Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard P. Feynman

If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives.

Richard P. 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. 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 … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

Richard P. Feynman

Unless a thing can be defined by measurement, it has no place in a theory. And since an accurate value of the momentum of a localized particle cannot be defined by measurement it therefore has no place in the theory.

Richard P. Feynman

Progress in science comes when experiments contradict theory.

Richard P. Feynman

The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination in a straightjacket, which is this: that it has to agree with the known laws of physics. ... It requires imagination to think of what's possible, and then it requires an analysis back, checking to see whether it fits, whether its allowed, according to what's known, okay?

Richard P. Feynman

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts.

Richard P. Feynman

It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.

Richard P. Feynman

We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

Richard P. Feynman

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.

Jim Fox

Her perspective led me into self-discovery. I got to see the other side.

Brett Johnson

It is a journey of discovery - artistically, sexually, socially.

Richard P. Feynman

We are very lucky to be living in an age in which we are still making discoveries. It is like the discovery of America-you only discover it once. The age in which we live is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature, and that day will never come again. It is very exciting, it is marvelous, but this excitement will have to go.

Richard P. Feynman

If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery.

Richard P. Feynman

One of the ways of stopping science would be only to do experiments in the region where you know the law. But experimenters search most diligently, and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. In other words, we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

Russell Baker

Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.

William Wordsworth

We murder to dissect.

William James

(Five) thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, an audience of some 5 or 6 score people, if each person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to the black unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale.

Walker Percy

Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative which no one has hit upon. It is that one finding oneself in one of life's critical situations need not after all respond in one of the traditional ways. No. One may simply default. Pass. Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on one's heel and leave. Exit. Why after all need one act humanly?

Walter Reisch

A scientist who cannot prove what he has accomplished, has accomplished nothing.

James Hansen

I've tried to be a straight scientist doing the science and reporting it as best I can.

Luis Walter Alvarez

I don't like to say bad things about paleontologists, but they're not very good scientists. They're more like stamp collectors.

John Charles Polanyi

Scientists and scholars should constitute themselves as an international NGO of exceptional authority.

Leo Szilard

A scientist's aim in a discussion with his colleagues is not to persuade, but to clarify.

Alan Alda

I must have interviewed 600 or 700 scientists all around the world.

Ben Okri

I was going to be a scientist.

Arthur Koestler

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

Thomas R. Cech

I think there is value in having practising scientists as leaders of research institutions.