First you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong. That's all there is to it.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of empirical evidence in validating hypotheses in science.
Richard P. Feynman articulates a fundamental principle of the scientific method: the necessity of testing guesses against actual experience. No theory or hypothesis, regardless of its elegance or the prestige of its creator, holds validity if it fails to align with observed reality. The quote underscores that the scientific process is grounded in verification through evidence, challenging the notion that intelligence or reputation can substitute for empirical correctness.
In practice
During a science presentation, you can quote Feynman to emphasize the importance of testing hypotheses.
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.
It may be conceit, but I believe the subject will interest the public, and I am sure that the views are original.
Yet if anyone believes that the earth rotates, surely he will hold that its motion is natural, not violent.
Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.
Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision.
It now appears that the way the universe began can indeed be determined, using imaginary time.
The gravest threat faced by the world is of an extremist group getting hold of nuclear weapons or materials.
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