Scientific Progress Is Measured In Units Of

A Good Deal Of My Research In Physics Has Consisted In Not Setting Out To Solve Some Particular Problem, But Simply Examining Mathematical Equations Of A Kind That Physicists Use And Trying To Fit Them Together In An Interesting Way, Regardless Of Any Application That The Work May Have. It Is Simply A Search For Pretty Mathematics. It May Turn Out Later To Have An Application. Then One Has Good Luck. At Age 78.

I Do Not See How A Man Can Work On The Frontiers Of Physics And Write Poetry At The Same Time. They Are In Opposition. In Science You Want To Say Something That Nobody Knew Before, In Words Which Everyone Can Understand. In Poetry You Are Bound To Say ... Something That Everyone Knows Already In Words That Nobody Can Understand. Commenting To Him About The Poetry J. Robert Oppenheimer Wrote.

The Only Object Of Theoretical Physics Is To Calculate Results That Can Be Compared With Experiment... It Is Quite Unnecessary That Any Satisfactory Description Of The Whole Course Of The Phenomena Should Be Given.

As Time Goes On, It Becomes Increasingly Evident That The Rules Which The Mathematician Finds Interesting Are The Same As Those Which Nature Has Chosen.

Well, In The First Place, It Leads To Great Anxiety As To Whether It's Going To Be Correct Or Not ... I Expect That's The Dominating Feeling. It Gets To Be Rather A Fever... At Age 60, When Asked About His Feelings On Discovering The Dirac Equation.