Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Interpretation
Feynman suggests that human behavior is often irrational, which is a more likely explanation for reports of UFOs than actual extraterrestrial encounters.
In this quote, Richard P. Feynman highlights the idea that the irrationalities inherent in human perception and behavior are more plausible explanations for strange phenomena, such as sightings of flying saucers, than the existence of intelligent alien life. He points to the complexities and quirks of human intelligence, suggesting that our interpretations of the world are often flawed and influenced by our biases and misconceptions, rather than reliable evidence of extraterrestrial interventions.
In practice
In a scientific debate about the possibilities of extraterrestrial life.
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.
Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eye.
The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head.
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it's this world or nothing. That's a very powerful perception.
No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.
It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.
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