"Seeking New Laws"

I must also point out to you that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong. If the guess that you make is poorly expressed and rather vague, and the method that you used for figuring out the consequences is rather vague, you're not sure, and you just say I think everything is because it's all due to moogles, and moogles do this and that, more or less.... See more

It's necessary to make science useful, although it's uncertain. It's only useful if it makes predictions. It's only useful if it tells you about some experiment that hasn't been done. It's no good if it just tells you what just went on. So it's necessary to extend the ideas beyond where they've been tested.

So the only way that it seems to me that it can happen– that what can happen in the future first– either that everything becomes known, that all the laws become known. That would mean that after you had enough laws, you could compute consequences. And they would always agree with experiment, which would be the end of the line. Or it might happen th... See more

Well, that's the way that it is scientific. It is scientific only to say what's more likely and less likely, and not to be proving all the time, possible and impossible.

And it's a very strong tendency of people to say against some idea, if someone comes up with an idea, and says let's suppose the world is this way. And you say to him, well, what would you get for the answer for such and such a problem? And he says, I haven't developed it far enough. And you say, well, we have already developed it much further. We ... See more

If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you've made a great discovery. Even if it doesn't agree with nature. It's darn hard, it's almost impossible, but not quite impossible, to find another theory, which agrees with experiments over the en... See more

You can recognize truth by beauty and simplicity.

we always try to guess the most likely explanation, keeping in the back of the mind the fact that if it doesn't work, then we must discuss the other possibilities.

As soon as any real, definite idea is substituted, it becomes almost immediately apparent that it doesn't work.