Richard P. Feynman Quotes

We have learnt through experience that when an electrical ray strikes the surface of an atom, an electron, and in some circumstances a second and even a third electron, can be detached.

The process of radiation may be, and is, continuous - at any rate within limits extending to far smaller quantities than the quantum.

The bubbles are thinner than wavelengths of light.

Some people reflect light, some deflect it, you by some miracle, seem to collect it.

There is no greater mystery to me than that of light traveling through darkness.

I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.

Light refused increases darkness.

Yes, instruction! Light! Light! Everything comes from light, and to everything it returns.

When the light returns to its source, it takes nothing of what it has illuminated.

Black holes are pretty scary when you ponder them. They seem nihilistic, infinitely destructive on an inconceivable scale, notwithstanding the ideas of Hawking radiation.

We might be the holographic image of a two-dimensional structure.

If we conceive all the changes in the physical world as reducible to the motion of atoms, motions generated by means of the fixed nuclear forces of those atoms, the whole of the world could thus be known by means of the natural sciences.

The rotation of the polarization plane is extraordinarily small in all gases, thus also in sodium vapour.

I imagined there would be a way to crack the diffraction barrier. But of course I didn't know exactly how it would work, but I had a gut feeling that there must be something, and so I tried to think about it, to be creative.

Photons have neither morals or visas.

Nobody ever told us all matter radiated. We just assumed it did.

For her PhD, Maria Goeppert Mayer, a theoretical physicist, came up with the idea of multi-photon physics. That means an atom absorbs two or more photons simultaneously.

My PhD project was actually doing something that required a high-intensity laser. It was supposed to work in a way that many, many photons of light would interact with an atom all at the same time.

The first thing I do, after I talk with the director and we agree that I'm going to do the role... My jumping off point is I get a picture of what my 'look' will be. My wardrobe style, my facial hair, glasses and all that kind of stuff.

There's so much energy exchange [in conduction], so you get back a lot, of course, but you also have to give a lot. It's kind of high-energy thing.

The sensitive plate, the gas which is ionised, the fluorescent screen, are in reality receivers, into another kind of energy, chemical energy, ionic energy... luminous energy.

What doesn't transmit light creates its own darkness.

It's actually kind of weird that we can comprehend the law of gravity, or that we can understand quantum mechanics, enough at least to make computers.

'Participant' is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the 'observer' of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can't be done, quantum mechanics says it...May the universe in some sense be 'brought into being' by the participation of those who participate?

Hit it! You have to hit it harder than that. Electrons are timid little things but notional; you have to let them know who’s boss.