Richard P. Feynman Quotes About Imagination
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The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination, in a tight straightjacket.
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The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. ... They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know.
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What we need is imagination, but imagination in a terrible strait-jacket.
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When the problem [quantum chromodynamics] is finally solved, it will all be by imagination. Then there will be some big thing about the great way it was done. But it's simple -it will all be by imagination, and persistence.
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But see that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
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It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science. It is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition. That is indeed difficult.
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As usual, nature's imagination far surpasses our own, as we have seen from the other theories which are subtle and deep.
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Nature's imagination far surpasses our own.
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I think Nature's imagination is so much greater than man's, she's never gonna let us relax!
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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.
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We are not to tell nature what she’s gotta be... She's always got better imagination than we have.
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The work I have done has, already, been adequately rewarded and recognized. Imagination reaches out repeatedly trying to achieve some higher level of understanding, until suddenly I find myself momentarily alone before one new corner of nature's pattern of beauty and true majesty revealed. That was my reward.
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It requires a much higher degree of imagination to understand the electromagnetic field than to understand invisible angels. ... I speak of the E and B fields and wave my arms and you may imagine that I can see them ... [but] I cannot really make a picture that is even nearly like the true waves.
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The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth." But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations--to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.
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We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.
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The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination in a straightjacket, which is this: that it has to agree with the known laws of physics. ... It requires imagination to think of what's possible, and then it requires an analysis back, checking to see whether it fits, whether its allowed, according to what's known, okay?
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