A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.
Interpretation
Some truths are intuitive and can be accepted without proof, even if they remain unproven.
This quote by Richard P. Feynman emphasizes the idea that there exists a vast realm of knowledge and truths that we may come to understand through experience or intuition rather than through formal evidence or proof. Feynman's assertion reflects the complexity of understanding reality, suggesting that our grasp of truth is not strictly bound by what can be empirically demonstrated, and that intellectual inquiry may yield insights that transcend proven facts.
In practice
In a lecture on scientific inquiry, one might say, 'As Richard P. Feynman noted, a very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.'
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 may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost certain that there is life somewhere in space.
There's something really beautiful about science, that human beings can ask these questions and can answer them. You can make models of nature and understand how it works.
Japan is a model already to the lie that economic growth is the key to our future. If they can really show an alternative to nukes and fossil fuels, then they will be the poster boy for the renewable energy for the future.
Science has helped us to understand and master ourselves, creating an elevated new form of human life, the wealth and beauty of which cannot be pictured today by the keenest imagination.
It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory-if we look for confirmations. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions... A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or refute it.
The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers.
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