Enjoyable article, Thanks.

Interestingly, many of the quotations attributed to Richard Feynman were probably never uttered by the famous physicist. For example, it was theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg who delivered the following quip about ornithology during a speech reprinted in the journal “Nature” on December 3, 1987. Weinberg gave the quip an anonymous attribution:

“I’ve heard the remark (although I forget the source) that the philosophy of science is just about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”

No solid evidence that Feynman employed the quip above has been uncovered.

The source of this joke can be traced further back in time to a remark attributed the to influential painter Barnett Newman by 1955 in the magazine “Art in America”:

“Aesthetics is for the artist like Ornithology is for the birds.”