Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) American physicist ; (his surname is pronounced like "fine-man")

Table of contents

1 Sourced 2 Attributed 2.1 Feynman On Flying Saucers 3 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)

• 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.
  • from The Meaning of it All (the entire Psychology department reportedly walked out in a huff at this point)

• 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" (in the collection The Meaning of it All)

• 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.
  • Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

• 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 preceeding 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.
  • The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999) p. 186-187. This work is based on transcriptions from an interview made in 1981.

• 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, 1968, pp. 313-320.

• 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' Commmision 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

• 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.
  • The Meaning of it All

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 possible 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.
  • 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 inate problem with Quantum Theory.

• 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.

• Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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)

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

Feynman On Flying Saucers

I had a conversation about flying saucers some years ago with "laymen". You see, because I'm "scientific", they think I know all about flying saucers!

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

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, "is very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible, then how can you say it's unlikely?"

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

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."

...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.

1974 Caltech commencement address

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 types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked hard enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it. Feynman was a magician. ~ Hans Bethe

• 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.

• 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