Richard P. Feynman
Born:
Died: 1988

1943
Feynman joined Oppenheimer's team at Los Alamos to help develop the atomic bomb.

There are two kinds of ways of looking at mathematics... the Babylonian tradition and the Greek tradition... Euclid discovered that there was a way in which all the theorems of geometry could be ordered from a set of axioms that were particularly simple... The Babylonian attitude... is that you know all of the various theorems and many of the connections in between, but you have never fully realized that it could all come up from a bunch of axioms... Even in mathematics you can start in different places... In physics we need the Babylonian method, and not the Euclidian or Greek method.
— Richard Feynman

One of the most important things in this `guess—compute consequences—compare with experiment' business is to know when you are right. It is possible to know when you are right way ahead of checking all the consequences. You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. It is always easy when you have made a guess, and done two or three little calculations to make sure that it is not obviously wrong, to know that it is right. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right—at least if you have any experience—because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in. Your guess is, in fact, that something is very simple. If you cannot see immediately that it is wrong, and it is simpler than it was before, then it is right. The inexperienced, and crackpots, and people like that, make guesses that are simple, but you can immediately see that they are wrong, so that does not count. Others, the inexperienced students, make guesses that are very complicated, and it sort of looks as if it is all right, but I know it is not true because the truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought. What we need is imagination, but imagination in a terrible strait-jacket. We have to find a new view of the world that has to agree with everything that is known, but disagree in its predictions somewhere, otherwise it is not interesting. And in that disagreement it must agree with nature...
— Feynman

Far more marvelous is the truth than any artist of the past imagined. Why do poets of the present not speak of it?
-Richard Feynman

"Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected."
- Richard Feynman

"There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe that there ever was such a time. ... On the other hand, I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. ... Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly 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."
- Richard Feynman

The truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.
- Richard Feynman

If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain.
- Richard Feynman

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.
- Richard Feynman

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner,what you actually did in order to get to do the work.

- Richard Feynman

Each 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.

-- Richard Feynman

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out - The Best Short Works of Richard Feynman
Copyright 1999

The Meaning of it All - Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist
Copyright 1998
Richard Feynman