The Thammasat University Library has acquired new books by Richard Feynman that may be useful for students at the Faculty of Science and Technology, Thammasat University.

Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning American physicist and professor at the California Institute of Technology, the United States of America.

Feynman captured the popular imagination by his enthusiasm for his hobbies, such as playing the bongo drums, and also his way of expressing himself in lively statements like the following:

• A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.

“The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics,” Nobel Lecture (11 December 1965)

• The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. … No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.

letter to Koichi Mano (3 February 1966); published in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman (2005)

• Do not read so much, look about you and think of what you see there.

letter to Ashok Arora, 4 January 1967, published in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track (2005)

• Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

address “What is Science?”, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966)

• Energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right.

address “What is Science?”, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966)

• Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.

address “What is Science?”, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966)

• The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool… We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.

“Cargo Cult Science”, adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address.

• You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right—at least if you have any experience—because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in. …The inexperienced, the crackpots, and people like that, make guesses that are simple, but you can immediately see that they are wrong, so that does not count. Others, the inexperienced students, make guesses that are very complicated, and it sort of looks as if it is all right, but I know it is not true because the truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.

as quoted by K.C. Cole, Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life (1985)

• What I cannot create, I do not understand.

Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.

on his blackboard at the time of death in February 1988; from a photo in the Caltech archives

• Einstein was a giant. His head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground. But those of us who are not that tall have to choose!

recalled by Carver Mead in Collective Electrodynamics: Quantum Foundations of Electromagnetism (2002)

• Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it.

“The Value of Science,” public address at the National Academy of Sciences (Autumn 1955)

• To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature. … If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.

“The Relation of Mathematics to Physics,” chapter 2

• Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there… I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

“Probability and Uncertainty — the Quantum Mechanical View of Nature,” chapter 6

• In general, we look for a new law by the following process: First we guess it. Then we – now don’t laugh, that’s really true. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what, if this is right, if this law that we guessed is right, to see what it would imply. And then we compare the computation results to nature, or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.
• Nature’s imagination far surpasses our own.

“Seeking New Laws,” chapter 7

• You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. … I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

“The Making of a Scientist,”

• The only way to have real success in science, the field I’m familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good and what’s bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty.

“Afterthoughts”

• I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything. There are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask “Why are we here?” I might think about it a little bit, and if I can’t figure it out then I go on to something else. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.

from interview in “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out” (1981)

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)