Richard P. Feynman Quotes About Certainty
-
You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things... It doesn't frighten me.
→ -
We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.
→ -
We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty.
→ -
We find that the statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known with different degrees of certainty: "It is very much more likely that so and so is true than that it is not true".
→ -
If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives.
→ -
Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.
→ -
In its efforts to learn as much as possible about nature, modern physics has found that certain things can never be "known" with certainty. Much of our knowledge must always remain uncertain. The most we can know is in terms of probabilities.
→ -
I do believe that there is a conflict between science and religion ... the spirit or attitude toward the facts is different in religion from what it is in science. The uncertainty that is necessary in order to appreciate nature is not easily correlated with the feeling of certainty in faith.
→
Related Authors
-
Werner Heisenberg Physicist -
Michio Kaku Physicist -
Wolfgang Pauli Physicist -
Paul Dirac Physicist -
Richard Dawkins Ethologist -
Julian Schwinger Theoretical Physicist -
Albert Einstein Theoretical Physicist -
Erwin Schrodinger Physicist -
Steven Weinberg Theoretical Physicist -
Leonard Susskind Professor -
Sin-Itiro Tomonaga Physicist -
Enrico Fermi Physicist -
John Archibald Wheeler Physicist -
Freeman Dyson Physicist -
Robert B. Leighton Physicist -
Murray Gell-Mann Physicist -
J. Robert Oppenheimer Theoretical Physicist -
Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysicist -
Carl Sagan Astronomer -
Niels Bohr Physicist