Six Easy Pieces Quotes

“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“I think, however, that there isn't any solution to this problem of education other than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher --- a situation in which the student discusses the ideas, thinks about the things, and talks about the things.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“If a law does not work even in one place where it ought to, it is just wrong.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“the only thing that can be predicted is the probability of different events.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“The uncertainty principle “protects” quantum mechanics. Heisenberg recognized that if it were possible to measure the momentum and the position simultaneously with a greater accuracy, the quantum mechanics would collapse. So he proposed that it must be impossible.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern, again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from place to place, with different kinds of atoms arranged in many ways, continually changing, not repeating, how much more marvelously is it possible that this thing might behave? Is it possible that that "thing" walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you, is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement, such that the sheer complexity of it staggers the imagination as to what it can do? When we say we are a pile of atoms, we do not mean we are merely a pile of atoms, because a pile of atoms which is not repeated from one to the other might well have the possibilities which you see before you in the mirror.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“So we see that what looks like a dead, uninteresting thing—a glass of water with a cover, that has been sitting there for perhaps twenty years—really contains a dynamic and interesting phenomenon which is going on all the time. To”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“We cannot do it in this way for two reasons. First, we do not yet know all the basic laws: there is an expanding frontier of ignorance. Second, the correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore,”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Nobody yet knows how dogs work.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Perhaps, and perhaps not.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“What are the nuclei made of, and how are they held together? It is found that the nuclei are held together by enormous forces. When these are released, the energy released is tremendous compared with chemical energy, in the same ratio as the atomic bomb explosion is to a TNT explosion, because, of course, the atomic bomb has to do with changes inside the nucleus, while the explosion of TNT has to do with the changes of the electrons on the outside of the atoms.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“In the years before 1920, the picture of space as a three-dimensional space, and of time as a separate thing, was changed by Einstein, first into a combination which we call space-time, and then still further into a curved space-time to represent gravitation.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“there is an expanding frontier of ignorance.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.” (Gibbon)”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“This specialty of reducing deep ideas to simple, understandable terms is evident throughout The Feynman Lectures on Physics, but nowhere more so than in his treatment of quantum mechanics.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“if all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible? If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern, again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from place to place, with different kinds of atoms arranged in many ways, continually changing, not repeating, how much more marvelously is it possible that this thing might behave? Is it possible that that “thing” walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you, is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement, such that the sheer complexity of it staggers the imagination as to what it can do? When we say we are a pile of atoms, we do not mean we are merely a pile of atoms, because a pile of atoms which is not repeated from one to the other might well have the possibilities which you see before you in the mirror.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“If one cannot see gravitation acting here, he has no soul.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“To our eyes, our crude eyes, nothing is changing, but if we could see it a billion times magnified, we would see that from its own point of view it is always changing: molecules are leaving the surface, molecules are coming back.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.” But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations—to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess. This imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in physics: there are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“You might ask why we cannot teach physics by just giving the basic laws on page one and then showing how they work in all possible circumstances, as we do in Euclidean geometry, where we state the axioms and then make all sorts of deductions. (So,”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“If we look at the moons of Jupiter we can understand everything about the way they move around that planet. Incidentally, there was once a certain difficulty with the moons of Jupiter that is worth remarking on. These satellites were studied very carefully by Roemer, who noticed that the moons sometimes seemed to be ahead of schedule, and sometimes behind. (One can find their schedules by waiting a very long time and finding out how long it takes on the average for the moons to go around.) Now they were ahead when Jupiter was particularly close to the earth and they were behind when Jupiter was farther from the earth. This would have been a very difficult thing to explain according to the law of gravitation—it would have been, in fact, the death of this wonderful theory if there were no other explanation. If a law does not work even in one place where it ought to, it is just wrong. But the reason for this discrepancy was very simple and beautiful: it takes a little while to see the moons of Jupiter because of the time it takes light to travel from Jupiter to the earth. When Jupiter is closer to the earth the time is a little less, and when it is farther from the earth, the time is more. This is why moons appear to be, on the average, a little ahead or a little behind, depending on whether they are closer to or farther from the earth. This phenomenon showed that light does not travel instantaneously, and furnished the first estimate of the speed of light. This was done in 1656.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“all things are made of atoms, and that everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jigglings and wigglings of atoms.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“the correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore,”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“All things, even ourselves, are made of fine-grained, enormously strongly interacting plus and minus parts, all neatly balanced out.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“This was a tremendous idea—that to find something out, it is better to perform some careful experiments than to carry on deep philosophical arguments.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“What is this law of gravitation? It is that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force which for any two bodies is proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher