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" Physics has a history of synthesizing many phenomena into a few theories. "

Richard P. Feynman

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" 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

" Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things. "

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" From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are, of course, in the new places, the places where the rules do not work - not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules. "

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" 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

" In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself. "

Richard P. Feynman

" We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. "

Richard P. Feynman

" When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get 'Calculus for the Practical Man.' By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it. "

Richard P. Feynman

" Quarks came in a number of varieties - in fact, at first, only three were needed to explain all the hundreds of particles and the different kinds of quarks - they are called u-type, d-type, s-type. "

Richard P. Feynman

" I got a fancy reputation. During high school, every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew. "

Richard P. Feynman

" I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there. "

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 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

" The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth. "

Richard P. Feynman

" I was terrible in English. I couldn't stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention - it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature. "

Richard P. Feynman

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art. "

Richard P. Feynman

" Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this. "

Richard P. Feynman

" Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants. "

Richard P. Feynman

" I got a signed document from Bullock's saying that they had such-and-such drawings on consignment. Of course, nobody bought any of them, but otherwise, I was a big success: I had my drawings on sale at Bullock's! "

Richard P. Feynman

" Investigating the forces that hold the nuclear particles together was a long task. "

Richard P. Feynman

" Before I was born, my father told my mother, 'If it's a boy, he's going to be a scientist.' "

Richard P. Feynman

" It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another. "

Richard P. Feynman

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

Richard P. Feynman

" What one fool can understand, another can. "

Richard P. Feynman

" When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards. "

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

" There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics. "

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