Richard P. Feynman Quotes

Physics as we know it will be over in six months.

We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.

We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature. The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.

My present work concerns the problems connected with the theory of elementary particles, the theory of gravitation and cosmology and I shall be glad if I can manage to make some contribution to these important branches of science.

I'm a fan of supersymmetry, largely because it seems to be the only route by which gravity can be brought into the scheme. It's probably not even enough, but it's a way forward to get gravity involved. If you have supersymmetry, then there are more of these particles. That would be my favourite outcome.

As accelerators reach higher and higher energies, we may need a new Standard Model, or, at least, today's may need to be modified, but that's the way science operates.

The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level.

It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about we can discuss.

The chief difficulty of modern theoretical physics resides not in the fact that it expresses itself almost exclusively in mathematical symbols, but in the psychological difficulty of supposing that complete nonsense can be seriously promulgated and transmitted by persons who have sufficient intelligence of some kind to perform operations in differential and integral calculus.

Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious it ceases to be of absorbing interest to scientists. Almost all things scientists think and dream about are mysterious.

There is now a feeling that the pieces of physics are falling into place, not because of any single revolutionary idea or because of the efforts of any one physicist, but because of a flowering of many seeds of theory, most of them planted long ago.

We are not at the end but at the beginning of a new physics. But whatever we find, there will always be new horizons continually awaiting us.

Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign.

There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end ofthe search for the ultimate laws of nature.

We know there must be new physics. For example, we cannot explain what dark matter is.

From a scientific point of view, our mission is to seek answers to the fundamental questions about the universe. Many are open - we don't know about dark matter, which accounts for a quarter of the universe's matter, nor do we know why there's antimatter.

I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.

Very much, string theory is simply a work in progress. What we are inching toward every day are predictions that within the realm of current technology we hope to test. It's not like we're working on a theory that is permanently beyond experiment. That would be philosophy.

I've always really been into science, and in the last five years I've gotten into theoretical physics and the origins of the universe.

As for the forces, electromagnetism and gravity we experience in everyday life. But the weak and strong forces are beyond our ordinary experience. So in physics, lots of the basic building blocks take 20th- or perhaps 21st-century equipment to explore.

In the history of physics, every time we've looked beyond the scales and energies we were familiar with, we've found things that we wouldn't have thought were there.

Chemistry seems to be pretty much nailed down, and biology gains ground all the time. But physics seems to be mired in idle rumination. They think a Big Bang started the universe, but they don't really know.

I came to realise that string theory offers us the best hope of finding a unified theory of all matter and forces.

By having simplified what is known, physicists have been led into realms which as yet are anything but simple. That at some time, they, too, will appear as simple consequences of a theory of which no one has yet dreamed is not a statement of fact.It is a statement of faith.

To become a theoretical physicist ... you need to have a passionate love affair with the universe.