"Well, we're getting a little philosophical and serious, ok? Let's go back to what we're doing. One day we look at a map and this capital is K-Y-Z-Y-L and we decided it would be fun to go there because it's so obscure and peculiar. It's a game. It's not serious. It doesn't involve some deep philosophical point of view about authority or anything. It's just the fun of having an adventure to try to go to a land that we'd never heard of, that we knew was an independent country once, no longer an independent country, find out what it's like. And discover as we went along that nobody went there for a long time and it's isolated made it more interesting. But, you know, many explorers liked to go to places that are unusual. And, it's only for the fun of it. I don't go for this philosophical interpretation of "our deeper understanding of what we’re doing." We haven't any deep understanding of what we're doing. If we tried to understand what we're doing, we'd go nutty."
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
p. 236, from interview two weeks before his death in "The Quest for Tannu Tuva" (1989): video
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 …"