Richard P. Feynman Quotes

Not as a demonstrated natural law, but as a working hypothesis.

Understanding truth is the primary objective of science, not doing good for the world.

Experience by itself is not science.

The reason I spend so much of my time doing science is that the whole point of science is to help people resolve conflicting claims by saying: 'Show me the data.'

The man of science dissects the statement, verifies the facts, and demonstrates connection even where he cannot its purpose.

One of the greatest features of science is that it doesn't matter where you were born, and it doesn't matter what the belief systems of your parents might have been: If you perform the same experiment that someone else did, at a different time and place, you'll get the same result.

Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them.

Of course, not everybody's willing to go out and do the experiments, but for the people who are willing to go out and do that, - if the experiments don't work, then it means it's not science.

The social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the same mathematical underpinnings that had made the 'hard' sciences so brilliantly successful.

We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture.

Most importantly, I agree that the truth of these matters should be determined by interpretation of scientific evidence - experiments, fossil studies and the like.

Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.

Science has been a discipline in which testability, rather than any ecclesiastical authority or philosophical coherence, has been the measure of a scientific idea’s worth

Science must begin with myths and with the criticism of myth.

What scientists believe today may have to be revised in the light of observations made tomorrow, [In that sense] we can describe all our science as "theory.

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.

Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.

Science values static patterns.

Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.

In order that the facts obtained by observation and experiment may be capable of being used in furtherance of our exact and solid knowledge, they must be apprehended and analysed according to some Conceptions which, applied for this purpose, give distinct and definite results, such as can be steadily taken hold of and reasoned from.

The philosophy of science is inherent in the process. This is to say, you think critically, you draw a conclusion based on evidence, but we all pursue discovery based on our observations. That's where science starts.

Experiments are mediators between nature and idea.

Science is something that you have facts. They can be tested. They can be checked. Heterosexual AIDS, another one.

It appears that anything you say about the way that theory and experiment may interact is likely to be correct, and anything you say about the way that theory and experiment must interact is likely to be wrong.

"True science has no belief," says Dr. Fenwick, in Bulwer-Lytton's 'Strange Story;' "true science knows but three states of mind: denial, conviction, and the vast interval between the two, which is not belief, but the suspension of judgment." Such, perhaps, was true science in Dr. Fenwick's days. But the true science of our modern times proceeds otherwise; it either denies point-blank, without any preliminary investigation, or sits in the interim, between denial and conviction, and, dictionary in hand, invents new Graeco-Latin appellations for non-existing kinds of hysteria!