"As soon as I arrived at Cornell, I became aware of Dick as the liveliest personality in our department. In many ways he reminded me of Frank Thompson. Dick was no poet and certainly no Communist. But he was like Frank in his loud voice, his quick mind, his intense interest in all kinds of things and people, his crazy jokes, and his disrespect for authority. I had a room in a student dormitory and sometimes around two o'clock in the morning I would wake up to the sound of a strange rhythm pulsating over the silent campus. That was Dick playing his bongo drums. Dick was also a profoundly original scientist. He refused to take anybody's word for anything. This meant that he was forced to rediscover or reinvent for himself almost the whole of physics. It took him five years of concentrated work to reinvent quantum mechanics. He said that he couldn't understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks, and so he had to begin afresh from the beginning."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesNobel laureates in PhysicsNobel laureates from the United StatesPhysicists from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (1979), p.54
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Related Quotes
"What the students are taught ...now ...about physics ...The numbers are much bigger... so enormous you can't count th…"
"That's called monochromatic light, light of one color. ...I'm going to discuss all my phenomena for a while with ligh…"
"One of the most important things in this 'guess — compute consequences — compare with experiment' business is to know…"
"[T]he Mayan[s]... had a scheme for predicting... when Venus was a morning... or . ...[T]hey had a rule for... making …"
"[I]n the years we have developed enormous abilities in mathematics and it takes a long time to train the students, an…"
"I don't know about philosophy of Mayans. We have very little information due to the efficiency of the Spanish es and.…"
"The most important thing I found out from [my father] is that if you asked any question and pursued it deeply enough,…"
"I don't like honors. ... I've already got the prize: the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in …"
"That was the beginning and the idea seemed so obvious to me that I fell deeply in love with it. And, like falling in …"
"If we make an instrument that can detect light, that's as sensitive as it can possibly be made. ...This ...is called …"