Richard Feynman on Nature

"If an apple is magnified to the size of the earth, then the atoms in the apple are approximately the size of the original apple."

"Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry."

"Light is something like raindrops — each little lump of light is called a photon — and if the light is all one color, all the "raindrops" are the same."

"The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man."

"Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it's a wonderful problem, because it doesn't look so easy."

"There are many interesting phenomena … which involve a mixture of physical phenomena and physiological processes, and the full appreciation of natural phenomena, as we see them, must go beyond physics in the usual sense. We make no apologies for making these excursions into other fields, because the separation of fields, as we have emphasized, is merely a human convenience, and an unnatural thing. Nature is not interested in our separations, and many of the interesting phenomena bridge the gaps between fields."

"There are those who are going to be disappointed when no life is found on other planets. Not I — I want to be reminded and delighted and surprised once again, through interplanetary exploration, with the infinite variety and novelty of phenomena that can be generated from such simple principles. The test of science is its ability to predict. Had you never visited the earth, could you predict the thunderstorms, the volcanoes, the ocean waves, the auroras, and the colorful sunset? A salutary lesson it will be when we learn of all that goes on on each of those dead planets — those eight or ten balls, each agglomerated from the same dust cloud and each obeying exactly the same laws of physics."