Richard Feynman: Quotes about understanding

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.”

Richard Feynman

on his blackboard at the time of death in February 1988; from a photo in the Caltech archives http://archives.caltech.edu/pictures/1.10-29.jpg

Understanding

“God was always invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand.”

Richard Feynman

interview published in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1988) edited by Paul C. W. Davies and Julian R. Brown, p. 208-209
Context: God was always invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.

God , Understanding

“The remark which I read somewhere, that science is all right as long as it doesn't attack religion, was the clue I needed to understand the problem. As long as it doesn't attack religion it need not be paid attention to and nobody has to learn anything. So it can be cut off from society except for its applications, and thus be isolated. And then we have this terrible struggle to try to explain things to people who have no reason to want to know. But if they want to defend their own point of view, they will have to learn what yours is a little bit. So I suggest, maybe correctly and perhaps wrongly, that we are too polite.”

Richard Feynman book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

from lecture "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society", given at the Galileo Symposium in Italy (1964)
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999)

People , Religion , Understanding , Problem

“There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.”

Richard Feynman book What Do You Care What Other People Think?

"The Making of a Scientist," p. 11: video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEwUwWh5Xs4&t=26s
What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988)
Context: I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. … There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.

Flowers , Understanding , Question , Knowledge

“While I am describing to you how Nature works, you won't understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that.”

Richard Feynman book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

Source: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), p. 10

Way , Understanding , Nature

“Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them.”

Richard Feynman

Rogers Commission Report (1986)
Context: Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty of the projects. 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, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

World , Understanding , Reality

“Will you understand what I'm going to tell you? … No, you're not going to be able to understand it. … That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.”

Richard Feynman book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

Source: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), p. 9

Understanding

“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

Richard Feynman book The Character of Physical Law

Variant: I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
Source: The Character of Physical Law (1965), chapter 6, “Probability and Uncertainty — the Quantum Mechanical View of Nature,” p. 129

Understanding , Thinking

“You will have to brace yourselves for this — not because it is difficult to understand, but because it is absolutely ridiculous: All we do is draw little arrows on a piece of paper — that’s all!”

Richard Feynman book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

Source: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), p. 24

Understanding , Drawing

“It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to π, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out — without putting it in secretly!”

Richard Feynman book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

On the numerical value of α, the fine-structure constant, p. 129
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985)

God , Understanding , Nature , Dance

“There were certain things I didn't like, such as tipping. I thought we should be paid more, and not have to have any tips. But when I proposed that to the boss, I got nothing but laughter. She told everybody, "Richard doesn't want his tips, hee, hee, hee; he doesn't want his tips, ha, ha, ha." The world is full of this kind of dumb smart-alec who doesn't understand anything.”

Richard Feynman

Part 1: "From Rockaway to MIT", "String Beans", p. 25
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

World , Understanding , Laughter

“Well, we’re getting a little philosophical and serious, ok? Let’s go back to what we’re doing. One day we look at a map and this capital is K-Y-Z-Y-L and we decided it would be fun to go there because it’s so obscure and peculiar. It’s a game. It’s not serious. It doesn't involve some deep philosophical point of view about authority or anything. It’s just the fun of having an adventure to try to go to a land that we’d never heard of, that we knew was an independent country once, no longer an independent country, find out what it’s like. And discover as we went along that nobody went there for a long time and it’s isolated made it more interesting. But, you know, many explorers liked to go to places that are unusual. And, it’s only for the fun of it. I don’t go for this philosophical interpretation of "our deeper understanding of what we’re doing."”

Richard Feynman

We haven’t any deep understanding of what we’re doing. If we tried to understand what we’re doing, we’d go nutty.
Source: No Ordinary Genius (1994), p. 236, from interview two weeks before his death in "The Quest for Tannu Tuva" (1989): video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn4_40hAAr0&t=51m49s

Game , Understanding , Time , Country

“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

Part 1: "From Rockaway to MIT", "Who Stole the Door?", p. 36-37
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

People , Way , Understanding , Knowledge

“A person talks in such generalities that everyone can understand him and it's considered to be some deep philosophy. However, I would like to be very rather more special and I would like to be understood in an honest way, rather than in a vague way.”

Richard Feynman book The Character of Physical Law

Source: The Character of Physical Law (1965), chapter 1, “The Law of Gravitation,” p. 13: video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3mhkYbznBk&t=7m53s

Way , Understanding , Personality

“My mother … had a wonderful sense of humor, and I learned from her that the highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.”

Richard Feynman book What Do You Care What Other People Think?

"The Making of a Scientist," p. 19
What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988)

Understanding , Sense , Laughter , Learning

“To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature. … If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.”

Richard Feynman book The Character of Physical Law

Source: The Character of Physical Law (1965), chapter 2, “The Relation of Mathematics to Physics,” p. 58

Beauty , Feeling , Mathematics , Understanding

“It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing — atoms with curiosity — that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.”

Richard Feynman book The Meaning of It All

lecture II: "The Uncertainty of Values"
The Meaning of It All (1999)

Life , God , History , Understanding

“When you're thinking about something that you don't understand, you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion. It's a very difficult and unhappy business. And so most of the time you're rather unhappy, actually, with this confusion. You can't penetrate this thing. Now, is the confusion's because we're all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid working against this, trying to figure out [how] to put the two sticks together to reach the banana and we can't quite make it, the idea? And I get this feeling all the time that I'm an ape trying to put two sticks together, so I always feel stupid. Once in a while, though, the sticks go together on me and I reach the banana.”

Richard Feynman

Video interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lytxafTXg6c dated 1963

Stupidity , Feeling , Idea , Understanding

“The electron is a theory we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real.”

Richard Feynman

Part 2: "The Princeton Years", "A Map of the Cat?", p. 70
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

Way , Understanding , Nature

“The third aspect of my subject is that of science as a method of finding things out. This method is based on the principle that observation is the judge of whether something is so or not. All other aspects and characteristics of science can be understood directly when we understand that observation is the ultimate and final judge of the truth of an idea. But "prove" used in this way really means "test," in the same way that a hundred-proof alcohol is a test of the alcohol, and for people today the idea really should be translated as, "The exception tests the rule." Or, put another way, "The exception proves that the rule is wrong."”

Richard Feynman book The Meaning of It All

That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong.
lecture I: "The Uncertainty of Science"
The Meaning of It All (1999)

People , Alcohol , Truth , Way