Richard Feynman was an American physicist who explored new ways of thinking about quantum mechanics and wrote The Meaning of It All and QED.
Quotes by Richard Feynman in Time One
In reality, it contains the only mystery.
Why can we use mathematics to describe nature without a mechanism behind it? Nobody knows.
A new idea is extremely difficult to think of. It takes a fantastic imagination
[T]he earth’s gravitational field never ends, but peters out very slowly in a precise and careful law, probably to the edges of the Universe.
There should be somewhere in the works some kind of principle that uxles only make wuxles, and never vice versa, and [this] would be the thing that makes the whole phenomena of the world seem to go one way. But we have not found this yet.
Nobody knows any machinery. Nobody can give you any deeper explanation of [the two-slit experiment] than I have given; that is, a description of it.
The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, and that is different from what has been thought of.
[T]he fact that there are rules at all … is a kind of a miracle; that it is possible to find a rule, like the inverse square law of gravitation, is some sort of miracle.
Nobody knows how it can be like that.
The law of inertia has no known origin.
[I]n the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple ….
Nature herself does not seem to know which way the electron is going to go.
Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns....
Each small piece of [Nature’s] fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.
The question, then, is how the thing gets ordered in the first place ….
I believe that the theory that space is continuous is wrong ….
If you calculated something roughly, it would give a reasonable answer. But if you tried to compute it more accurately, you would find that the correction you thought was going to be small … was in fact very large―in fact, it was infinity!
So when some fool physicist gives a lecture at UCLA in 1983 and says, “This is the way it works, and look at how wonderfully similar the theories are,” it’s not because Nature is really similar; it’s because the physicists have only been able to think of the same damn thing, over and over again.
The theory of gravitation … stands isolated from the other theories. Gravitation is, so far, not understandable in terms of other phenomena.
The principle of science, the definition almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific ‘truth’.
