“It is to be emphasized that no matter how many [amplitude] arrows we draw, add, or multiply, our objective is to calculate a single final arrow for the event. Mistakes are often made by physics students at first because they do not keep this important point in mind. They work for so long analyzing events involving a single photon that they begin to think that the arrow is somehow associated with the photon”

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

rather than with the event
Source: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), p. 75-76

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is to be emphasized that no matter how many [amplitude] arrows we draw, add, or multiply, our objective is to calcul…" by Richard Feynman?

Richard Feynman181

American theoretical physicist 1918–1988

Related quotes

“But if the arrow is straight
And the point is slick
It can pierce through dust no matter how thick”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964), Restless Farewell

“I longed to return to that bloody riverbank, to throw myself in the path of the final arrow, to die ignorant, and so, in love. Better to be killed by an arrow than by the words of the one I most trusted.”

Robin Wasserman (1978) American writer of speculative fiction for young people

Source: The Book of Blood and Shadow

“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

“Life invented it first, Zoe thought, like so many other things. Like eyes: Turning photon impacts into neurochemical events with such subtlety that a frog can target a fly and a man can admire a rose.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 25 (p. 194)

“The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 454
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Context: "Everything is already there in...." How does it come about that [an] arrow points? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? — "No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." — That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.