We're always, by the way, in fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don't understand the conclusions. After we've checked them enough, we're okay.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of exploring and questioning the unknown in scientific inquiry.
Richard P. Feynman highlights the essence of fundamental physics as a discipline driven by curiosity and the pursuit of understanding. He suggests that scientists must continuously investigate and scrutinize concepts that are not fully understood until they can confidently assert their validity, indicating that uncertainty is a natural part of the scientific process. This reflects a broader theme in science where inquiry and validation lead to greater knowledge and understanding.
In practice
In a TED talk on scientific exploration, one might quote Feynman to inspire curiosity in the audience.
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.
There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.
While I'm a big fan of science fiction, especially as rendered in expensive Hollywood blockbusters, it's the real universe that calls to me.
If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.
I am not accustomed to saying anything with certainty after only one or two observations.
I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.
The essence of mathematics lies precisely in its freedom.
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