Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Richard P. Feynman

Related Quotes:

" The situation in the sciences is this: A concept or an idea which cannot be measured or cannot be referred directly to experiment may or may not be useful. It need not exist in a theory. "

Richard P. Feynman

" Einstein's gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea. "

Richard P. Feynman

" I don't understand what it's all about or what's worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it. "

Richard P. Feynman

" I was a very shy character, always feeling uncomfortable because everybody was stronger than I, and always afraid I would look like a sissy. Everybody else played baseball; everybody else did all kinds of athletic things. "

Richard P. Feynman

" Once you have a computer that can do a few things - strictly speaking, one that has a certain 'sufficient set' of basic procedures - it can do basically anything any other computer can do. This, loosely, is the basis of the great principle of 'Universality'. "

Richard P. Feynman

" If we have an atom that is in an excited state and so is going to emit a photon, we cannot say when it will emit the photon. It has a certain amplitude to emit the photon at any time, and we can predict only a probability for emission; we cannot predict the future exactly. "

Richard P. Feynman

" See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. "

Richard P. Feynman

" You're unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things. "

Richard P. Feynman

" There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before. I don't know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature. "

Richard P. Feynman

" We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all. "

Richard P. Feynman

" For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. "

Richard P. Feynman

" 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. "

Richard P. Feynman

" 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. "

Richard P. Feynman

" We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task. "

Richard P. Feynman

" The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation? "

Richard P. Feynman

" If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize. "

Richard P. Feynman

" The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life. "

Richard P. Feynman

" Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate. "

Richard P. Feynman

" First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense. "

Richard P. Feynman

" I've always been very one-sided about science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it. "

Richard P. Feynman

" Today we say that the law of relativity is supposed to be true at all energies, but someday somebody may come along and say how stupid we were. "

Richard P. Feynman

" The original reason to start the project, which was that the Germans were a danger, started me off on a process of action, which was to try to develop this first system at Princeton and then at Los Alamos, to try to make the bomb work. "

Richard P. Feynman

" Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical. "

Richard P. Feynman

" I don't believe in honors - it bothers me. Honors bother: honors is epaulettes; honors is uniforms. My papa brought me up this way. "

Richard P. Feynman

" We're always, by the way, in fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don't understand the conclusions. After we've checked them enough, we're okay. "

Richard P. Feynman

" I thought one should have the attitude of 'What do you care what other people think!' "

Richard P. Feynman

" It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem. "

Richard P. Feynman

" The universe is very large, and its boundaries are not known very well, but it is still possible to define some kind of a radius to be associated with it. "

Richard P. Feynman

" If you realize all the time what's kind of wonderful - that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience - every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything's pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before. "

Richard P. Feynman

" I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile! "

Richard P. Feynman