You see, one thing is, 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.
There was an interesting early relationship between physics and biology in which biology helped physics in the discovery of the conservation of energy, which was first demonstrated by Mayer in connection with the amount of heat taken in and given out by a living creature.
I said, “There’s a long tradition behind life in India that comes from a religion and philosophy that is thousands of years old. And although these people are not in India, they still pass on those traditions about what’s important in life – trying to build for the future and supporting their children in the effort – which have come down to them for centuries.
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.
I USED to cross the United States in my automobile every summer, trying to make it to the Pacific Ocean. But, for various reasons, I would always get stuck somewhere – usually in Las Vegas.
Religion gives inspiration to act well. Not only that, it gives inspiration to the arts and to many other activities of human beings.
That night, Brazilian TV audiences saw the director of the Center for Physical Research welcome the Visiting Professor from the United States, but little did they know that the subject of their conversation was finding a girl to spend the night with!
Because “extra-difficult popular physics books” scare publishers half to death. Hawking famously said that every equation halves the sale of a popular book.
With quantum physics, who needs drugs?
It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
Being the word of God connects the ethical and metaphysical aspects of religion. And finally, that also inspires the inspiration, because if you are working for God and obeying God’s will, you are in some way connected to the universe, your actions have a meaning in the greater world, and that is an inspiring aspect.
Murray Gell-Mann countered in the following weeks by giving a beautiful set of six lectures concerning the linguistic relations of all the languages of the world.
Another 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.
I’ve very often made mistakes in my physics by thinking the theory isn’t as good as it really is, thinking that there are lots of complications that are going to spoil it – an attitude that anything can happen, in spite of what you’re pretty sure should happen.
The supernova of 1987 had just been discovered, and Feynman was very excited about it. He said, “Tycho Brahe had his supernova, and Kepler had his. Then there weren’t any for 400 years.
He detested hierarchy and enjoyed the friendship of people in all walks of life. He was, like Shakespeare, an actor with a talent for comedy.
Your situation is just an accident of life.
Only with quantitative observations can one arrive at quantitative relationships, which are the heart of physics.
Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities. Yet science has not collapsed.
A physical understanding is a completely unmathematical, imprecise, and inexact thing, but absolutely necessary for a physicist.