The Quotable Feynman: Richard Feynman in His Own Words
Richard Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga for their work on quantum electrodynamics, but many readers meet him first as a voice: the bongo-playing, safe-cracking storyteller of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and the Caltech lecturer who made introductory physics feel like an adventure. The Quotable Feynman, edited by his daughter Michelle Feynman and published by Princeton University Press in 2015, gathers that voice into a single volume. Spanish readers know it as La física de las palabras (Crítica, 2016, translated by Joandomènec Ros). The English Kindle edition on Amazon.es is the easiest way to read it in the original.
Author: Richard P. Feynman (1918–1988), edited by Michelle Feynman
Title: The Quotable Feynman
Format: Kindle eBook (English edition), available on Amazon.es
Scope: about 500 quotations drawn from interviews, lectures, letters, articles and books, arranged by theme, with a foreword by Brian Cox, reflections by Yo-Yo Ma, a preface by Michelle Feynman and a chronology of his life
Amazon: amazon.es/dp/B00XD9BWUC (ASIN B00XD9BWUC)
A Life Told in Short Bursts
The quotations are grouped under roughly two dozen headings, and the table of contents reads like a compressed biography: youth, family, art and music, nature, imagination, humour, love, philosophy and religion, the nature of science, the quantum world, mathematics, war, the Challenger, politics, doubt and uncertainty, education, advice, the Nobel Prize and the future. A closing section collects what other people said about him. The sources span his whole career, from the Los Alamos years on the Manhattan Project to the lecture hall at Caltech and, near the end of his life, the Rogers Commission that investigated the loss of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. Some of the passages had never been published before, and around twenty photographs break up the text.
Doubt as a Way of Life
The thread that runs through the whole book is uncertainty. Feynman returns again and again to the idea that scientific knowledge is a collection of statements held with different degrees of confidence, never with absolute certainty, and that the freedom to doubt is what keeps science moving. The publisher chose a line from this territory as the book’s epigraph: “Some people say, ‘How can you live without knowing?’ I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.” The same attitude appears when he talks about experts, about governments that presume to decide what is scientifically true, and about anyone who claims to hold the final answer. Admitting ignorance, for him, was not a weakness but the starting point of every discovery.
The physics is here too, in small, digestible doses. There is the famous thought experiment from The Feynman Lectures on Physics: if all scientific knowledge were destroyed and only one sentence could be passed on, he would choose the atomic hypothesis, the idea that everything is made of atoms in perpetual motion. There are remarks on gravitation and light, on the strangeness of the quantum world, which he cheerfully admitted he did not fully understand either, and on his picture of the positron as an electron travelling backwards in time, an idea he was careful to separate from science-fiction time travel.
Why Read It Now
A book of quotations can easily become a shelf of fortune cookies. This one avoids that trap because the voice is so consistent. Whether Feynman is discussing the Challenger disaster, where he insisted that reality must take precedence over public relations, or teaching, or telling young people to do what they enjoy and stop worrying about what others expect of them, the same habits of mind keep surfacing: check everything, don’t fool yourself, and stay curious. Brian Cox’s foreword explains why physicists still quote him; Yo-Yo Ma’s reflections show the friend behind the legend. Read it a few pages at a time, then turn to the Lectures or Surely You’re Joking for the long form. It also sits well beside Einstein’s Relativity, another physicist explaining his world to non-specialists.
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