Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Richard Feynman

230 quotes

“That's the way multiplication works you know, with numbers it's the same. ...That's why we call it multiplication. ...Suppose you wanted to say that 6 = 3 x 2, which is true. But let me look at it a different way... This is the analog [to arrow multiplication]... The 2 bears a relation, 2 is not a number from this point of view. It's a relationship. It bears a relation to 1. It's an expansion of 1. How much do you have to expand 1? ...Yeah, double. ...That's what you do to 3 to get 6. That's why... it's called multiplication, because we do to this arrow [#2], what we had to do to the original one [standard arrow] to get the blue one [arrow #1].”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most shocking characteristic of... [QED] is the crazy framework of amplitudes..! [P]hysicist have been fiddling with amplitudes for... fifty years... and have gotten... used to it. ...[A]ll new particles and... phenomena... we... observe fit perfectly with everything... deduced from... a framework of amplitudes, in which the probability of an event is the square of the final arrow... So this... has no experimental doubt..: you can have... philosophical worries... as to what the amplitudes mean... but because physics is an experimental science and the framework agrees with experiment, it's good enough...”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why are the theories of physics so similar in their structure? There are a number of possibilities. The first is the limited imagination of physicists: when we see a new phenomenon, we try to fit it into the framework we already have—until we have made enough experiments, we don't know that it doesn't work. So when some fool physicist gives a lecture at UCLA in 1983 and says, “This is the way it works, and look how wonderfully similar the theories are,” it's not because Nature is really similar; it's because the physicists have only been able to think of the same damn thing, over and over again. Another possibility is that it is the same damn thing over and over again—that Nature has only one way of doing things, and She repeats her story from time to time. A third possibility is that things look similar because they are aspects of the same thing—some larger picture underneath, from which things can be broken into parts that look different, like fingers on the same hand. Many physicists are working very hard trying to put together a grand picture that unifies everything into one super-duper model. It's a delightful game, but at present time none of the speculators agree with any of the other speculators as to what the grand picture is.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless. But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked much harder at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis and do things. I took lessons from a Japanese man every day for an hour. One day he was teaching me the word for "see." "All right," he said. "You want to say, 'May I see your garden?' What do you say?" I made up a sentence with the word that I had just learned. "No, no!" he said. "When you say to someone, 'Would you like to see my garden?' you use the first 'see.' But when you want to see someone else's garden, you must use another 'see,' which is more polite." "Would you like to glance at my lousy garden?" is essentially what you're saying in the first case, but when you want to look at the other fella's garden, you have to say something like, "May I observe your gorgeous garden?" So there's two different words you have to use. Then he gave me another one: "You go to a temple, and you want to look at the gardens..." I made up a sentence, this time with the polite "see." "No, no!" he said. "In the temple, the gardens are much more elegant. So you have to say something that would be equivalent to 'May I hang my eyes on your most exquisite gardens?" Three or four different words for one idea, because when I'm doing it, it's miserable; when you're doing it, it's elegant. I was learning Japanese mainly for technical things, so I decided to check if this same problem existed among the scientists. At the institute the next day, I said to the guys in the office, "How would I say in Japanese, 'I solve the Dirac Equation'?" They said such-and-so. "OK. Now I want to say, 'Would you solve the Dirac Equation?' — how do I say that?" "Well, you have to use a different word for 'solve,' " they say. "Why?" I protested. "When I solve it, I do the same damn thing as when you solve it!" "Well, yes, but it's a different word — it's more polite." I gave up. I decided that wasn't the language for me, and stopped learning Japanese.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It's difficult to describe because it's an emotion. It's analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there's a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run "behind the scenes" by the same organization, the same physical laws. It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It's a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?" We have also found that certification criteria used in Flight Readiness Reviews often develop a gradually decreasing strictness. The argument that the same risk was flown before without failure is often accepted as an argument for the safety of accepting it again. Because of this, obvious weaknesses are accepted again and again, sometimes without a sufficiently serious attempt to remedy them, or to delay a flight because of their continued presence.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The acceptance and success of these flights is taken as evidence of safety. But erosion and blow-by are not what the design expected. They are warnings that something is wrong. The equipment is not operating as expected, and therefore there is a danger that it can operate with even wider deviations in this unexpected and not thoroughly understood way. The fact that this danger did not lead to a catastrophe before is no guarantee that it will not the next time, unless it is completely understood. When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next. The origin and consequences of the erosion and blow-by were not understood. They did not occur equally on all flights and all joints; sometimes more, and sometimes less. Why not sometime, when whatever conditions determined it were right, still more leading to catastrophe? In spite of these variations from case to case, officials behaved as if they understood it, giving apparently logical arguments to each other often depending on the "success" of previous flights.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty of the projects. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources. For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well, we're getting a little philosophical and serious, ok? Let's go back to what we're doing. One day we look at a map and this capital is K-Y-Z-Y-L and we decided it would be fun to go there because it's so obscure and peculiar. It's a game. It's not serious. It doesn't involve some deep philosophical point of view about authority or anything. It's just the fun of having an adventure to try to go to a land that we'd never heard of, that we knew was an independent country once, no longer an independent country, find out what it's like. And discover as we went along that nobody went there for a long time and it's isolated made it more interesting. But, you know, many explorers liked to go to places that are unusual. And, it's only for the fun of it. I don't go for this philosophical interpretation of "our deeper understanding of what we’re doing." We haven't any deep understanding of what we're doing. If we tried to understand what we're doing, we'd go nutty.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 236, from interview two weeks before his death in "The Quest for Tannu Tuva" (1989): video
“I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. There are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask "Why are we here?" I might think about it a little bit, and if I can't figure it out then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 239, from interview in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1981): video
“The third aspect of my subject is that of science as a method of finding things out. This method is based on the principle that observation is the judge of whether something is so or not. All other aspects and characteristics of science can be understood directly when we understand that observation is the ultimate and final judge of the truth of an idea. But "prove" used in this way really means "test," in the same way that a hundred-proof alcohol is a test of the alcohol, and for people today the idea really should be translated as, "The exception tests the rule." Or, put another way, "The exception proves that the rule is wrong." That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing — atoms with curiosity — that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe in limited government. I believe that government should be limited in many ways, and what I am going to emphasize is only an intellectual thing. I don't want to talk about everything at the same time. Let's take a small piece, an intellectual thing.No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's a great game to try to look at the past, at an unscientific era, look at something there, and say have we got the same thing now, and where is it? So I would like to amuse myself with this game. First, we take witch doctors. The witch doctor says he knows how to cure. There are spirits inside which are trying to get out. ... Put a snakeskin on and take quinine from the bark of a tree. The quinine works. He doesn't know he's got the wrong theory of what happens. If I'm in the tribe and I'm sick, I go to the witch doctor. He knows more about it than anyone else. But I keep trying to tell him he doesn't know what he's doing and that someday when people investigate the thing freely and get free of all his complicated ideas they'll learn much better ways of doing it. Who are the witch doctors? Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, of course.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, "What are you going to do about the farm question?" And he knows right away - bang, bang, bang. Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. "What are you going to do on the farm problem?" "Well, I don't know. I used to be a general, and I don't know anything about farming. But it seems to me it must be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say that they know how to solve the farm problem. And it must be a hard problem. So the way I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it, and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it. Now, I can't tell you ahead of time what solution, but I can give you some of the principles I'll try to use - not to make things difficult for individual farmers, if there are any special problems we will have to have some way to take care of them," etc., etc., etc. Now such a man would never get anywhere in this country, I think. It's never been tried, anyway. This is in the attitude of mind of the populace, that they have to have an answer and that a man who gives an answer is better than a man who gives no answer, when the real fact of the matter is, in most cases, it is the other way around. And the result of this of course is that the politician must give an answer. And the result of this is that political promises can never be kept. It is a mechanical fact; it is impossible. The result of that is that nobody believes campaign promises. And the result of that is a general disparaging of politics, a general lack of respect for the people who are trying to solve problems, and so forth. It's all generated from the very beginning (maybe - this is a simple analysis). It's all generated, maybe, by the fact that the attitude of the populace is to try to find the answer instead of trying to find a man who has a way of getting at the answer.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've always been rather very one-sided about the science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it. I didn't have time to learn, and I didn't have much patience for what's called the humanities; even though in the university there were humanities that you had to take, I tried my best to avoid somehow to learn anything and to work on it. It's only afterwards, when I've gotten older and more relaxed that I've spread out a little bit — I've learned to draw, and I read a little bit, but I'm really still a very one-sided person and don't know a great deal. I have a limited intelligence and I've used it in a particular direction.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out", p. 2-3, transcript of BBC TV Horizon interview (1981): video
“The remark which I read somewhere, that science is all right as long as it doesn't attack religion, was the clue I needed to understand the problem. As long as it doesn't attack religion it need not be paid attention to and nobody has to learn anything. So it can be cut off from society except for its applications, and thus be isolated. And then we have this terrible struggle to try to explain things to people who have no reason to want to know. But if they want to defend their own point of view, they will have to learn what yours is a little bit. So I suggest, maybe correctly and perhaps wrongly, that we are too polite.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: from lecture "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society", given at the Galileo Symposium in Italy (1964)
“D’Arline,I adore you, sweetheart. I know how much you like to hear that—but I don’t only write it because you like it—I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you. It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you—almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing. But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and what I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you—I always will love you. I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead—but I still want to comfort and take care of you—and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you—I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that together. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together—or learn Chinese—or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now. No. I am alone without you and you were the "idea-woman" and general instigator of all our wild adventures. When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn't have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true—you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else—but I want to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don’t want to be in my way. I’ll bet that you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I—I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone—but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.My darling wife, I do adore you.I love my wife. My wife is dead.RichP.S. Please excuse my not mailing this—but I don’t know your new address.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Feynman's late wife Arline. The letter is dated 17 October 1946; Arline died of tuberculosis on 16 June 1945.
“The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. … No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it. You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From a letter to physicist Koichi Mano, dated 3 February 1966. Mano was one of Feynman's former doctoral students.
“People 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.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Robert Barro, Nothing Is Sacred (2002), Introduction
“Feynman 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.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Freeman Dyson, in letter to his parents on 8 March 1948, as published in From Eros to Gaia (1992), p. 325
“As soon as I arrived at Cornell, I became aware of Dick as the liveliest personality in our department. In many ways he reminded me of Frank Thompson. Dick was no poet and certainly no Communist. But he was like Frank in his loud voice, his quick mind, his intense interest in all kinds of things and people, his crazy jokes, and his disrespect for authority. I had a room in a student dormitory and sometimes around two o'clock in the morning I would wake up to the sound of a strange rhythm pulsating over the silent campus. That was Dick playing his bongo drums. Dick was also a profoundly original scientist. He refused to take anybody's word for anything. This meant that he was forced to rediscover or reinvent for himself almost the whole of physics. It took him five years of concentrated work to reinvent quantum mechanics. He said that he couldn't understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks, and so he had to begin afresh from the beginning.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (1979), p.54
“Why should we care about Feynman? What was so special about him? Why did he become a public icon, standing with Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking as the Holy Trinity of twentieth-century physics? The public has demonstrated remarkably good taste in choosing its icons. All three of them are genuinely great scientists, with flashes of true genius as well as solid accomplishments to their credit. But to become an icon, it is not enough to be a great scientist. There are many other scientists, not so great as Einstein but greater than Hawking and Feynman, who did not become icons. ... Scientists who become icons must not only be geniuses but also performers, playing to the crowd and enjoying public acclaim. Einstein and Feynman both grumbled about the newspaper and radio reporters who invaded their privacy, but both gave the reporters what the public wanted, sharp and witty remarks that would make good headlines. Hawking in his unique way also enjoys the public adulation that his triumph over physical obstacles has earned for him. I will never forget the joyful morning in Tokyo when Hawking went on a tour of the streets in his wheelchair and the Japanese crowds streamed after him, stretching out their hands to touch his chair. Einstein, Hawking, and Feynman shared an ability to break through the barriers that separated them from ordinary people. The public responded to them because they were regular guys, jokers as well as geniuses. The third quality that is needed for a scientist to become a public icon is wisdom. Besides being a famous joker and a famous genius, Feynman was also a wise human being whose answers to serious questions made sense. To me and to hundreds of other students who came to him for advice, he spoke truth. Like Einstein and Hawking, he had come through times of great suffering, nursing Arline through her illness and watching her die, and emerged stronger. Behind his enormous zest and enjoyment of life was an awareness of tragedy, a knowledge that our time on earth is short and precarious. The public made him into an icon because he was not only a great scientist and a great clown but also a great human being and a guide in time of trouble. Other Feynman books have portrayed him as a scientific wizard and as a storyteller. This collection of letters shows us for the first time the son caring for his father and mother, the father caring for his wife and children, the teacher caring for his students, the writer replying to people throughout the world who wrote to him about their problems and received his full and undivided attention.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Freeman Dyson, in "Wise Man", The New York Review of Books (20 October 2005)
“Weinberg 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 ‘to explain the world’, 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. ‘I didn’t like [Feynman] very much’, 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 Weinberg’s ascent to pre-eminence and could never resist trying to take him down a peg or two. Feynman’s brilliant colleague Murray Gell-Mann, also famous for his aggression, was a much more reasonable critic, Weinberg said: ‘If you set out a good argument, in a bullet-proof way, Murray would leave you alone’.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician's mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber. Hans Bethe, whom Dyson considers to be his teacher, is an “ordinary genius”; so much so that one may gain the erroneous impression that he is not a genius at all. But it was Feynman, only slightly older than Dyson, who captured the young man's imagination.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mark Kac, in his introduction to Enigmas of Chance: An Autobiography (1985), p. xxv
“He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this. He is a man of thoroughly engaging character and personality, extremely clear, extremely normal in all respects, and an excellent teacher with a warm feeling for physics in all its aspects. He has the best possible relations both with the theoretical people of whom he is one, and with the experimental people with whom he works in very close harmony.The reason for telling you about him now is that his excellence is so well known, both at Princeton where he worked before he came here, and to a not inconsiderable number of "big shots" on this project, that he has already been offered a position for the post war period, and will most certainly be offered others. I feel that he would be a great strength for our department, tending to tie together its teaching, its research and its experimental and theoretical aspects. I may give you two quotations from men with whom he has worked. Bethe has said that he would rather lose any two other men than Feynman from this present job, and E.P. Wigner said, "He is a second Dirac. Only this time human.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: J. Robert Oppenheimer, on Feynman's work at Los Alamos, in a letter to Professor R.T. Birge (4 November 1943)
“Feynman's IQ was measured at 124 when he was young — well above average, but far from genius level. So how'd he become fluent in differential equations by the age of 15? Feynman's fascination with the inner workings of the mechanical objects around him couldn't have hurt his left-brain power. As a kid living in Queens, he took apart everything from radios to wagon wheels. This wide-eyed fascination stuck with him; for his entire life, Feynman's colleagues cited his "childlike" approach to physics problems, which bore great results. In fact, a fellow physicist once said that the “Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm” contained three steps: 1. Write down the problem. 2. Think very hard. 3. Write down the answer.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Will Pearson, Mangesh Hattikudur and John Green, Mental Floss: Genius Instruction Manual (2006), chapter: "If It's Too Late For You: The Science Edition", section: "Strategy 1: Let Them Tinker", p. 60
“My strongest memory of [Feynman’s junior quantum mechanics course] is the very beginning, when he started, not with some deep principle of nature, or some experiment, but with a review of Gaussian integrals. Clearly, there was some calculating to be done. I did get over my shyness one time, to ask him about the infinities that appear in quantum field theory (QFT): do they have a physical interpretation? Feynman said ‘no.’ In retrospect, he must have known more, from the work of Wilson, Weinberg, and others. But perhaps it did not satisfy him, since he had not derived it himself. But this question tugged on me for the next eight years, and was my first deep result.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Joseph Polchinski, Memories of a Theoretical Physicist (2017).
“Years ago, when I was an assistant professor of physics at Berkeley, I used to be invited down to Cal Tech about once a year to give a talk. It was usually the low point of my year. In the audience at Cal Tech were two leaders of modern physics, Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman, who interrupted with frequent questions, ruthlessly probing to see if I really knew what I was talking about and had anything new to say. Of the two, Feynman was the more frightening. Gell-Mann was mostly interested in finding out whether there was anything in my talk that he should know about, so he was no problem if I did have anything worth while to say. Feynman was having fun. It is Feynman as a fun-lover - chum of Las Vegas showgirls, cracker of safes at Los Alamos, player of bongo drums - who has won the hearts of the public. I found this side of Feynman hard to take. But, of course, Feynman had a more serious side. He did not do his great work on the quantum theory of fields in a moment between bongo gigs, but over several years of hard intellectual labour. On a more personal level, while helping to design the atomic bomb at Los Alamos during the war, Feynman devotedly nursed his first wife through her tragic and ultimately fatal illness. And Feynman thought deeply about the goals and methods of science, as shown in his 1964 Messenger lectures at Cornell.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Steven Weinberg, "Feynman on God and his granny", Times Higher Education (May 29, 1998)