A feeling for it
Richard Feynman, some quotes and info
Feynman received the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work, with Julian Schwinger and Shin’ichiro Tomonaga, in remaking the theory of quantum electrodynamics. His invention of ‘Feynman diagrams’ – pictorial representations of particle interactions – revolutionized the field. He is also considered by many to be the father of nanotechnology; in a 1959 talk entitled, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” he proposed a challenge to the scientific community to start thinking on a very small scale, personally offering two prizes. A series of lectures on introductory physics that Feynman gave at Caltech between 1961–63 was edited and published as “The Feynman Lectures of Physics,” which is thought to be the most popular physics book ever written.
“There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e - the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!” ― Richard P. Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” ― Richard P. Feynman
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” ― Richard P. Feynman
“I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!” ― Richard Feynman
