"Seeking New Laws"

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.

Another thing that will happen is that if all is known– ultimately, if it turns out all is known, it gets very dull– the biggest philosophy and the careful attention to all these things that I've been talking about will have gradually disappeared. The philosophers, who are always on the outside, making stupid remarks, will be able to close in. Beca... See more

We must, and we should, and we always do extend as far as we can beyond what we already know, those things, those ideas that we've already obtained. We extend the ideas beyond their range. Dangerous, yes, uncertain, yes. But the only way to make progress.

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

I must say that in this age, people are experiencing a delight, a tremendous delight. The delight that you get when you guess how nature will work in a new situation, never seen before. From experiments and information in a certain range, you can guess what's going to happen in the region where no one has ever explored before. It's a little differe... See more

This kind of game, of roughly guessing at family relations and so on, is illustrative of a kind of preliminary sparring which one does with nature, before really discovering some deep and fundamental law. Before you get the deeper discoveries, examples are very important in the previous history of science. For instance, Mendeleev's discovery of the... See more

What we need is imagination. But imagination is a terrible straitjacket. We have to find a new view of the world that has to agree with everything that's known, but disagree in its predictions, some way. Otherwise it's not interesting. And in that disagreement, agree with nature.

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

The inexperienced and crackpots and people like that will make guesses that are simple, all right, but you can immediately see that they're wrong. That doesn't count. And others, the inexperienced students, make guesses that are very complicated. And it sort of looks like it's all right. But I know that's not true, because the truth always turns ou... 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.