If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.
Interpretation
Complex ideas often require deep understanding, and simplicity might undermine their value.
This quote emphasizes the notion that truly profound ideas and discoveries, especially in fields like science, often possess an inherent complexity that makes them difficult to explain to the general public. It suggests that if a concept can be easily understood by everyone, it may lack the depth and significance required to merit high recognition, such as a Nobel Prize. Feynman's assertion reflects the delicate balance between comprehensibility and profundity in scientific achievement.
In practice
In a lecture about scientific theories, one could use this quote to highlight the depth of research involved.
The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?
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.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.
For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.
Necessity is the mother of all invention.
The revolution which began with the creation of quantum theory and relativity theory can only be finished with their unification into a single theory that can give us a single, comprehensive picture of nature.
Science is only βoneβ of the many instruments people invented to cope with their surroundings. It is not the only one, it is not infallible and it has become too powerful, too pushy and too dangerous to be left on its own.
One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasnβt as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy
It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by the act of learning all the way.
I would like nuclear fusion to become a practical power source. It would provide an inexhaustible supply of energy, without pollution or global warming.
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