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.
When the wrong question is being asked, it usually turns out to be because the right question is too difficult. Scientists ask questions they can answer. That is, it is often the case that the operations of a science are not a consequence of the problematic of that science, but that the problematic is induced by the available means.
Remember that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.
What is mathematics? It is only a systematic effort of solving puzzles posed by nature.
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
It is not a simple matter to differentiate unsuccessful from successful experiments. . . .[Most] work that is finally successful is the result of a series of unsuccessful tests in which difficulties are gradually eliminated.
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