“Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings”: did Feynman say it?

Where we looked

This one has a ready-made setting: Feynman, “speaking at a Caltech graduation ceremony”. That phrase travels with the quote almost everywhere, always in the same words and never with a year. As one reader on the Wikiquote discussion page noticed back in 2016, that sameness is itself a warning sign: it looks copied, not checked.

So we started with the graduation ceremony. Feynman’s commencement address at Caltech that is on record is “Cargo Cult Science”, from June 1974, the talk with “you must not fool yourself” in it. We read Caltech’s scan of the printed version, pages 10 to 13. Electrons come up only in the story of Millikan’s oil-drop measurement of the electron’s charge. There is nothing about electrons having feelings.

The earliest print we found

The Wikiquote discussion points to a 2010 paper, and that is where we found it too. Andrew W. Lo and Mark T. Mueller of MIT open their paper on “physics envy” in finance, “WARNING: Physics Envy May Be Hazardous To Your Wealth!”, with this:

“Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! – Richard Feynman, speaking at a Caltech graduation ceremony.”

No year, no source. It’s an opening flourish, not a citation, and it fits their argument perfectly: markets are hard to model because the particles in them, people, have feelings.

We then searched the full text of the Internet Archive’s books for “electrons had feelings”. It found 33 matches, and none dated earlier than the 2010 paper. Almost all are finance books: the line went on to Lo’s own Adaptive Markets (2017) and to Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money, where it’s followed by “Well, investors have feelings.” That is how most people meet it today.

What we can and can’t say

We can’t rule out that Feynman said something like it at some Caltech event. But a quote with no year, no recording and no print before 2010, 22 years after he died, isn’t one we can call his.

Our take

No reliable source found. If you use the line, the honest credit is “often attributed to Feynman”, or better, “as Andrew Lo and Mark Mueller put it, quoting Feynman”, which makes clear where you got it. If someone has a recording or a programme from a Caltech ceremony with Feynman saying it, we’ll update this page.