by teaching himself quantum electrodynamics from a peculiar and unfashionable point of view; one that he may have to invent for himself.

• The same equations have the same solutions. (Thus when you have solved a mathematical problem, you can re-use the solution in another physical situation. Feynman was skilled in transforming a problem into one that he could solve.)

• The wonderful thing about science is that it's alive.

• There are 10¹¹ stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

• What does it mean, to understand? ... I don't know.

• What I cannot create, I do not understand.
  • On his blackboard at time of death in 1988. (See The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking, pg. 83)

• We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

• When you are solving a problem, don't worry. Now, after you have solved the problem, then that's the time to worry.

• Einstein was a genius: Head in the clouds, feet on the ground. But those of us who are not as tall, have to make a choice.

• Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.

Feynman On Flying Saucers

I had a conversation about flying saucers some years ago with ..[pause].. "laymen" [some audience laughter]. Because I'm "scientific", I know all about flying saucers!

So, I said "I don't think there are flying saucers!"

So the other..My antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers?! Can you prove that it's impossible?"

I said, "No, I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely."

"That", they say, "you are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible, then why..how can you say it's likely that it's unlikely?"

But, that's the way it is, scientific. It is scientific only to say what's more likely and less likely, and not to be proving all the time possible, impossible.

To define what I mean, I finally said to him, "Listen. I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the result of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence rather than the unknown rational efforts of extraterrestrial intelligence." [considerable audience laughter]

The last statement has also been reported as "UFOs are better explained in terms of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial beings rather than by any unknown rational efforts of extraterrestrial beings."

No evidence in this Cornell film clip for the above UFO quote but he might have said it elswhere.

Verbatim quote derived from PBS NOVA "The best mind since Einstein (1993) containing unedited film of lecture given at Cornell 1964. Quote should be upgraded to "Sourced" instead of "Attributed".

Quotations of others on Feynman

• The Feynman Problem-Solving Algorithm:
    (1) write down the problem;
    (2) think very hard;
    (3) write down the answer.
  • Attributed to Murray Gell-Mann

• "There are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre." - Mark Kac

• He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer on Feynman's status among the physicists at Los Alamos.

• Thirty-one years ago [1949], Dick Feynman told me about his "sum over histories" version of quantum mechanics. "The electron does anything it likes," he said. "It just goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time, however it likes, and then you add up the amplitudes and it gives you the wave-function." I said to him, "You're crazy." But he wasn't. Freeman J. Dyson, 1983

• Shortly before midnight on February 15, 1988, his body gasped for air that the oxygen tube could not provide, and his space in the world closed. An imprint remained: what he knew, how he knew. ~ James Gleick. Genius: Richard Feynman and modern physics

• There were 183 of us freshmen, and a bowling ball hanging from the three-story ceiling to just above the floor. Feynman walked in and, without a word, grabbed the ball and backed against the wall with the ball touching his nose. He let go, and the ball swung slowly 60 feet across the room and back - stopping naturally just short of crushing his face. Then he took the ball again, stepped forward, and said: "I wanted to show you that I believe in what I'm going to teach you over the next two years." — Michael Scott, first president of Apple Computer

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