Six Easy Pieces Quotes

“We just have to take what we see, and then formulate all the rest of our ideas in terms of our actual experience.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia be silent?”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“The supernova of 1987 had just been discovered, and Feynman was very excited about it. He said, “Tycho Brahe had his supernova, and Kepler had his. Then there weren’t any for 400 years.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Another way to remember their size is this: if an apple is magnified to the size of the earth, then the atoms in the apple are approximately the size of the original apple.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“This is one of the most fantastic pieces of detective work that has ever been done—organic chemistry. To discover the arrangement of the atoms in these enormously complicated arrays the chemist looks at what happens when he mixes two different substances together. The physicist could never quite believe that the chemist knew what he was talking about when he described the arrangement of the atoms. For about twenty years it has been possible, in some cases, to look at such molecules (not quite as complicated as this one, but some which contain parts of it) by a physical method, and it has been possible to locate every atom, not by looking at colors, but by measuring where they are. And lo and behold!, the chemists are almost always correct.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Science is a people-driven activity like all human endeavor, and just as subject to fashion and whim.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“For all substances tried, the masses and weights are exactly proportional within 1 part in 1,000,000,000, or less. This is a remarkable experiment.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“It can be done.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“All proteins are not enzymes, but all enzymes are proteins.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“In fact, there seem to be just four kinds of interaction between particles which, in the order of decreasing strength, are the nuclear force, electrical interactions, the beta-decay interaction, and gravity.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“The fact that a particle has zero mass means, in a way, that it cannot be at rest. A photon is never at rest; it is always moving at 186,000 miles a second.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Just as the electrical interaction can be connected to a particle, a photon, Yukawa suggested that the forces between neutrons and protons also have a field of some kind, and that when this field jiggles it behaves like a particle.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“In quantum electrodynamics, two numbers are put in and most of the other numbers in the world are supposed to come out. The two numbers that are put in are called the mass of the electron and the charge of the electron.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“At the present time no exceptions are found to the quantum-electrodynamic laws outside the nucleus, and there we do not know whether there is an exception because we simply do not know what is going on in the nucleus.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“If they stopped moving, we would know where they were and that they had zero motion, and that is against the uncertainty principle.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“What keeps the electrons from simply falling in? This principle: If they were in the nucleus, we would know their position precisely, and the uncertainty principle would then require that they have a very large (but uncertain) momentum, i.e., a very large kinetic energy.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“How do we know that there are atoms?”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“So the liquid gradually cools if it evaporates.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Hence, if you wish to evaporate water turn on the fan!”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“If we increase the pressure, we can make it solidify.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“If we heat the water, the jiggling increases and the volume between the atoms increases, and if the heating continues there comes a time when the pull between the molecules is not enough to hold them together and they do fly apart and become separated from one another.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“A true law is: if an object moves with a speed of less than one hundred miles a second the mass is constant to within one part in a million. In some such approximate form this is a correct law.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“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”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“If a piece of steel or a piece of salt, consisting of atoms one next to the other, can have such interesting properties; if water—which is nothing but these little blobs, mile upon mile of the same thing over the earth—can form waves and foam, and make rushing noises and strange patterns as it runs over cement; 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”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Everything is made of atoms. That is the key hypothesis. The most important hypothesis in all of biology, for example, is that everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics. This”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“How do we know that there are atoms? By one of the tricks mentioned earlier: we make the hypothesis that there are atoms, and one after the other results come out the way we predict, as they ought to if things are made of atoms. There is also somewhat more direct evidence, a good example of which is the following: The”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Why do we see no change? Because just as many molecules are leaving as are coming back! In the long run “nothing happens.” If we then take the top of the vessel off and blow the moist air away, replacing it with dry air, then the number of molecules leaving is just the same as it was before, because this depends on the jiggling of the water, but the number coming back is greatly reduced because there are so many fewer water molecules above the water. Therefore”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“This is water vapor, which is always found above liquid water. (There is an equilibrium between the steam vapor and the water which will be described later.) In”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher