Science is uncertain.
Today’s brains are yesterday’s mashed potatoes.
Some people think Wheeler’s gotten crazy in his later years, but he’s always been crazy.
People who wish to analyze nature without using mathematics must settle for a reduced understanding.
The problem of creating something new, but which is consistent with everything which has been seen before, is one of extreme difficulty.
What we need is imagination, but imagination in a terrible strait-jacket.
Science is a process for learning about nature in which competing ideas about how the world works are measured against observations.
Another thing I must point out is that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong.
I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something. How careful you have to be about checking your experiments. How easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something.
In its efforts to learn as much as possible about nature, modern physics has found that certain things can never be “known” with certainty. Much of our knowledge must always remain uncertain. The most we can know is in terms of probabilities.
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.
We can deduce, often, from one part of physics like the law of gravitation, a principle which turns out to be much more valid than the derivation.
You know how it always is, every new idea, it takes a generation or two until it becomes obvious that there’s no real problem. I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.
If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 1 in 100,000, I know he’s full of crap.
Strange! I don’t understand how it is that we can write mathematical expressions and calculate what the thing is going to do without being able to picture it.
What is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.
Few people realize the number of things that are possible.
I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere, I can say to myself, “At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something. I’m making some contribution.” It’s just psychological.
I am not interested in what today’s mathematicians find interesting.
You can always recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.