Physicist Liked to Poke Fun at Human Predicament
Richard P. Feynman was a man who loved a little self-deprecating humor, and often poked fun at the human predicament.
On the Nobel prize: “It’s a pain in the neck. I don’t like honors. . . . The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation of other people using it. Those are the real things. Honors bother, honors are epauletes, honors are uniforms. My papa brought me up this way. I can’t stand it. It hurts me.”
On physics: “One way that’s kind of a fun analogy in trying to get some idea of what we’re doing in trying to understand nature is to imagine that the gods are playing some great game and you don’t know the rules of the game, but you’re allowed to look at the board, at least from time to time.”
After turning down a prestigious position at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study: “They expected me to be wonderful, to offer me a job like this, and I wasn’t wonderful. And therefore I realized a new principle was I’m not responsible for what other people think I am able to do. I don’t have to be good because they think I’m going to be good. And somehow or other I could relax about this and I thought to myself, ‘I haven’t done anything important, and I’m never going to do anything important, but I used to enjoy physics and mathematical things. And because I used to play with it, it was never very important, but I used to do things for the fun of it.’ So I decided I’m going to do things only for the fun of it.”
From a 1955 address before the National Academy of Sciences: “I believe that a scientist looking at non-scientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.”
And these isolated thoughts:
“The same thrill, the same awe and mystery, come again and again when we look at any problem deeply enough. With more knowledge comes deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still.”
“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. There are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions and pass them on.”
“I used to cross the United States in my automobile every summer, trying to make it to the Pacific Ocean. But, for various reasons, I would always get stuck somewhere--usually in Las Vegas.”
