It is too easy to memorize a lot or read a lot and not really understand anything.
If your professors and fellow students seem to know some things but seem to be oblivious to other things, that does not exclude you from learning what they know whilst remaining deeply aware of what they are blind to.
I now know that it’s possible for a night’s work of a graduate student to be done in ten seconds by a professor.
My father taught me about pi before I had learned in the school the decimals for fractions, and explained decimals. See, I was really ahead in arithmetic. I remember him telling me about pi as a great and marvelous mystery.
I don’t know why number theory does not find application in physics. We seem to need instead the mathematics of functions of continuous variables, complex numbers, and abstract algebra.
I don’t know why number theory does not find application in physics. We seem to need instead the mathematics of functions of continuous variables, complex numbers, and abstract algebra.
People have this feeling that scientists know more about this than they do. It is not true. It’s like the Wizard of Oz. You look behind and you see he’s an ordinary fellow like you are.
Although you say, “I’d love to get all the publicity we can stand,” I personally cannot stand publicity and my wish would be the exact opposite. I’d love no publicity at all.
Publicity is an evil thing — once it starts to work — its practitioners don’t know when to stop and it gets bigger and bigger.
The behavior of sub-nuclear systems is so strange compared to the ones the brain evolved to deal with that the analysis has to be very abstract: to understand ice, you have to understand things that are themselves very unlike ice.
It is very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you who have gone to school, where you were probably told something about light behaving like waves. I’m telling you the way it does behave — like particles. (QED, p. 15)
Now I come to the greatest shame of theoretical physics. For the last twenty-five years, well it’s more than that, it’s nearly forty years, field theories have been in existence, and still no one can compute most of their consequences exactly. (1973)
The science fiction writers who have interpreted my view of the positron as an electron going backward in time have not realized that the theory is completely consistent with causality principles and in no way implies that we can travel backward in time.
We see the ingenuity, if I may put it that way, of nature herself. The peculiarity of the way she works. It takes a terrible strain on the mind to understand these things.
I believe, although I can’t guarantee it, that most of my education as a graduate student was through my own studying, through worrying about problems, through talking to friends, and very little courses. And that’s the way it was in those days.
Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn, as in my example of “oomph,” then the proposition they state is almost meaningless.
Feynman Nostrich
When I was a child and found out Santa Claus wasn’t real, I wasn’t upset. Rather, I was relieved that there was a much simpler phenomenon to explain how so many children all over the world got presents on the same night.
The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution: not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
The principle of science, the definition almost, is the following: the test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of “proof.”
We are trying to prove ourselves as wrong as quickly possible, because only in that way can we find progress.
There are ten to the 11th power 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.
You must compare your ideas with Nature; she tells you yes or no.