Richard P. Feynman Quotes About Mathematics
-
To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.
→ -
Just as a poet often has license from the rules of grammar and pronunciation, we should like to ask for 'physicists' license from the rules of mathematics in order to express what we wish to say in as simple a manner as possible.
→ -
You see, the chemists have a complicated way of counting: instead of saying "one, two, three, four, five protons", they say, "hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron."
→ -
Everybody who reasons carefully about anything is making a contribution ... and if you abstract it away and send it to the Department of Mathematics they put it in books.
→ -
The truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.
→ -
People who wish to analyze nature without using mathematics must settle for a reduced understanding.
→ -
If there is something very slightly wrong in our definition of the theories, then the full mathematical rigor may convert these errors into ridiculous conclusions.
→ -
There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time ... On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
→ -
Mathematics is not just a language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning.
→ -
Some things that satisfy the rules of algebra can be interesting to mathematicians even though they don't always represent a real situation.
→ -
... it is impossible to explain honestly the beauties of the laws of nature in a way that people can feel, without their having some deep understanding of mathematics. I am sorry, but this seems to be the case.
→ -
This is not very important what I'm doing. I'm just proving something.
→ -
One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much. I love only nature, and I hate mathematicians.
→ -
There is no harm in doubt and skepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made.
→ -
We decided that 'trivial' means 'proved'. So we joked with the mathematicians: We have a new theorem- that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that's proved is trivial.
→ -
If all of mathematics disappeared, physics would be set back by exactly one week.
→ -
Mathematics is a language plus reasoning. It's like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning.
→ -
One cannot understand... the universality of laws of nature, the relationship of things, without an understanding of mathematics. There is no other way to do it.
→ -
Thus we can get the correct answer for the probability of partial reflection by imagining (falsely) that all reflection comes from only the front and back surfaces. In this intuitively easy analysis, the 'front surface' and 'back surface' arrows are mathematical constructions that give us the right answer, whereas .... a more accurate representation of what is really going on: partial reflection is the scattering of light by electrons inside the glass.
→
Related Authors
-
Werner Heisenberg Physicist -
Michio Kaku Physicist -
Wolfgang Pauli Physicist -
Paul Dirac Physicist -
Richard Dawkins Ethologist -
Julian Schwinger Theoretical Physicist -
Albert Einstein Theoretical Physicist -
Erwin Schrodinger Physicist -
Steven Weinberg Theoretical Physicist -
Leonard Susskind Professor -
Sin-Itiro Tomonaga Physicist -
Enrico Fermi Physicist -
John Archibald Wheeler Physicist -
Freeman Dyson Physicist -
Robert B. Leighton Physicist -
Murray Gell-Mann Physicist -
J. Robert Oppenheimer Theoretical Physicist -
Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysicist -
Carl Sagan Astronomer -
Niels Bohr Physicist