Genius Quotes

“Maybe that’s why young people make success. They don’t know enough. Because when you know enough it’s obvious that every idea that you have is no good.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there.”
― Richard Feynman, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“The adult Feynman asked: If all scientific knowledge were lost in a cataclysm, what single statement would preserve the most information for the next generations of creatures?”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists’ understanding of mutations in DNA.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“riches have never made people great but love does it every day—we”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“When people speak of the borderline between genius and madness, why is it so evident what they mean?”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“It was the first antiparticle, vindicating a prediction of Dirac’s, based on little more than a faith in the loveliness of his equations.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of knowing. The alternative to uncertainty is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of knowing. The alternative to uncertainty is authority, against which science had fought for centuries. “Great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance,” he jotted on a sheet of notepaper one day. “... teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Feynman did have an extraordinary affinity for his friends’ children. He would entertain them with gibberish, or with juggling tricks, or with what sounded to Dyson like a one-man percussion band. He could enthrall them merely by borrowing someone’s eyeglasses and slowly putting them on, taking them off, and putting them on. Or he would engage them in conversation. He once asked Henry Bethe, “Did you know there are twice as many numbers as numbers?” “No, there are not!” Henry said. Feynman said he could prove it. “Name a number.” “One million.” Feynman said, “Two million.” “Twenty-seven!” Feynman said, “Fifty-four,” and kept on countering with the number that was twice Henry’s, until suddenly Henry saw the point. It was his first real encounter with infinity.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“He suspected that when Feynman wanted to know what an electron would do under given circumstances he merely asked himself, “If I were an electron, what would I do?”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Philosophy set knowledge adrift; physics anchored knowledge to reality.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“By the time Carl was four, Feynman was actively lobbying against a first-grade science book proposed for California schools. It began with pictures of a mechanical wind-up dog, a real dog, and a motorcycle, and for each the same question: “What makes it move?” The proposed answer—“Energy makes it move”—enraged him.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“They could see from the start that Wilson’s idea sat somewhere near the border between possible and hopeless—but on which side of the border?”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Our memories, too, blend the immediate past with the anticipation of the soon to be, and a living amalgam of these—not some infinitesimal pointlike instant forever fleeing out of reach—is our now.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“They meant to bring back together, as a unified subject, the discipline that had been subdivided for undergraduates into mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and optics.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“The spirit of Edison, not Einstein, still governed their image of the scientist. Perspiration, not inspiration. Mathematics was unfathomable and unreliable.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“He despised philosophy as soft and unverifiable. Philosophers “are always on the outside making stupid remarks,” he said, and the word he pronounced philozawfigal was a mocking epithet, but his influence was philosophical anyway, particularly for younger physicists.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Feynman resented the polished myths of most scientific history, submerging the false steps and halting uncertainties under a surface of orderly intellectual progress, but he created a myth of his own.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“The military actively encouraged, when it did not finance directly, the giant cyclotrons, betatrons, synchrotrons, and synchrocyclotrons, any one of which consumed more steel and electricity than a prewar experimentalist could have imagined. These were not so much crumbs from the weapons-development table as they were blank checks from officials persuaded that physics worked miracles. Who could say what was impossible? Free energy? Time travel? Antigravity? In 1954 the secretary of the army invited Feynman to serve as a paid consultant on an army scientific advisory panel, and he agreed, traveling to Washington for several days in November. At a cocktail party after one session, a general confided that what the army really needed was a tank that could use sand as fuel.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones,” wrote the poet Richard Wilbur, and even in the atomic era it was hard to see how the physicist’s swarming clouds of particles could give rise to the hard-edged world of everyday sight and touch.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“The shuttle’s solid rocket boosters were made in sections, assembled one atop another at the launch site. The joints holding the sections together had to be sealed to prevent the escape of hot gasesfrom inside the rocket. Pairs of O-rings-a quarter-inch thickspanned the 37-foot circumference. The pressure of the gas was supposed to wedge them tightly into the joints, creating the seal.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“(Feynman, to the surprise and displeasure of some of his humanities colleagues, had taken her side; he had spent many pleasant hours in her office reading aloud such poems as Theodore Roethke’s “I Knew a Woman”: “I measure time by how a body sways....”) Like most men in physics, Feynman had known a few women as professional colleagues and believed that he had treated them, individually, as equals. They tended to agree. What more, he wondered, could anyone ask?”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“He believed that it was not certainty but freedom from certainty that empowered people to make judgments about right and wrong: knowing that they could never be more”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“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.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of knowing. The alternative to uncertainty is authority, against which science had fought for centuries. “Great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance,” he jotted on a sheet of notepaper one day. “... teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“This was the world according to Feynman. No scientist since Newton had so ambitiously and so unconventionally set down the full measure of his knowledge of the world—his own knowledge and his community’s. With intensive editing by other physicists, chiefly Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, the lectures became the famous “red books”—the three-volume Feynman Lectures on Physics. Colleges and universities worldwide tried to adopt them as textbooks and then, inevitably, gave them up for more manageable and less radical alternatives. Unlike true textbooks, however, Feynman’s volumes continued to sell steadily a generation later.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Quantum electrodynamics had become a singular triumph of theoretical physics. The computations that had taken Feynman and Schwinger hours or weeks to accomplish in their first and second approximations could now be extended to many deeper levels of accuracy, using electronic computers and hundreds of Feynman diagrams to organize the work.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman