Richard Feynman Quotes

• For [Richard] Feynman, the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must match reality. It must match what is already known. Scientific creativity is imagination in a straitjacket.

  James Gleick

  Powerful, Knowledge, Creativity

  James Gleick (2011). “Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman”, p.509, Open Road Media

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• Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, "How did he do it? He must be a genius!"

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Science, People, Giving

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• "Half genius and half buffoon," Freeman Dyson ... wrote. ... [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American-unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science.

  James Gleick

  Science, Energy, Genius

  James Gleick (2011). “Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman”, p.8, Open Road Media

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• Theorists write all the popular books on science: Heinz Pagels, Frank Wilczek, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, et al. And why not? They have all that spare time.

  Leon M. Lederman

  Book, Writing, Science

  Leon M. Lederman, Dick Teresi (1993). “The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, what is the Question?”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The late Richard Feynman, a superb physicist, said once as we talked about the laser that the way to tell a great idea is that, when people hear it, they say, 'Gee, I could have thought of that.'

  Charles Hard Townes

  Ideas, People, Lasers

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• My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorse—and, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the truth of—a proposition that I don't understand. So far, my faith is not unlike religious faith, but I am not in the slightest bit motivated to go to my death rather than recant the formulas of physics. Watch: E doesn't equal mc2, it doesn't, it doesn't! I was lying, so there!

  Daniel Dennett

  Religious, Lying, Watches

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• Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.

  Bill Bryson

  Earth, May, Matter

  Bill Bryson (2014). “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, p.194, Lulu Press, Inc

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• [Richard Feynman] truly believed that if you couldn't explain something simply, you didn't understand it.

  Leonard Susskind

  Motivation, Inspiration, Simply You

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