It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil – which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.
Pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are alright; you can talk to them and try to help them out. But pompous fools – guys who are fools and covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus – THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!
All the time you’re saying to yourself, ‘I could do that, but I won’t,’ — which is just another way of saying that you can’t.
But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.
Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
All the time you’re saying to yourself, ‘I could do that, but I won’t,’ — which is just another way of saying that you can’t.
Quantum mechanics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is – absurd.
I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.
Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.The other students in the class interrupt me: We *know* all that!Oh, I say, you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you’ve had four years of biology. They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
I happen to know this, and I happen to know that, and maybe I know that;and I work everything out from there. Tomorrow I may forgot that this is true, but remember that something else is true, so I can reconstruct it all again. I am never quite sure of where I am supposed to begin or where I am supposed to end. I just remember enough all the time so that as the memory fades and some of the pieces fall out I can put the thing back together again every day
What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school… It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see my physics students don’t understand it… That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does.
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
I have no responsibility to live up to what others expect of me. That’s their mistake, not my failing.
We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.
I couldn’t claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys–but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.
If you thought that science was certain – well, that is just an error on your part.
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil – which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is … If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
If you thought you were trying to find out more about it because you’re gonna get an answer to some deep philosophical question…you may be wrong! It may be that you can’t get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature. But my interest in science is to simply find out about the world.
Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
It is always good to know which ideas cannot be checked directly, but it is not necessary to remove them all. It is not true that we can pursue science completely by using only those concepts which are directly subject to experiment.
Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.