Richard Phillips Feynman (1918–88) was an American physicist, Nobel laureate, best-selling author, and a member of the presidential commission that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
Born in 1918 to Jewish parents in Queens, New York, Feynman graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1939 and received his doctorate from Princeton University in 1942. He was a member of the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. When the first bomb was test-detonated in 1945, he was delighted about the project’s triumph, but soon the real-world consequences of this new weapon began to distress him. Feynman spent much of his academic career at the California Institute of Technology. He was awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with two other scientists for their independent work on quantum electrodynamics.
Feynman attracted extensive attention during the much-televised Rogers Commission hearings on the Challenger space shuttle accident in 1986. Discouraged by witnesses’ ambiguous answers and bureaucratic delays, he conducted a spur-of-the-moment experiment that proved a critical argument of the investigation. He dunked a piece of the rocket booster’s O-ring material into a cup of ice water and quickly showed that the O-ring material lost all resiliency at low temperatures.
Feynman died in 1988 after an eight-year battle with abdominal cancer. He was a popular and energetic lecturer and was celebrated for his insatiable curiosity, gentle wit, modesty, brilliant mind, and playful temperament. His famous book of reminiscences, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, was on the New York Times best-seller list for 14 weeks in 1985.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Richard Feynman
I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, but if I can’t figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don’t have to know an answer…. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.
—Richard Feynman
Topics: Life
The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.
—Richard Feynman
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy — and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter.
—Richard Feynman
A great deal more is known than has been proved.
—Richard Feynman
God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand.
—Richard Feynman
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
—Richard Feynman
Topics: Intelligence
There is no harm in doubt and skepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made.
—Richard Feynman
Topics: Discovery
Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? Our poets do not write about it; our artists do not try to portray this remarkable thing. The value of science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.
—Richard Feynman
Topics: Science
I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there.
—Richard Feynman
Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn’t be worth the Nobel Prize.
—Richard Feynman
What I cannot create, I do not understand.
—Richard Feynman
I don’t know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.
—Richard Feynman
We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.
—Richard Feynman
Topics: Science
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
—Richard Feynman
Topics: Technology, Nature
I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
—Richard Feynman
Topics: Learning
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.
—Richard Feynman
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
—Richard Feynman
Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
—Richard Feynman
In this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another.
—Richard Feynman
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?
—Richard Feynman
When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next.
—Richard Feynman
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
—Richard Feynman
Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.
—Richard Feynman
Topics: Philosophy
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