When I found out that 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 story had been getting pretty complicated – it was getting out of hand.
Every instrument that has been designed to be sensitive enough to detect weak light has always ended up discovering that the same thing: light is made of particles.
To test whether you have learned an idea or a definition, rephrase what you just learned without using the new word.
Victory usually goes to those green enough to underestimate the monumental hurdles they are facing.
I don’t think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.
As you know, a theory in physics is not useful unless it is able to predict underlying effects which we would otherwise expect.
Once we were driving in the midwest and we pulled into a McDonald’s. Someone came up to me and asked me why I have Feynman diagrams all over my van. I replied, “Because I am Feynman!” The young man went, “Ahhhhh!”
It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.
The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way someday.
Nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it’s a wonderful problem, because it doesn’t look so easy.
A person talks in such generalities that everyone can understand him and it’s considered to be some deep philosophy. However, I would like to be very rather more special and I would like to be understood in an honest way, rather than in a vague way.
This is the key of modern science and is the beginning of the true understanding of nature. This idea. That to look at the things, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained, may lie a clue to one or another of a possible theoretical interpretation.
Therefore psychologically we must keep all the theories in our heads, and every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics.
People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don’t give us a chance to tell them anything about what we know pretty well. They always want to know the things we don’t know.
No one really understands quantum mechanics.
The scale of light can be described by numbers called the frequency and as the numbers get higher, the light goes from red to blue to ultraviolet. We can’t see ultraviolet light, but it can affect photographic plates. It’s still light only the number is different.
Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.
Progress in science comes when experiments contradict theory.
The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things...
That is the logical tight-rope on which we have to walk if we wish to interpret nature.