The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.
Interpretation
Feynman suggests that our understanding of physics is incomplete and lacks critical foundational knowledge.
In this quote, Richard P. Feynman compares the state of physics to a game of chess where players are unaware of some crucial rules, implying that while we have made significant progress in understanding the universe, there are still fundamental principles and laws that remain elusive or unknown. This analogy highlights the complexity of scientific inquiry and encourages continued exploration and learning in the field of physics.
In practice
In a lecture on the current challenges in physics, one could use this quote to emphasize the need for deeper research.
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.
Has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? . . . No other human institution comes close.
String theory is not the only theory that can accommodate extra dimensions, but it certainly is the one that really demands and requires it.
The fact that mathematics does such a good job of describing the Universe is a mystery that we don't understand. And a debt that we will probably never be able to repay.
In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.
... chemistry is a trade for people without enough imagination to be physicists.
I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in interest in financial history.
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