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Richard Feynman Quotes (1918-1988)
Physicist, King, Scientist
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About Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 β February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist. He is known for the work he did in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and in particle physics, for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirΕ Tomonaga. Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world.
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Richard Feynman quotes.
βI have to understand the world, you see.β
βPhysics is to mathematics what sex is to masturbation.β
βNature's imagination far surpasses our own.β
βI think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.β
βPrinciples
You can't say A is made of B
or vice versa.
All mass is interaction.β
You can't say A is made of B
or vice versa.
All mass is interaction.β
βThe imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.β
βSo far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, like Newton's equations, are reversible.β
βSince then I never pay attention to anything by "experts". I calculate everything myself.β
β[S]tudy hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.β
βIf we have confidence in a law, then if something appears to be wrong it can suggest to us another phenomenon.β
Richard Feynman Quotes by Topic
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Richard Feynman on Experiment 7 quotes
βEach piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected. β¦ The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific βtruthβ.β
Richard Feynman on Quantum mechanics 5 quotes
β...the "paradox" is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be."β
Richard Feynman on Science 4 quotes
βScience is the belief in the ignorance of experts. ... Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it.β
Richard Feynman on Inertia 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Inertia →Richard Feynman on Absurdism 2 quotes
βThe highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.β
Richard Feynman on Atom 2 quotes
βAnother way to remember their size is this: if an apple is magnified to the size of the earth, then the atoms in the apple are approximately the size of the original apple.β
Richard Feynman on Quantum electrodynamics 2 quotes
βThe theory of quantum electrodynamics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She isβabsurd.β
Richard Feynman on Unification in science and mathematics 2 quotes
βPeople are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don't give us a chance to tell them anything about what we know pretty well. They always want to know the things we don't know.β
Richard Feynman on Electron 2 quotes
βAnd, just like it should in all stories about philosophers, it ended up in complete chaos. In all their previous discussions they hadn't even asked themselves whether such a simple object as a brick, much less an electron, is an "essential object."β
Richard Feynman on Equivalence principle 2 quotes
βIn fact, how could you tell inside a space ship whether you are sitting on the earth or are accelerating in free space? According to Einsteinβs equivalence principle there is no way to tell if you only make measurements of what happens to things inside!β
Richard Feynman on Pattern 2 quotes
βDeep in the sea all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves and a new dance starts.Growing in size and complexity living things masses of atoms DNA, protein dancing a pattern ever more intricate.β
Richard Feynman on History of science 2 quotes
βOur freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question β to doubt β to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.β
What Richard Feynman Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Richard Feynman shared regarding contemporaries.
Richard Feynman on Albert Einstein 3 quotes
βEinstein was a giant. His head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground. Those of us who are not so tall have to choose!β
Richard Feynman on John von Neumann 2 quotes
βJohnny von Neumann was the greatest mathematician around.β
Richard Feynman on David Bohm
Richard Feynman on John Archibald Wheeler
Richard Feynman on Isaac Newton
βNewton had other postulates by which he could get the law of angular momentum, but Newtonian laws were wrong. There's no forces, it's all a lot of balony. The particles don't have orbits, and so on.β
Richard Feynman on Edward Fredkin
βBennett from IBM, Fredkin, and later Toffoli investigated whether, with gates that are reversible, you can do everything. And it turns out, wonderfully true, that the irreversibiilty is not essential for computation. It just happens to be the way we designed the circuits.β
Richard Feynman on Paul Dirac
βWhen 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. Maxwell in his day got his equations, but only in an enormous mass of 'gear wheels' and so forth.β
Richard Feynman on James Clerk Maxwell
β'''From a long view of the history of mankind β seen from, say, ten thousand years from now β 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.β
Richard Feynman on Baruch Spinoza
βMy son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza and there was the most childish reasoning! There were all these attributes, and Substances, and all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher, and we're laughing at him. It's because there's no excuse for it! In the same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions, and take the contrary propositions, and look at the world and you can't tell which is right.β
Richard Feynman on Michael Faraday
βWith the realization that electric currents make magnetic fields, people immediately suggested that, somehow or other, magnets might also make electric fields. Various experiments were tried. For example, two wires were placed parallel to each other and a current was passed through one of them in the hope of finding a current in the other. The thought was that the magnetic field might in some way drag the electrons along in the second wire, giving some such law as "likes prefer to move alike." With the largest available current and the most sensitive galvanometer to detect any current, the result was negative. Large magnets next to wires also produced no observed effects. Finally, Faraday discovered in 1840 the essential feature that had been missedβthat electric effects exist only when there is something changing. If one of a pair of wires has a changing current, a current is induced in the other, or if a magnet is moved near an electric circuit, there is a current. We say that currents are induced. This was the induction effect discovered by Faraday. It transformed the rather dull subject of static fields into a very exciting dynamic subject with an enormous range of wonderful phenomena.β
Richard Feynman on Robert Oppenheimer
βOne of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium. This committee had men like Compton and Tolman and Smyth and Urey and Rabi and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they'd ask me questions and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there's this other possibility we have to consider against it. So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn't repeat and emphasize his point. Finally at the end, Tolman, who's the chairman, would say, "Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it's true that Compton's argument is the best of all, and now we have to go ahead." It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best -- summing it all up -- without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.β
Quotes About Richard Feynman
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Richard Feynman from others.
Forman S. Acton on Richard Feynman
βIn the hands of a Feynman the [variational] technique works like a Latin charm; with ordinary mortals the result is a mixed bag.β
Robert Barro on Richard Feynman
βPeople often ask me why I became an economist. In college and before that, I tended toward mathematics and science. As a physics major at Caltech in the early 1960s, I was lucky to take the two-year sequence taught to freshmen and sophomores the one and only time by the great Richard Feynman. (To prove this, I have a signed and leather-bound copy of the notes from his course.) Feynman's approach was to skip the standard topics in physics and use with frontier material. That was partly why many of the faculty and graduate students attended the course. It also meant that I learned early on what it would mean to be an actual physicist, and I decided pretty quickly that I would not be a great one. In retrospect, it was fortunate that I learned this so soon, rather than having to wait until my senior year or, perhaps, even to graduate school.β
Gregory Benford on Richard Feynman
βRichard Feynman became so exasperated [at the National Academy of Sciences] that he resigned his membership, saying that he saw no point in belonging to an organization that spent most of its time deciding who to let in.β
Jeff Coffin on Richard Feynman
Leon Cooper on Richard Feynman
βRichard Feynman has related that at a meeting of the American Physical Society, likely sometime in 1956, he was chatting with Onsager when a wild-eyed young man came up to them and said that he had solved the problem of superconductivity. ... As Feyman relates, he could not understand what the young man was saying and concluded that the fellow was probably crazy. ... Feynman believed that the young man was me. I am not sure whether or not this meeting actually occurred, but it might have.β
F. J. Duarte on Richard Feynman
βFeynman uses Dirac's notation to describe the quantum mechanics of stimulated emission. ... He applies that physics to several physical systems, including dye molecules. ... In this regard, Feynman could have predicted the existence of the tunable laser. Furthermore, Feynman made accessible Dirac's quantum notation via his thought experiments on two-slit interference with electrons.β
Freeman Dyson on Richard Feynman 8 quotes
βFeynman is the young American professor, half genius and half buffoon, who keeps all physicists and their children amused with his effervescent vitality. He has, however, as I have recently learned, a great deal more to him than that, and you may be interested in his story. The part of it with which I am concerned began when he arrived at Los Alamos; there he found and fell in love with a brilliant and beautiful girl, who was tubercular and had been exiled to New Mexico in the hope of stopping the disease. When Feynman arrived, things had got so bad that the doctors gave her only a year to live, but he determined to marry her and marry her he did; and for a year and a half, while working at full pressure on the Project, he nursed her and made her days cheerful. She died just before the end of the war.β
Graham Farmelo on Richard Feynman
βWeinberg had a remarkable feel for the workings of nature. Always beginning with experimentally well-established principles, he had an uncanny ability to set out regularities in the natural world and to use them to account for a wide range of measurements and observations. He loved mathematics, he told me, but it was only ever a tool for him: more than anything else, he wanted βto explain the worldβ, a phrase he used as the title of one of his popular books. In many ways, his approach was similar to that of Richard Feynman, and for many years I was puzzled by the many rumours I heard that they did not get on. Weinberg confirmed to me only relatively recently that the stories were true. βI didnβt like [Feynman] very muchβ, he admitted. The main reason was that whenever Weinberg gave a talk at Caltech, Feynman harried him mercilessly, to the point of cruelty. Several witnesses to these encounters told me that Feynman appeared to be jealous of Weinbergβs ascent to pre-eminence and could never resist trying to take him down a peg or two. Feynmanβs brilliant colleague Murray Gell-Mann, also famous for his aggression, was a much more reasonable critic, Weinberg said: βIf you set out a good argument, in a bullet-proof way, Murray would leave you aloneβ.β
Richard on Richard Feynman
Murray Gell-Mann on Richard Feynman
βHe surrounded himself with a cloud of myth, and he spent a great deal of time and energy generating anecdotes about himself. ... Many of the anecdotes arose, of course, through the stories Richard told, of which he generally was the hero, and in which he had to come out, if possible, looking smarter than anyone else.β
James Gleick on Richard Feynman 2 quotes
βArchitect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times. He took the half-made conceptions of waves and particles in the 1940s and shaped them into tools that ordinary physicists could use and understand. He had a lightning ability to see into the heart of the problems nature posed.β
David L. Goodstein on Richard Feynman
βOnce I asked him to explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin-1/2 particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Gauging his audience perfectly, he said, "I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it." But a few days later he came to me and said: "You know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it."β
Disputed Quotes
Quotes attributed to Richard Feynman that are questionable.
βThe philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.β
About Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 β February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist. He is known for the work he did in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and in particle physics, for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirΕ Tomonaga. Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world.