Quotes from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“If a law does not work even in one place where it ought to, it is just wrong.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“the only thing that can be predicted is the probability of different events.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern, again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from place to place, with different kinds of atoms arranged in many ways, continually changing, not repeating, how much more marvelously is it possible that this thing might behave? Is it possible that that "thing" walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you, is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement, such that the sheer complexity of it staggers the imagination as to what it can do? When we say we are a pile of atoms, we do not mean we are merely a pile of atoms, because a pile of atoms which is not repeated from one to the other might well have the possibilities which you see before you in the mirror.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“The uncertainty principle “protects” quantum mechanics. Heisenberg recognized that if it were possible to measure the momentum and the position simultaneously with a greater accuracy, the quantum mechanics would collapse. So he proposed that it must be impossible.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“So we see that what looks like a dead, uninteresting thing—a glass of water with a cover, that has been sitting there for perhaps twenty years—really contains a dynamic and interesting phenomenon which is going on all the time. To”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“We cannot do it in this way for two reasons. First, we do not yet know all the basic laws: there is an expanding frontier of ignorance. Second, the correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore,”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“To our eyes, our crude eyes, nothing is changing, but if we could see it a billion times magnified, we would see that from its own point of view it is always changing: molecules are leaving the surface, molecules are coming back.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Why do we see no change? Because just as many molecules are leaving as are coming back! In the long run “nothing happens.” If we then take the top of the vessel off and blow the moist air away, replacing it with dry air, then the number of molecules leaving is just the same as it was before, because this depends on the jiggling of the water, but the number coming back is greatly reduced because there are so many fewer water molecules above the water. Therefore”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“How do we know that there are atoms? By one of the tricks mentioned earlier: we make the hypothesis that there are atoms, and one after the other results come out the way we predict, as they ought to if things are made of atoms. There is also somewhat more direct evidence, a good example of which is the following: The”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“If one cannot see gravitation acting here, he has no soul.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Everything is made of atoms. That is the key hypothesis. The most important hypothesis in all of biology, for example, is that everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics. This”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“You might ask why we cannot teach physics by just giving the basic laws on page one and then showing how they work in all possible circumstances, as we do in Euclidean geometry, where we state the axioms and then make all sorts of deductions. (So,”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“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. This imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in physics: there are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“What will happen at very low temperatures is indicated in Fig. 1-4: the molecules lock into a new pattern which is ice. This particular schematic diagram of ice is wrong because it is in two dimensions, but it is right qualitatively. The interesting point is that the material has a definite place for every atom, and you can easily appreciate that if somehow or other we were to hold all the atoms at one end of the drop in a certain arrangement, each atom in a certain place, then because of the structure of interconnections, which is rigid, the other end miles away (at our magnified scale) will have a definite location. So”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“If a piece of steel or a piece of salt, consisting of atoms one next to the other, can have such interesting properties; if water—which is nothing but these little blobs, mile upon mile of the same thing over the earth—can form waves and foam, and make rushing noises and strange patterns as it runs over cement; if all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible? If”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Is it possible that that “thing” walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you, is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement, such that the sheer complexity of it staggers the imagination as to what it can do? When”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“The difference between solids and liquids is, then, that in a solid the atoms are arranged in some kind of an array, called a crystalline array, and they do not have a random position at long distances; the position of the atoms on one side of the crystal is determined by that of other atoms millions of atoms away on the other side of the crystal.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“This is water vapor, which is always found above liquid water. (There is an equilibrium between the steam vapor and the water which will be described later.) In”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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