Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.
Interpretation
Sometimes, ideas that seem contradictory can be understood through detailed study and experimentation.
This quote by Richard P. Feynman highlights the importance of rigorous analysis and experimentation in scientific inquiry. It emphasizes that what initially appears to be a paradox may actually reveal underlying truths when examined thoroughly. Feynman suggests that the complexities of concepts in physics, as demonstrated by the works of Einstein and Bohr, should be approached with an open mind and a commitment to understanding, as deeper insights can emerge from careful investigation.
In practice
During a lecture on scientific methodology, you could use this quote to emphasize the importance of experimenting with seemingly contradictory ideas.
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.
We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there.
It is the first duty of a hypothesis to be intelligible.
Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about "any" things or about "some" things, without specifications of definite particular things.
If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we're ever likely to do that is by going into space.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
The general struggle for existence of animate beings is not a struggle for raw materials, these for organisms are air water & soil, all abundantly available, nor for energy which exists in plenty in the sun and any hot body in the form of heat, but rather a struggle for entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth.
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