* OCR: "the real caterpillar".
--------
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
by Richard P. Feynman
"Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!"
A Bantam Book
published by arrangement with
W.W. Norton Company, Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
W.W. Norton edition published February 1985
9 printings through March 1985
A selection of Book-of-the-Month Club/Science April 1985 and
Macmillan Book Clubs April 1985.
Portions of this book appeared in Science '84 magazine December
1984 and in Discover magazine November 1984.
Bantam edition February 1986
Cover photo by Floyd Clark / Caltech.
All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1985 by Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or
any other means, without permission.
For information address: W.W. Norton Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Ave., New
York, NY 10110.
ISBN 0-553-25649-1
Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada
--------
The stories in this book were collected intermittently and informally
during seven years of very enjoyable drumming with Richard Feynman. I have
found each story by itself to be amusing, and the collection taken together
to be amazing: That one person could have so many wonderfully crazy things
happen to him in one life is sometimes hard to believe. That one person
could invent so much innocent mischief in one life is surely an inspiration!
Ralph Leighton
--------
I hope these won't be the only memoirs of Richard Feynman. Certainly
the reminiscences here give a true picture of much of his character -- his
almost compulsive need to solve puzzles, his provocative mischievousness,
his indignant impatience with pretension and hypocrisy, and his talent for
one-upping anybody who tries to one-up him! This book is great reading:
outrageous, shocking, still warm and very human.
For all that, it only skirts the keystone of his life: science. We see
it here and there, as background material in one sketch or another, but
never as the focus of his existence, which generations of his students and
colleagues know it to be. Perhaps nothing else is possible. There may be no
way to construct such a series of delightful stories about himself and his
work: the challenge and frustration, the excitement that caps insight, the
deep pleasure of scientific understanding that has been the wellspring of
happiness in his life.
I remember when I was his student how it was when you walked into one
of his lectures. He would be standing in front of the hall smiling at us all
as we came in, his fingers tapping out a complicated rhythm on the black top
of the demonstration bench that crossed the front of the lecture hall. As
latecomers took their seats, he picked up the chalk and began spinning it
rapidly through his fingers in a manner of a professional gambler playing
with a poker chip, still smiling happily as if at some secret joke. And then
-- still smiling -- he talked to us about physics, his diagrams and
equations helping us to share his understanding. It was no secret joke that
brought the smile and the sparkle in his eye, it was physics. The joy of
physics! The joy was contagious. We are fortunate who caught that infection.
Now here is your opportunity to be exposed to the joy of life in the style
of Feynman.
Albert R. Hibbs
Senior Member of the Technical Staff,
Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
California Institute of Technology
--------
Some facts about my timing: I was born in 1918 in a small town called
Far Rockaway, right on the outskirts of New York, near the sea. I lived
there until 1935, when I was seventeen. I went to MIT for four years, and
then I went to Princeton, in about 1939. During the time I was at Princeton
I started to work on the Manhattan Project, and I ultimately went to Los
Alamos in April 1943, until something like October or November 1946, when I
went to Cornell.
I got married to Arlene in 1941, and she died of tuberculosis while I
was at Los Alamos, in 1946.
I was at Cornell until about 1951. I visited Brazil in the summer of
1949 and spent half a year there in 1951, and then went to Caltech, where
I've been ever since.
I went to Japan at the end of 1951 for a couple of weeks, and then
again, a year or two later, just after I married my second wife, Mary Lou.
I am now married to Gweneth, who is English, and we have two children,
Carl and Michelle.
R. P. F.
--------
--------
He Fixes Radios by Thinking!
When I was about eleven or twelve I set up a lab in my house. It
consisted of an old wooden packing box that I put shelves in. I had a
heater, and I'd put in fat and cook french-fried potatoes all the time. I
also had a storage battery, and a lamp bank.
To build the lamp bank I went down to the five-and-ten and got some
sockets you can screw down to a wooden base, and connected them with pieces
of bell wire. By making different combinations of switches -- in series or
parallel -- I knew I could get different voltages. But what I hadn't
realized was that a bulb's resistance depends on its temperature, so the
results of my calculations weren't the same as the stuff that came out of
the circuit. But it was all right, and when the bulbs were in series, all
half-lit, they would gloooooooooow, very pretty -- it was great!
I had a fuse in the system so if I shorted anything, the fuse would
blow. Now I had to have a fuse that was weaker than the fuse in the house,
so I made my own fuses by taking tin foil and wrapping it around an old
burnt-out fuse. Across my fuse I had a five-watt bulb, so when my fuse blew,
the load from the trickle charger that was always charging the storage
battery would light up the bulb. The bulb was on the switchboard behind a
piece of brown candy paper (it looks red when a light's behind it) -- so if
something went off, I'd look up to the switchboard and there would be a big
red spot where the fuse went. It was fun!
I enjoyed radios. I started with a crystal set that I bought at the
store, and I used to listen to it at night in bed while I was going to
sleep, through a pair of earphones. When my mother and father went out until
late at night, they would come into my room and take the earphones off --
and worry about what was going into my head while I was asleep.
About that time I invented a burglar alarm, which was a very
simple-minded thing: it was just a big battery and a bell connected with
some wire. When the door to my room opened, it pushed the wire against the
battery and closed the circuit, and the bell would go off.
One night my mother and father came home from a night out and very,
very quietly, so as not to disturb the child, opened the door to come into
my room to take my earphones off. All of a sudden this tremendous bell went
off with a helluva racket -- BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG!!! I jumped out of bed
yelling, "It worked! It worked!"
I had a Ford coil -- a spark coil from an automobile -- and I had the
spark terminals at the top of my switchboard. I would put a Raytheon RH
tube, which had argon gas in it, across the terminals, and the spark would
make a purple glow inside the vacuum -- it was just great!
One day I was playing with the Ford coil, punching holes in paper with
the sparks, and the paper caught on fire. Soon I couldn't hold it any more
because it was burning near my fingers, so I dropped it in a metal
wastebasket which had a lot of newspapers in it. Newspapers burn fast, you
know, and the flame looked pretty big inside the room. I shut the door so my
mother -- who was playing bridge with some friends in the living room --
wouldn't find out there was a fire in my room, took a magazine that was
lying nearby, and put it over the wastebasket to smother the fire.
After the fire was out I took the magazine off, but now the room began
to fill up with smoke. The wastebasket was still too hot to handle, so I got
a pair of pliers, carried it across the room, and held it out the window for
the smoke to blow out.
But because it was breezy outside, the wind lit the fire again, and now
the magazine was out of reach. So I pulled the flaming wastebasket back in
through the window to get the magazine, and I noticed there were curtains in
the window -- it was very dangerous!
Well, I got the magazine, put the fire out again, and this time kept
the magazine with me while I shook the glowing coals out of the wastepaper
basket onto the street, two or three floors below. Then I went out of my
room, closed the door behind me, and said to my mother, "I'm going out to
play," and the smoke went out slowly through the windows. I also did some
things with electric motors and built an amplifier for a photo cell that I
bought that could make a bell ring when I put my hand in front of the cell.
I didn't get to do as much as I wanted to, because my mother kept putting me
out all the time, to play. But I was often in the house, fiddling with my
lab.
I bought radios at rummage sales. I didn't have any money, but it
wasn't very expensive -- they were old, broken radios, and I'd buy them and
try to fix them. Usually they were broken in some simple-minded way -- some
obvious wire was hanging loose, or a coil was broken or partly unwound -- so
I could get some of them going. On one of these radios one night I got WACO
in Waco, Texas -- it was tremendously exciting!
On this same tube radio up in my lab I was able to hear a station up in
Schenectady called WGN. Now, all of us kids -- my two cousins, my sister,
and the neighborhood kids -- listened on the radio downstairs to a program
called the Eno Crime Club -- Eno effervescent salts -- it was the thing!
Well, I discovered that I could hear this program up in my lab on WGN one
hour before it was broadcast in New York! So I'd discover what was going to
happen, and then, when we were all sitting around the radio downstairs
listening to the Eno Crime Club, I'd say, "You know, we haven't heard from
so-and-so in a long time. I betcha he comes and saves the situation."
Two seconds later, bup-bup, he comes! So they all got excited about
this, and I predicted a couple of other things. Then they realized that
there must be some trick to it -- that I must know, somehow. So I owned up
to what it was, that I could hear it upstairs the hour before.
You know what the result was, naturally. Now they couldn't wait for the
regular hour. They all had to sit upstairs in my lab with this little creaky
radio for half an hour, listening to the Eno Crime Club from Schenectady.
We lived at that time in a big house; it was left by my grandfather to
his children, and they didn't have much money aside from the house. It was a
very large, wooden house, and I would run wires all around the outside, and
had plugs in all the rooms, so I could always listen to my radios, which
were upstairs in my lab. I also had a loudspeaker -- not the whole speaker,
but the part without the big horn on it.
One day, when I had my earphones on, I connected them to the
loudspeaker, and I discovered something: I put my finger in the speaker and
I could hear it in the earphones; I scratched the speaker and I'd hear it in
the earphones. So I discovered that the speaker could act like a microphone,
and you didn't even need any batteries. At school we were talking about
Alexander Graham Bell, so I gave a demonstration of the speaker and the
earphones. I didn't know it at the time, but I think it was the type of
telephone he originally used.
So now I had a microphone, and I could broadcast from upstairs to
downstairs, and from downstairs to upstairs, using the amplifiers of my
rummage-sale radios. At that time my sister Joan, who was nine years younger
than I was, must have been about two or three, and there was a guy on the
radio called Uncle Don that she liked to listen to. He'd sing little songs
about "good children," and so on, and he'd read cards sent in by parents
telling that "Mary So-and-so is having a birthday this Saturday at 25
Flatbush Avenue."
One day my cousin Francis and I sat Joan down and said that there was a
special program she should listen to. Then we ran upstairs and we started to
broadcast: "This is Uncle Don. We know a very nice little girl named Joan
who lives on New Broadway; she's got a birthday coming -- not today, but
such-and-such. She's a cute girl." We sang a little song, and then we made
music: "Deedle leet deet, doodle doodle loot doot; deedle deedle leet,
doodle loot doot doo..." We went through the whole deal, and then we came
downstairs: "How was it? Did you like the program?"
"It was good," she said, "but why did you make the music with your
mouth?"
One day I got a telephone call: "Mister, are you Richard Feynman?"
"Yes."
"This is a hotel. We have a radio that doesn't work, and would like it
repaired. We understand you might be able to do something about it."
"But I'm only a little boy," I said. "I don't know how --"
"Yes, we know that, but we'd like you to come over anyway."
It was a hotel that my aunt was running, but I didn't know that. I went
over there with -- they still tell the story -- a big screwdriver in my back
pocket. Well, I was small, so any screwdriver looked big in my back pocket.
I went up to the radio and tried to fix it. I didn't know anything
about it, but there was also a handyman at the hotel, and either he noticed,
or I noticed, a loose knob on the rheostat -- to turn up the volume -- so
that it wasn't turning the shaft. He went off and filed something, and fixed
it up so it worked.
The next radio I tried to fix didn't work at all. That was easy: it
wasn't plugged in right. As the repair jobs got more and more complicated, I
got better and better, and more elaborate. I bought myself a milliammeter in
New York and converted it into a voltmeter that had different scales on it
by using the right lengths (which I calculated) of very fine copper wire. It
wasn't very accurate, but it was good enough to tell whether things were in
the right ballpark at different connections in those radio sets.
The main reason people hired me was the Depression. They didn't have
any money to fix their radios, and they'd hear about this kid who would do
it for less. So I'd climb on roofs to fix antennas, and all kinds of stuff.
I got a series of lessons of ever-increasing difficulty. Ultimately I got
some job like converting a DC set into an AC set, and it was very hard to
keep the hum from going through the system, and I didn't build it quite
right. I shouldn't have bitten that one off, but I didn't know.
One job was really sensational. I was working at the time for a
printer, and a man who knew that printer knew I was trying to get jobs
fixing radios, so he sent a fellow around to the print shop to pick me up.
The guy is obviously poor -- his car is a complete wreck -- and we go to his
house which is in a cheap part of town. On the way, I say, "What's the
trouble with the radio?"
He says, "When I turn it on it makes a noise, and after a while the
noise stops and everything's all right, but I don't like the noise at the
beginning."
I think to myself: "What the hell! If he hasn't got any money, you'd
think he could stand a little noise for a while."
And all the time, on the way to his house, he's saying things like, "Do
you know anything about radios? How do you know about radios -- you're just
a little boy!"
He's putting me down the whole way, and I'm thinking, "So what's the
matter with him? So it makes a little noise."
But when we got there I went over to the radio and turned it on. Little
noise? My God! No wonder the poor guy couldn't stand it. The thing began to
roar and wobble --WUH BUH BUH BUH BUH -- A tremendous amount of noise. Then
it quieted down and played correctly. So I started to think: "How can that
happen?"
I start walking back and forth, thinking, and I realize that one way it
can happen is that the tubes are heating up in the wrong order -- that is,
the amplifier's all hot, the tubes are ready to go, and there's nothing
feeding in, or there's some back circuit feeding in, or something wrong in
the beginning part -- the RF part -- and therefore it's making a lot of
noise, picking up something. And when the RF circuit's finally going, and
the grid voltages are adjusted, everything's all right.
So the guy says, "What are you doing? You come to fix the radio, but
you're only walking back and forth!"
I say, "I'm thinking!" Then I said to myself, "All right, take the
tubes out, and reverse the order completely in the set." (Many radio sets in
those days used the same tubes in different places -- 212's, I think they
were, or 212-A's.) So I changed the tubes around, stepped to the front of
the radio, turned the thing on, and it's as quiet as a lamb: it waits until
it heats up, and then plays perfectly -- no noise.
When a person has been negative to you, and then you do something like
that, they're usually a hundred percent the other way, kind of to
compensate. He got me other jobs, and kept telling everybody what a
tremendous genius I was, saying, "He fixes radios by thinking!" The whole
idea of thinking, to fix a radio -- a little boy stops and thinks, and
figures out how to do it -- he never thought that was possible.
Radio circuits were much easier to understand in those days because
everything was out in the open. After you took the set apart (it was a big
problem to find the right screws), you could see this was a resistor, that's
a condenser, here's a this, there's a that; they were all labeled. And if
wax had been dripping from the condenser, it was too hot and you could tell
that the condenser was burned out. If there was charcoal on one of the
resistors you knew where the trouble was. Or, if you couldn't tell what was
the matter by looking at it, you'd test it with your voltmeter and see
whether voltage was coming through. The sets were simple, the circuits were
not complicated. The voltage on the grids was always about one and a half or
two volts and the voltages on the plates were one hundred or two hundred,
DC. So it wasn't hard for me to fix a radio by understanding what was going
on inside, noticing that something wasn't working right, and fixing it.
Sometimes it took quite a while. I remember one particular time when it
took the whole afternoon to find a burned-out resistor that was not
apparent. That particular time it happened to be a friend of my mother, so I
had time -- there was nobody on my back saying, "What are you doing?"
Instead, they were saying, "Would you like a little milk, or some cake?" I
finally fixed it because I had, and still have, persistence. Once I get on a
puzzle, I can't get off. If my mother's friend had said, "Never mind, it's
too much work," I'd have blown my top, because I want to beat this damn
thing, as long as I've gone this far. I can't just leave it after I've found
out so much about it. I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is
the matter with it in the end.
That's a puzzle drive. It's what accounts for my wanting to decipher
Mayan hieroglyphics, for trying to open safes. I remember in high school,
during first period a guy would come to me with a puzzle in geometry, or
something which had been assigned in his advanced math class. I wouldn't
stop until I figured the damn thing out -- it would take me fifteen or
twenty minutes. But during the day, other guys would come to me with the
same problem, and I'd do it for them in a flash. So for one guy, to do it
took me twenty minutes, while there were five guys who thought I was a
super-genius.
So I got a fancy reputation. During high school every puzzle that was
known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people
had invented, I knew. So when I got to MIT there was a dance, and one of the
seniors had his girlfriend there, and she knew a lot of puzzles, and he was
telling her that I was pretty good at them. So during the dance she came
over to me and said, "They say you're a smart guy, so here's one for you: A
man has eight cords of wood to chop..."
And I said, "He starts by chopping every other one in three parts,"
because I had heard that one.
Then she'd go away and come back with another one, and I'd always know
it.
This went on for quite a while, and finally, near the end of the dance,
she came over, looking as if she was going to get me for sure this time, and
she said, "A mother and daughter are traveling to Europe..."
"The daughter got the bubonic plague." She collapsed! That was hardly
enough clues to get the answer to that one: It was the long story about how
a mother and daughter stop at a hotel and stay in separate rooms, and the
next day the mother goes to the daughter's room and there's nobody there, or
somebody else is there, and she says, "Where's my daughter?" and the hotel
keeper says, "What daughter?" and the register's got only the mother's name,
and so on, and so on, and there's a big mystery as to what happened. The
answer is, the daughter got bubonic plague, and the hotel, not wanting to
have to close up, spirits the daughter away, cleans up the room, and erases
all evidence of her having been there. It was a long tale, but I had heard
it, so when the girl started out with, "A mother and daughter are traveling
to Europe," I knew one thing that started that way, so I took a flying
guess, and got it.
We had a thing at high school called the algebra team, which consisted
of five kids, and we would travel to different schools as a team and have
competitions. We would sit in one row of seats and the other team would sit
in another row. A teacher, who was running the contest, would take out an
envelope, and on the envelope it says "forty-five seconds." She opens it up,
writes the problem on the blackboard, and says, "Go!" -- so you really have
more than forty-five seconds because while she's writing you can think. Now
the game was this: You have a piece of paper, and on it you can write
anything, you can do anything. The only thing that counted was the answer.
If the answer was "six books," you'd have to write "6," and put a big circle
around it. If what was in the circle was right, you won; if it wasn't, you
lost.
One thing was for sure: It was practically impossible to do the problem
in any conventional, straightforward way, like putting "A is the number of
red books, B is the number of blue books," grind, grind, grind, until you
get "six books." That would take you fifty seconds, because the people who
set up the timings on these problems had made them all a trifle short. So
you had to think, "Is there a way to see it?" Sometimes you could see it in
a flash, and sometimes you'd have to invent another way to do it and then do
the algebra as fast as you could. It was wonderful practice, and I got
better and better, and I eventually got to be the head of the team. So I
learned to do algebra very quickly, and it came in handy in college. When we
had a problem in calculus, I was very quick to see where it was going and to
do the algebra -- fast.
Another thing I did in high school was to invent problems and theorems.
I mean, if I were doing any mathematical thing at all, I would find some
practical example for which it would be useful. I invented a set of
right-triangle problems. But instead of giving the lengths of two of the
sides to find the third, I gave the difference of the two sides. A typical
example was: There's a flagpole, and there's a rope that comes down from the
top. When you hold the rope straight down, it's three feet longer than the
pole, and when you pull the rope out tight, it's five feet from the base of
the pole. How high is the pole?
I developed some equations for solving problems like that, and as a
result I noticed some connection -- perhaps it was sin^2 + cos^2 = 1 -- that
reminded me of trigonometry. Now, a few years earlier, perhaps when I was
eleven or twelve, I had read a book on trigonometry that I had checked out
from the library, but the book was by now long gone. I remembered only that
trigonometry had something to do with relations between sines and cosines.
So I began to work out all the relations by drawing triangles, and each one
I proved, by myself. I also calculated the sine, cosine, and tangent of
every five degrees, starting with the sine of five degrees as given, by
addition and half-angle formulas that I had worked out.
A few years later, when we studied trigonometry in school, I still had
my notes and I saw that my demonstrations were often different from those in
the book. Sometimes, for a thing where I didn't notice a simple way to do
it, I went all over the place till I got it. Other times, my way was most
clever -- the standard demonstration in the book was much more complicated!
So sometimes I had 'em beat, and sometimes it was the other way around.
While I was doing all this trigonometry, I didn't like the symbols for
sine, cosine, tangent, and so on. To me, "sin f" looked like s times i times
n times f! So I invented another symbol, like a square root sign, that was a
sigma with a long arm sticking out of it, and I put the f underneath. For
the tangent it was a tau with the top of the tau extended, and for the
cosine I made a kind of gamma, but it looked a little bit like the square
root sign.
Now the inverse sine was the same sigma, but left-to-right reflected so
that it started with the horizontal line with the value underneath, and then
the sigma. That was the inverse sine, NOT sin^-1 f -- that was crazy! They
had that in books! To me, sin^-1 meant 1/sine, the reciprocal. So my symbols
were better.
I didn't like f(x) -- that looked to me like f times x. I also didn't
like dy/dx -- you have a tendency to cancel the d's -- so I made a different
sign, something like an & sign. For logarithms it was a big L extended to
the right, with the thing you take the log of inside, and so on.
I thought my symbols were just as good, if not better, than the regular
symbols -- it doesn't make any difference what symbols you use -- but I
discovered later that it does make a difference. Once when I was explaining
something to another kid in high school, without thinking I started to make
these symbols, and he said, "What the hell are those?" I realized then that
if I'm going to talk to anybody else, I'll have to use the standard symbols,
so I eventually gave up my own symbols.
I had also invented a set of symbols for the typewriter, like fortran
has to do, so I could type equations. I also fixed typewriters, with paper
clips and rubber bands (the rubber bands didn't break down like they do here
in Los Angeles), but I wasn't a professional repairman; I'd just fix them so
they would work. But the whole problem of discovering what was the matter,
and figuring out what you have to do to fix it -- that was interesting to
me, like a puzzle.
--------
I must have been seventeen or eighteen when I worked one summer in a
hotel run by my aunt. I don't know how much I got -- twenty-two dollars a
month, I think -- and I alternated eleven hours one day and thirteen the
next as a desk clerk or as a busboy in the restaurant. And during the
afternoon, when you were desk clerk, you had to bring milk up to Mrs. D--,
an invalid woman who never gave us a tip. That's the way the world was: You
worked long hours and got nothing for it, every day.
This was a resort hotel, by the beach, on the outskirts of New York
City. The husbands would go to work in the city and leave the wives behind
to play cards, so you would always have to get the bridge tables out. Then
at night the guys would play poker, so you'd get the tables ready for them
-- clean out the ashtrays and so on. I was always up until late at night,
like two o'clock, so it really was thirteen and eleven hours a day.
There were certain things I didn't like, such as tipping. I thought we
should be paid more, and not have to have any tips. But when I proposed that
to the boss, I got nothing but laughter. She told everybody, "Richard
doesn't want his tips, hee, hee, hee; he doesn't want his tips, ha, ha, ha."
The world is full of this kind of dumb smart-alec who doesn't understand
anything.
Anyway, at one stage there was a group of men who, when they'd come
back from working in the city, would right away want ice for their drinks.
Now the other guy working with me had really been a desk clerk. He was older
than I was, and a lot more professional. One time he said to me, "Listen,
we're always bringing ice up to that guy Ungar and he never gives us a tip
-- not even ten cents. Next time, when they ask for ice, just don't do a
damn thing. Then they'll call you back, and when they call you back, you
say, 'Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot. We're all forgetful sometimes.'"
So I did it, and Ungar gave me fifteen cents! But now, when I think
back on it, I realize that the other desk clerk, the professional, had
really known what to do -- tell the other guy to take the risk of getting
into trouble. He put me to the job of training this fella to give tips. He
never said anything; he made me do it!
I had to clean up tables in the dining room as a busboy. You pile all
this stuff from the tables on to a tray at the side, and when it gets high
enough you carry it into the kitchen. So you get a new tray, right? You
should do it in two steps -- take the old tray away, and put in a new one --
but I thought, "I'm going to do it in one step." So I tried to slide the new
tray under, and pull the old tray out at the same time, and it slipped --
BANG! All the stuff went on the floor. And then, naturally, the question
was, "What were you doing? How did it fall?" Well, how could I explain that
I was trying to invent a new way to handle trays?
Among the desserts there was some kind of coffee cake that came out
very pretty on a doily, on a little plate. But if you would go in the back
you'd see a man called the pantry man. His problem was to get the stuff
ready for desserts. Now this man must have been a miner, or something --
heavy-built, with very stubby, rounded, thick fingers. He'd take this stack
of doilies, which are manufactured by some sort of stamping process, all
stuck together, and he'd take these stubby fingers and try to separate the
doilies to put them on the plates. I always heard him say, "Damn deez
doilies!" while he was doing this, and I remember thinking, "What a contrast
-- the person sitting at the table gets this nice cake on a doilied plate,
while the pantry man back there with the stubby thumbs is saying, 'Damn deez
doilies!'" So that was the difference between the real world and what it
looked like.
My first day on the job the pantry lady explained that she usually made
a ham sandwich, or something, for the guy who was on the late shift. I said
that I liked desserts, so if there was a dessert left over from supper, I'd
like that. The next night I was on the late shift till 2:00 a.m. with these
guys playing poker. I was sitting around with nothing to do, getting bored,
when suddenly I remembered there was a dessert to eat. I went over to the
icebox and opened it up, and there she'd left six desserts! There was a
chocolate pudding, a piece of cake, some peach slices, some rice pudding,
some jello -- there was everything! So I sat there and ate the six desserts
-- it was sensational!
The next day she said to me, "I left a dessert for you..."
"It was wonderful," I said, "abolutely wonderful!"
"But I left you six desserts because I didn't know which one you liked
the best."
So from that time on she left six desserts. They weren't always
different, but there were always six desserts.
One time when I was desk clerk a girl left a book by the telephone at
the desk while she went to eat dinner, so I looked at. it. It was The Life
of Leonardo, and I couldn't resist: The girl let me borrow it and I read the
whole thing.
I slept in a little room in the back of the hotel, and there was some
stew about turning out the lights when you leave your room, which I couldn't
ever remember to do. Inspired by the Leonardo book, I made this gadget which
consisted of a system of strings and weights -- Coke bottles full of water
-- that would operate when I'd open the door, lighting the pull-chain light
inside. You open the door, and things would go, and light the light; then
you close the door behind you, and the light would go out. But my real
accomplishment came later.
I used to cut vegetables in the kitchen. String beans had to be cut
into one-inch pieces. The way you were supposed to do it was: You hold two
beans in one hand, the knife in the other, and you press the knife against
the beans and your thumb, almost cutting yourself. It was a slow process. So
I put my mind to it, and I got a pretty good idea. I sat down at the wooden
table outside the kitchen, put a bowl in my lap, and stuck a very sharp
knife into the table at a forty-five-degree angle away from me. Then I put a
pile of the string beans on each side, and I'd pick out a bean, one in each
hand, and bring it towards me with enough speed that it would slice, and the
pieces would slide into the bowl that was in my lap.
So I'm slicing beans one after the other -- chig, chig, chig, chig,
chig -- and everybody's giving me the beans, and I'm going like sixty when
the boss comes by and says, "What are you doing?"
I say, "Look at the way I have of cutting beans!" -- and just at that
moment I put a finger through instead of a bean. Blood came out and went on
the beans, and there was a big excitement: "Look at how many beans you
spoiled! What a stupid way to do things!" and so on. So I was never able to
make any improvement, which would have been easy -- with a guard, or
something -- but no, there was no chance for improvement.
I had another invention, which had a similar difficulty. We had to
slice potatoes after they'd been cooked, for some kind of potato salad. They
were sticky and wet, and difficult to handle. I thought of a whole lot of
knives, parallel in a rack, coming down and slicing the whole thing. I
thought about this a long time, and finally I got the idea of wires in a
rack.
So I went to the five-and-ten to buy some knives or wires, and saw
exactly the gadget I wanted: it was for slicing eggs. The next time the
potatoes came out I got my little egg-slicer out and sliced all the potatoes
in no time, and sent them back to the chef. The chef was a German, a great
big guy who was King of the Kitchen, and he came storming out, blood vessels
sticking out of his neck, livid red. "What's the matter with the potatoes?"
he says. "They're not sliced!"
I had them sliced, but they were all stuck together. He says, "How can
I separate them?"
"Stick 'em in water," I suggest.
"IN WATER? EAGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"
Another time I had a really good idea. When I was desk clerk I had to
answer the telephone. When a call came in, something buzzed, and a flap came
down on the switchboard so you could tell which line it was. Sometimes, when
I was helping the women with the bridge tables or sitting on the front porch
in the middle of the afternoon (when there were very few calls), I'd be some
distance from the switchboard when suddenly it would go. I'd come running to
catch it, but the way the desk was made, in order to get to the switchboard
you had to go quite a distance further down, then around, in behind, and
then back up to see where the call was coming from -- it took extra time.
So I got a good idea. I tied threads to the flaps on the switchboard,
and strung them over the top of the desk and then down, and at the end of
each thread I tied a little piece of paper. Then I put the telephone talking
piece up on top of the desk, so I could reach it from the front. Now, when a
call came, I could tell which flap was down by which piece of paper was up,
so I could answer the phone appropriately, from the front, to save time. Of
course I still had to go around back to switch it in, but at least I was
answering it. I'd say, "Just a moment," and then go around to switch it in.
I thought that was perfect, but the boss came by one day, and she
wanted to answer the phone, and she couldn't figure it out -- too
complicated. "What are all these papers doing? Why is the telephone on this
side? Why don't you... raaaaaaaa!"
I tried to explain -- it was my own aunt -- that there was no reason
not to do that, but you can't say that to anybody who's smart, who runs a
hotel! I learned there that innovation is a very difficult thing in the real
world.
--------
At MIT the different fraternities all had "smokers" where they tried to
get the new freshmen to be their pledges, and the summer before I went to
MIT I was invited to a meeting in New York of Phi Beta Delta, a Jewish
fraternity. In those days, if you were Jewish or brought up in a Jewish
family, you didn't have a chance in any other fraternity. Nobody else would
look at you. I wasn't particularly looking to be with other Jews, and the
guys from the Phi Beta Delta fraternity didn't care how Jewish I was -- in
fact, I didn't believe anything about that stuff, and was certainly not in
any way religious. Anyway, some guys from the fraternity asked me some
questions and gave me a little bit of advice -- that I ought to take the
first-year calculus exam so I wouldn't have to take the course -- which
turned out to be good advice. I liked the fellas who came down to New York
from the fraternity, and the two guys who talked me into it, I later became
their roommate.
There was another Jewish fraternity at MIT, called "SAM," and their
idea was to give me a ride up to Boston and I could stay with them. I
accepted the ride, and stayed upstairs in one of the rooms that first night.
The next morning I looked out the window and saw the two guys from the
other fraternity (that I met in New York) walking up the steps. Some guys
from the Sigma Alpha Mu ran out to talk to them and there was a big
discussion.
I yelled out the window, "Hey, I'm supposed to be with those guys!" and
I rushed out of the fraternity without realizing that they were all
operating, competing for my pledge. I didn't have any feelings of gratitude
for the ride, or anything.
The Phi Beta Delta fraternity had almost collapsed the year before,
because there were two different cliques that had split the fraternity in
half. There was a group of socialite characters, who liked to have dances
and fool around in their cars afterwards, and so on, and there was a group
of guys who did nothing but study, and never went to the dances.
Just before I came to the fraternity they had had a big meeting and had
made an important compromise. They were going to get together and help each
other out. Everyone had to have a grade level of at least such-and-such. If
they were sliding behind, the guys who studied all the time would teach them
and help them do their work. On the other side, everybody had to go to every
dance. If a guy didn't know how to get a date, the other guys would get him
a date. If the guy didn't know how to dance, they'd teach him to dance. One
group was teaching the other how to think, while the other guys were
teaching them how to be social.
That was just right for me, because I was not very good socially. I was
so timid that when I had to take the mail out and walk past some seniors
sitting on the steps with some girls, I was petrified: I didn't know how to
walk past them! And it didn't help any when a girl would say, "Oh, he's
cute!"
It was only a little while after that the sophomores brought their
girlfriends and their girlfriends' friends over to teach us to dance. Much
later, one of the guys taught me how to drive his car. They worked very hard
to get us intellectual characters to socialize and be more relaxed, and vice
versa. It was a good balancing out.
I had some difficulty understanding what exactly it meant to be
"social." Soon after these social guys had taught me how to meet girls, I
saw a nice waitress in a restaurant where I was eating by myself one day.
With great effort I finally got up enough nerve to ask her to be my date at
the next fraternity dance, and she said yes.
Back at the fraternity, when we were talking about the dates for the
next dance, I told the guys I didn't need a date this time -- I had found
one on my own. I was very proud of myself.
When the upperclassmen found out my date was a waitress, they were
horrified. They told me that was not possible; they would get me a "proper"
date. They made me feel as though I had strayed, that I was amiss. They
decided to take over the situation. They went to the restaurant, found the
waitress, talked her out of it, and got me another girl. They were trying to
educate their "wayward son," so to speak, but they were wrong, I think. I
was only a freshman then, and I didn't have enough confidence yet to stop
them from breaking my date.
When I became a pledge they had various ways of hazing. One of the
things they did was to take us, blindfolded, far out into the countryside in
the dead of winter and leave us by a frozen lake about a hundred feet apart.
We were in the middle of absolutely nowhere -- no houses, no nothing -- and
we were supposed to find our way back to the fraternity. We were a little
bit scared, because we were young, and we didn't say much -- except for one
guy, whose name was Maurice Meyer: you couldn't stop him from joking around,
making dumb puns, and having this happy-go-lucky attitude of "Ha, ha,
there's nothing to worry about. Isn't this fun!"
We were getting mad at Maurice. He was always walking a little bit
behind and laughing at the whole situation, while the rest of us didn't know
how we were ever going to get out of this.
We came to an intersection not far from the lake -- there were still no
houses or anything -- and the rest of us were discussing whether we should
go this way or that way, when Maurice caught up to us and said, "Go this
way."
"What the hell do you know, Maurice?" we said, frustrated. "You're
always making these jokes. Why should we go this way?"
"Simple: Look at the telephone lines. Where there's more wires, it's
going toward the central station."
This guy, who looked like he wasn't paying attention to anything, had
come up with a terrific idea! We walked straight into town without making an
error.
On the following day there was going to be a schoolwide freshman versus
sophomore mudeo (various forms of wrestling and tug of wars that take place
in the mud). Late in the evening, into our fraternity comes a whole bunch of
sophomores -- some from our fraternity and some from outside -- and they
kidnap us: they want us to be tired the next day so they can win.
The sophomores tied up all the freshmen relatively easily -- except me.
I didn't want the guys in the fraternity to find out that I was a "sissy."
(I was never any good in sports. I was always terrified if a tennis ball
would come over the fence and land near me, because I never could get it
over the fence -- it usually went about a radian off of where it was
supposed to go.) I figured this was a new situation, a new world, and I
could make a new reputation. So in order that I wouldn't look like I didn't
know how to fight, I fought like a son of a gun as best I could (not knowing
what I was doing), and it took three or four guys many tries before they
were finally able to tie me up. The sophomores took us to a house, far away
in the woods, and tied us all down to a wooden floor with big U tacks.
I tried all sorts of ways to escape, but there were sophomores guarding
us, and none of my tricks worked. I remember distinctly one young man they
were afraid to tie down because he was so terrified: his face was pale
yellow-green and he was shaking. I found out later he was from Europe --
this was in the early thirties -- and he didn't realize that these guys all
tied down to the floor was some kind of a joke; he knew what kinds of things
were going on in Europe. The guy was frightening to look at, he was so
scared.
By the time the night was over, there were only three sophomores
guarding twenty of us freshmen, but we didn't know that. The sophomores had
driven their cars in and out a few times to make it sound as if there was a
lot of activity, and we didn't notice it was always the same cars and the
same people. So we didn't win that one.
My father and mother happened to come up that morning to see how their
son was doing in Boston, and the fraternity kept putting them off until we
came back from being kidnapped. I was so bedraggled and dirty from
struggling so hard to escape and from lack of sleep that they were really
horrified to discover what their son looked like at MIT!
I had also gotten a stiff neck, and I remember standing in line for
inspection that afternoon at ROTC, not being able to look straight forward.
The commander grabbed my head and turned it, shouting, "Straighten up!"
I winced, as my shoulders went at an angle: "I can't help it, sir!"
"Oh, excuse me!" he said, apologetically.
Anyway, the fact that I fought so long and hard not to be tied up gave
me a terrific reputation, and I never had to worry about that sissy business
again -- a tremendous relief.
I often listened to my roommates -- they were both seniors -- studying
for their theoretical physics course. One day they were working pretty hard
on something that seemed pretty clear to me, so I said, "Why don't you use
the Baronallai's equation?"
"What's that!" they exclaimed. "What are you talking about!"
I explained to them what I meant and how it worked in this case, and it
solved the problem. It turned out it was Bernoulli's equation that I meant,
but I had read all this stuff in the encyclopedia without talking to anybody
about it, so I didn't know how to pronounce anything.
But my roommates were very excited, and from then on they discussed
their physics problems with me -- I wasn't so lucky with many of them -- and
the next year, when I took the course, I advanced rapidly. That was a very
good way to get educated, working on the senior problems and learning how to
pronounce things.
I liked to go to a place called the Raymor and Playmore Ballroom -- two
ballrooms that were connected together -- on Tuesday nights. My fraternity
brothers didn't go to these "open" dances; they preferred their own dances,
where the girls they brought were upper crust ones they had met "properly."
I didn't care, when I met somebody, where they were from, or what their
background was, so I would go to these dances -- even though my fraternity
brothers disapproved (I was a junior by this time, and they couldn't stop
me) -- and I had a very good time.
One time I danced with a certain girl a few times, and didn't say much.
Finally, she said to me, "Who hants vewwy nice-ee."
I couldn't quite make it out -- she had some difficulty in speech --
but I thought she said, "You dance very nicely."
"Thank you," I said. "It's been an honor."
We went over to a table where a friend of hers had found a boy she was
dancing with and we sat, the four of us, together. One girl was very hard of
hearing, and the other girl was nearly deaf.
When the two girls conversed they would do a large amount of signaling
very rapidly back and forth, and grunt a little bit. It didn't bother me;
the girl danced well, and she was a nice person.
After a few more dances, we're sitting at the table again, and there's
a large amount of signaling back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,
until finally she says something to me which I gathered means, she'd like us
to take them to some hotel.
I ask the other guy if he wants to go.
"What do they want us to go to this hotel for?" he asks.
"Hell, I don't know. We didn't talk well enough!" But I don't have to
know. It's just fun, seeing what's going to happen; it's an adventure!
The other guy's afraid, so he says no. So I take the two girls in a
taxi to the hotel, and discover that there's a dance organized by the deaf
and dumb, believe it or not. They all belonged to a club. It turns out many
of them can feel the rhythm enough to dance to the music and applaud the
band at the end of each number.
It was very, very interesting! I felt as if I was in a foreign country
and couldn't speak the language: I could speak, but nobody could hear me.
Everybody was talking with signs to everybody else, and I couldn't
understand anything! I asked my girl to teach me some signs and I learned a
few, like you learn a foreign language, just for fun.
Everyone was so happy and relaxed with each other, making jokes and
smiling all the time; they didn't seem to have any real difficulty of any
kind communicating with each other. It was the same as with any other
language, except for one thing: as they're making signs to each other, their
heads were always turning from one side to the other. I realized what that
was. When someone wants to make a side remark or interrupt you, he can't
yell, "Hey, Jack!" He can only make a signal, which you won't catch unless
you're in the habit of looking around all the time.
They were completely comfortable with each other. It was my problem to
be comfortable. It was a wonderful experience.
The dance went on for a long time, and when it closed down we went to a
cafeteria. They were all ordering things by pointing to them. I remember
somebody asking in signs, "Where-are-you-from?" and my girl spelling out
"N-e-w Y-o-r-k." I still remember a guy signing to me "Good sport!" -- he
holds his thumb up, and then touches an imaginary lapel, for "sport." It's a
nice system.
Everybody was sitting around, making jokes, and getting me into their
world very nicely. I wanted to buy a bottle of milk, so I went up to the guy
at the counter and mouthed the word "milk" without saying anything.
The guy didn't understand.
I made the symbol for "milk," which is two fists moving as if you're
milking a cow, and he didn't catch that either.
I tried to point to the sign that showed the price of milk, but he
still didn't catch on.
Finally, some stranger nearby ordered milk, and I pointed to it.
"Oh! Milk!" he said, as I nodded my head yes.
He handed me the bottle, and I said, "Thank you very much!"
"You SON of a GUN!" he said, smiling.
I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in
mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of
plastic for drawing smooth curves -- a curly, funny-looking thing) and said,
"I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?"
I thought for a moment and said, "Sure they do. The curves are very
special curves. Lemme show ya," and I picked up my French curve and began to
turn it slowly. "The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on
each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal."
All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at
different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and
laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is
horizontal. They were all excited by this "discovery" -- even though they
had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already
"learned" that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any
curve is zero (horizontal). They didn't put two and two together. They
didn't even know what they "knew."
I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by
understanding; they learn by some other way -- by rote, or something. Their
knowledge is so fragile!
I did the same kind of trick four years later at Princeton when I was
talking with an experienced character, an assistant of Einstein, who was
surely working with gravity all the time. I gave him a problem: You blast
off in a rocket which has a clock on board, and there's a clock on the
ground. The idea is that you have to be back when the clock on the ground
says one hour has passed. Now you want it so that when you come back, your
clock is as far ahead as possible. According to Einstein, if you go very
high, your clock will go faster, because the higher something is in a
gravitational field, the faster its clock goes. But if you try to go too
high, since you've only got an hour, you have to go so fast to get there
that the speed slows your clock down. So you can't go too high. The question
is, exactly what program of speed and height should you make so that you get
the maximum time on your clock?
This assistant of Einstein worked on it for quite a bit before he
realized that the answer is the real motion of matter. If you shoot
something up in a normal way, so that the time it takes the shell to go up
and come down is an hour, that's the correct motion. It's the fundamental
principle of Einstein's gravity -- that is, what's called the "proper time"
is at a maximum for the actual curve. But when I put it to him, about a
rocket with a clock, he didn't recognize it. It was just like the guys in
mechanical drawing class, but this time it wasn't dumb freshmen. So this
kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people.
When I was a junior or senior I used to eat at a certain restaurant in
Boston. I went there by myself, often on successive evenings. People got to
know me, and I had the same waitress all the time.
I noticed that they were always in a hurry, rushing around, so one day,
just for fun, I left my tip, which was usually ten cents (normal for those
days), in two nickels, under two glasses: I filled each glass to the very
top, dropped a nickel in, and with a card over it, turned it over so it was
upside down on the table. Then I slipped out the card (no water leaks out
because no air can come in -- the rim is too close to the table for that).
I put the tip under two glasses because I knew they were always in a
hurry. If the tip was a dime in one glass, the waitress, in her haste to get
the table ready for the next customer, would pick up the glass, the water
would spill out, and that would be the end of it. But after she does that
with the first glass, what the hell is she going to do with the second one?
She can't just have the nerve to lift it up now!
On the way out I said to my waitress, "Be careful, Sue. There's
something funny about the glasses you gave me -- they're filled in on the
top, and there's a hole on the bottom!"
The next day I came back, and I had a new waitress. My regular waitress
wouldn't have anything to do with me. "Sue's very angry at you," my new
waitress said. "After she picked up the first glass and water went all over
the place, she called the boss out. They studied it a little bit, but they
couldn't spend all day figuring out what to do, so they finally picked up
the other one, and water went out again, all over the floor. It was a
terrible mess; Sue slipped later in the water. They're all mad at you."
I laughed.
She said, "It's not funny! How would you like it if someone did that to
you -- what would you do?"
"I'd get a soup plate and then slide the glass very carefully over to
the edge of the table, and let the water run into the soup plate -- it
doesn't have to run onto the floor. Then I'd take the nickel out."
"Oh, that's a goood idea," she said.
That evening I left my tip under a coffee cup, which I left upside down
on the table.
The next night I came and I had the same new waitress.
"What's the idea of leaving the cup upside down last time?"
"Well, I thought that even though you were in a hurry, you'd have to go
back into the kitchen and get a soup plate; then you'd have to sloooowly and
carefully slide the cup over to the edge of the table..."
"I did that," she complained, "but there was no water in it!"
My masterpiece of mischief happened at the fraternity. One morning I
woke up very early, about five o'clock, and couldn't go back to sleep, so I
went downstairs from the sleeping rooms and discovered some signs hanging on
strings which said things like "DOOR! DOOR! WHO STOLE THE DOOR?" I saw that
someone had taken a door off its hinges, and in its place they hung a sign
that said, "PLEASE CLOSE THE DOOR!" -- the sign that used to be on the door
that was missing.
I immediately figured out what the idea was. In that room a guy named
Pete Bernays and a couple of other guys liked to work very hard, and always
wanted it quiet. If you wandered into their room looking for something, or
to ask them how they did problem such and such, when you would leave you
would always hear these guys scream, "Please close the door!"
Somebody had gotten tired of this, no doubt, and had taken the door
off. Now this room, it so happened, had two doors, the way it was built, so
I got an idea: I took the other door off its hinges, carried it downstairs,
and hid it in the basement behind the oil tank. Then I quietly went back
upstairs and went to bed.
Later in the morning I made believe I woke up and came downstairs a
little late. The other guys were milling around, and Pete and his friends
were all upset: The doors to their room were missing, and they had to study,
blah, blah, blah, blah. I was coming down the stairs and they said,
"Feynman! Did you take the doors?"
"Oh, yeah!" I said. "I took the door. You can see the scratches on my
knuckles here, that I got when my hands scraped against the wall as I was
carrying it down into the basement."
They weren't satisfied with my answer; in fact, they didn't believe me.
The guys who took the first door had left so many clues -- the
handwriting on the signs, for instance -- that they were soon found out. My
idea was that when it was found out who stole the first door, everybody
would think they also stole the other door. It worked perfectly: The guys
who took the first door were pummeled and tortured and worked on by
everybody, until finally, with much pain and difficulty, they convinced
their tormentors that they had only taken one door, unbelievable as it might
be.
I listened to all this, and I was happy.
The other door stayed missing for a whole week, and it became more and
more important to the guys who were trying to study in that room that the
other door be found.
Finally, in order to solve the problem, the president of the fraternity
says at the dinner table, "We have to solve this problem of the other door.
I haven't been able to solve the problem myself, so I would like suggestions
from the rest of you as to how to straighten this out, because Pete and the
others are trying to study."
Somebody makes a suggestion, then someone else.
After a little while, I get up and make a suggestion. "All right," I
say in a sarcastic voice, "whoever you are who stole the door, we know
you're wonderful. You're so clever! We can't figure out who you are, so you
must be some sort of super-genius. You don't have to tell us who you are;
all we want to know is where the door is. So if you will leave a note
somewhere, telling us where the door is, we will honor you and admit forever
that you are a super-marvel, that you are so smart that you could take the
other door without our being able to figure out who you are. But for God's
sake, just leave the note somewhere, and we will be forever grateful to you
for it."
The next guy makes his suggestion: "I have another idea," he says. "I
think that you, as president, should ask each man on his word of honor
towards the fraternity to say whether he took the door or not."
The president says, "That's a very good idea. On the fraternity word of
honor!" So he goes around the table, and asks each guy, one by one: "Jack,
did you take the door?"
"No, sir, I did not take the door."
"Tim: Did you take the door?"
"No, sir! I did not take the door!"
"Maurice. Did you take the door?"
"No, I did not take the door, sir."
"Feynman, did you take the door?"
"Yeah, I took the door."
"Cut it out, Feynman; this is serious! Sam! Did you take the door..."
-- it went all the way around. Everyone was shocked. There must be some real
rat in the fraternity who didn't respect the fraternity word of honor!
That night I left a note with a little picture of the oil tank and the
door next to it, and the next day they found the door and put it back.
Sometime later I finally admitted to taking the other door, and I was
accused by everybody of lying. They couldn't remember what I had said. All
they could remember was their conclusion after the president of the
fraternity had gone around the table and asked everybody, that nobody
admitted taking the door. The idea they remembered, but not the words.
People often think I'm a faker, but I'm usually honest, in a certain
way -- in such a way that often nobody believes me!
--------
There was an Italian radio station in Brooklyn, and as a boy I used to
listen to it all the time. I LOVed the ROLLing SOUNds going over me, as if I
was in the ocean, and the waves weren't very high. I used to sit there and
have the water come over me, in this BEAUtiful iTALian. In the Italian
programs there was always some kind of family situation where there were
discussions and arguments between the mother and father:
High voice: "Nio teco TIEto capeto TUtto..."
Loud, low voice: "DRO tone pala TUtto!!" (with hand slapping).
It was great! So I learned to make all these emotions: I could cry; I
could laugh; all this stuff. Italian is a lovely language.
There were a number of Italian people living near us in New York. Once
while I was riding my bicycle, some Italian truck driver got upset at me,
leaned out of his truck, and, gesturing, yelled something like, "Me aRRUcha
LAMpe etta TIche!"
I felt like a crapper. What did he say to me? What should I yell back?
So I asked an Italian friend of mine at school, and he said, "Just say,
'A te! A te!' -- which means 'The same to you! The same to you!' "
I thought it was a great idea. I would say "A te! A te!"
back-gesturing, of course. Then, as I gained confidence, I developed my
abilities further. I would be riding my bicycle, and some lady would be
driving in her car and get in the way, and I'd say, "PUzzia a la maLOche!"
-- and she'd shrink! Some terrible Italian boy had cursed a terrible curse
at her!
It was not so easy to recognize it as fake Italian. Once, when I was at
Princeton, as I was going into the parking lot at Palmer Laboratory on my
bicycle, somebody got in the way. My habit was always the same: I gesture to
the guy, "oREzze caBONca MIche!", slapping the back of one hand against the
other.
And way up on the other side of a long area of grass, there's an
Italian gardner putting in some plants. He stops, waves, and shouts happily,
"REzza ma LIa!"
I call back, "RONte BALta!", returning the greeting. He didn't know I
didn't know, and I didn't know what he said, and he didn't know what I said.
But it was OK! It was great! It works! After all, when they hear the
intonation, they recognize it immediately as Italian -- maybe it's Milano
instead of Romano, what the hell. But he's an iTALian! So it's just great.
But you have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing
will happen.
One time I came home from college for a vacation, and my sister was
sort of unhappy, almost crying: her Girl Scouts were having a
father-daughter banquet, but our father was out on the road, selling
uniforms. So I said I would take her, being the brother (I'm nine years
older, so it wasn't so crazy).
When we got there, I sat among the fathers for a while, but soon became
sick of them. All these fathers bring their daughters to this nice little
banquet, and all they talked about was the stock market -- they don't know
how to talk to their own children, much less their children's friends.
During the banquet the girls entertained us by doing little skits,
reciting poetry, and so on. Then all of a sudden they bring out this
funny-looking apronlike thing, with a hole at the top to put your head
through. The girls announce that the fathers are now going to entertain
them.
So each father has to get up and stick his head through and say
something -- one guy recites "Mary Had a Little Lamb" -- and they don't know
what to do. I didn't know what to do either, but by the time I got up there,
I told them that I was going to recite a little poem, and I'm sorry that
it's not in English, but I'm sure they will appreciate it anyway:
A TUZZO LANTO
--Poici di Pare
TANto SAca TULna TI, na PUta TUchi PUti TI la.
RUNto CAta CHANto CHANta MANto CHI la TI da.
YALta CAra SULda MI la CHAta PIcha PIno TIto BRALda
pe te CHIna nana CHUNda lala CHINda lala CHUNda!
RONto piti CA le, a TANto CHINto quinta LALda
O la TINta dalla LALta, YENta PUcha lalla TALta!
I do this for three or four stanzas, going through all the emotions
that I heard on Italian radio, and the kids are unraveled, rolling in the
aisles, laughing with happiness.
After the banquet was over, the scoutmaster and a schoolteacher came
over and told me they had been discussing my poem. One of them thought it
was Italian, and the other thought it was Latin. The schoolteacher asks,
"Which one of us is right?"
I said, "You'll have to go ask the girls -- they understood what
language it was right away."
--------
When I was a student at MIT I was interested only in science; I was no
good at anything else. But at MIT there was a rule: You have to take some
humanities courses to get more "culture." Besides the English classes
required were two electives, so I looked through the list, and right away I
found astronomy -- as a humanities course! So that year I escaped with
astronomy. Then next year I looked further down the list, past French
literature and courses like that, and found philosophy. It was the closest
thing to science I could find.
Before I tell you what happened in philosophy, let me tell you about
the English class. We had to write a number of themes. For instance, Mill
had written something on liberty, and we had to criticize it. But instead of
addressing myself to political liberty, as Mill did, I wrote about liberty
in social occasions -- the problem of having to fake and lie in order to be
polite, and does this perpetual game of faking in social situations lead to
the "destruction of the moral fiber of society." An interesting question,
but not the one we were supposed to discuss.
Another essay we had to criticize was by Huxley, "On a Piece of Chalk,"
in which he describes how an ordinary piece of chalk he is holding is the
remains from animal bones, and the forces inside the earth lifted it up so
that it became part of the White Cliffs, and then it was quarried and is now
used to convey ideas through writing on the blackboard.
But again, instead of criticizing the essay assigned to us, I wrote a
parody called, "On a Piece of Dust," about how dust makes the colors of the
sunset and precipitates the rain, and so on. I was always a faker, always
trying to escape.
But when we had to write a theme on Goethe's Faust, it was hopeless!
The work was too long to make a parody of it or to invent something else. I
was storming back and forth in the fraternity saying, "I can't do it. I'm
just not gonna do it. I ain't gonna do it!"
One of my fraternity brothers said, "OK, Feynman, you're not gonna do
it. But the professor will think you didn't do it because you don't want to
do the work. You oughta write a theme on something -- same number of words
-- and hand it in with a note saying that you just couldn't understand the
Faust, you haven't got the heart for it, and that it's impossible for you to
write a theme on it."
So I did that. I wrote a long theme, "On the Limitations of Reason." I
had thought about scientific techniques for solving problems, and how there
are certain limitations: moral values cannot be decided by scientific
methods, yak, yak, yak, and so on.
Then another fraternity brother offered some more advice. "Feynman," he
said, "it ain't gonna work, handing in a theme that's got nothing to do with
Faust. What you oughta do is work that thing you wrote into the Faust."
"Ridiculous!" I said.
But the other fraternity guys think it's a good idea.
"All right, all right!" I say, protesting. "I'll try."
So I added half a page to what I had already written, and said that
Mephistopheles represents reason, and Faust represents the spirit, and
Goethe is trying to show the limitations of reason. I stirred it up, cranked
it all in, and handed in my theme.
The professor had us each come in individually to discuss our theme. I
went in expecting the worst.
He said, "The introductory material is fine, but the Faust material is
a bit too brief. Otherwise, it's very good -- B+ ." I escaped again!
Now to the philosophy class. The course was taught by an old bearded
professor named Robinson, who always mumbled. I would go to the class, and
he would mumble along, and I couldn't understand a thing. The other people
in the class seemed to understand him better, but they didn't seem to pay
any attention. I happened to have a small drill, about one-sixteenth-inch,
and to pass the time in that class, I would twist it between my fingers and
drill holes in the sole of my shoe, week after week.
Finally one day at the end of the class, Professor Robinson went "wugga
mugga mugga wugga wugga..." and everybody got excited! They were all talking
to each other and discussing, so I figured he'd said something interesting,
thank God! I wondered what it was?
I asked somebody, and they said, "We have to write a theme, and hand it
in in four weeks."
"A theme on what?"
"On what he's been talking about all year."
I was stuck. The only thing that I had heard during that entire term
that I could remember was a moment when there came this upwelling,
"muggawuggastreamofconsciousnessmuggawugga," and phoom! -- it sank back into
chaos.
This "stream of consciousness" reminded me of a problem my father had
given to me many years before. He said, "Suppose some Martians were to come
down to earth, and Martians never slept, but instead were perpetually
active. Suppose they didn't have this crazy phenomenon that we have, called
sleep. So they ask you the question: 'How does it feel to go to sleep? What
happens when you go to sleep? Do your thoughts suddenly stop, or do they
move less aanndd lleeessss rraaaaapppppiidddddllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyyyy? How
does the mind actually turn off?"
I got interested. Now I had to answer this question: How does the
stream of consciousness end, when you go to sleep?
So every afternoon for the next four weeks I would work on my theme. I
would pull down the shades in my room, turn off the lights, and go to sleep.
And I'd watch what happened, when I went to sleep.
Then at night, I'd go to sleep again, so I had two times each day when
I could make observations -- it was very good!
At first I noticed a lot of subsidiary things that had little to do
with falling asleep. I noticed, for instance, that I did a lot of thinking
by speaking to myself internally. I could also imagine things visually.
Then, when I was getting tired, I noticed that I could think of two
things at once. I discovered this when I was talking internally to myself
about something, and while I was doing this, I was idly imagining two ropes
connected to the end of my bed, going through some pulleys, and winding
around a turning cylinder, slowly lifting the bed. I wasn't aware that I was
imagining these ropes until I began to worry that one rope would catch on
the other rope, and they wouldn't wind up smoothly. But I said, internally,
"Oh, the tension will take care of that," and this interrupted the first
thought I was having, and made me aware that I was thinking of two things at
once.
I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they
become less and less logically interconnected. You don't notice that they're
not logically connected until you ask yourself, "What made me think of
that?" and you try to work your way back, and often you can't remember what
the hell did make you think of that!
So you get every illusion of logical connection, but the actual fact is
that the thoughts become more and more cockeyed until they're completely
disjointed, and beyond that, you fall asleep.
After four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and
explained the observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out
that all of these observations were made while I was watching myself fall
asleep, and I don't really know what it's like to fall asleep when I'm not
watching myself. I concluded the theme with a little verse I made up, which
pointed out this problem of introspection:
I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!
We hand in our themes, and the next time our class meets, the professor
reads one of them: "Mum bum wugga mum bum..." I can't tell what the guy
wrote.
He reads another theme: "Mugga wugga mum bum wugga wugga..." I don't
know what that guy wrote either, but at the end of it, he goes:
Uh wugga wuh. Uh wugga wuh.
Uh wugga wugga wugga.
I wugga wuh uh wugga wuh
Uh wugga wugga wugga.
"Aha!" I say. "That's my theme!" I honestly didn't recognize it until
the end.
After I had written the theme I continued to be curious, and I kept
practicing this watching myself as I went to sleep. One night, while I was
having a dream, I realized I was observing myself in the dream. I had gotten
all the way down, into the sleep itself!
In the first part of the dream I'm on top of a train and we're
approaching a tunnel. I get scared, pull myself down, and we go into the
tunnel -- whoosh! I say to myself, "So you can get the feeling of fear, and
you can hear the sound change when you go into the tunnel."
I also noticed that I could see colors. Some people had said that you
dream in black and white, but no, I was dreaming in color.
By this time I was inside one of the train cars, and I can feel the
train lurching about. I say to myself, "So you can get kinesthetic feelings
in a dream." I walk with some difficulty down to the end of the car, and I
see a big window, like a store window. Behind it there are -- not
mannequins, but three live girls in bathing suits, and they look pretty
good!
I continue walking into the next car, hanging onto the straps overhead
as I go, when I say to myself, "Hey! It would be interesting to get excited
-- sexually -- so I think I'll go back into the other car." I discovered
that I could turn around, and walk back through the train -- I could control
the direction of my dream. I get back to the car with the special window,
and I see three old guys playing violins -- but they turned back into girls!
So I could modify the direction of my dream, but not perfectly.
Well, I began to get excited, intellectually as well as sexually,
saying things like, "Wow! It's working!" and I woke up.
I made some other observations while dreaming. Apart from always asking
myself, "Am I really dreaming in color?" I wondered, "How accurately do you
see something?"
The next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass, and
she had red hair. I tried to see if I could see each hair. You know how
there's a little area of color just where the sun is reflecting -- the
diffraction effect, I could see that! I could see each hair as sharp as you
want: perfect vision!
Another time I had a dream in which a thumbtack was stuck in a
doorframe. I see the tack, run my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the
tack. So the "seeing department" arid the "feeling department" of the brain
seem to be connected. Then I say to myself, Could it be that they don't have
to be connected? I look at the doorframe again, and there's no thumbtack. I
run my finger down the doorframe, and I feel the tack!
Another time I'm dreaming and I hear "knock-knock; knock-knock."
Something was happening in the dream that made this knocking fit, but not
perfectly -- it seemed sort of foreign. I thought: "Absolutely guaranteed
that this knocking is coming from outside my dream, and I've invented this
part of the dream to fit with it. I've got to wake up and find out what the
hell it is."
The knocking is still going, I wake up, and... Dead silence. There was
nothing. So it wasn't connected to the outside.
Other people have told me that they have incorporated external noises
into their dreams, but when I had this experience, carefully "watching from
below," and sure the noise was coming from outside the dream, it wasn't.
During the time of making observations in my dreams, the process of
waking up was a rather fearful one. As you're beginning to wake up there's a
moment when you feel rigid and tied down, or underneath many layers of
cotton batting. It's hard to explain, but there's a moment when you get the
feeling you can't get out; you're not sure you can wake up. So I would have
to tell myself -- after I was awake -- that that's ridiculous. There's no
disease I know of where a person falls asleep naturally and can't wake up.
You can always wake up. And after talking to myself many times like that, I
became less and less afraid, and in fact I found the process of waking up
rather thrilling -- something like a roller coaster: After a while you're
not so scared, and you begin to enjoy it a little bit.
You might like to know how this process of observing my dreams stopped
(which it has for the most part; it's happened just a few times since). I'm
dreaming one night as usual, making observations, and I see on the wall in
front of me a pennant. I answer for the twenty-fifth time, "Yes, I'm
dreaming in color," and then I realize that I've been sleeping with the back
of my head against a brass rod. I put my hand behind my head and I feel that
the back of my head is soft. I think, "Aha! That's why I've been able to
make all these observations in my dreams: the brass rod has disturbed my
visual cortex. All I have to do is sleep with a brass rod under my head, and
I can make these observations any time I want. So I think I'll stop making
observations on this one, and go into deeper sleep."
When I woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was the back of my
head soft. Somehow I had become tired of making these observations, and my
brain had invented some false reasons as to why I shouldn't do it any more.
As a result of these observations I began to get a little theory. One
of the reasons that I liked to look at dreams was that I was curious as to
how you can see an image, of a person, for example, when your eyes are
closed, and nothing's coming in. You say it might be random, irregular nerve
discharges, but you can't get the nerves to discharge in exactly the same
delicate patterns when you are sleeping as when you are awake, looking at
something. Well then, how could I "see" in color, and in better detail, when
I was asleep?
I decided there must be an "interpretation department." When you are
actually looking at something -- a man, a lamp, or a wall -- you don't just
see blotches of color. Something tells you what it is; it has to be
interpreted. When you're dreaming, this interpretation department is still
operating, but it's all slopped up. It's telling you that you're seeing a
human hair in the greatest detail, when it isn't true. It's interpreting the
random junk entering the brain as a clear image.
One other thing about dreams. I had a friend named Deutsch, whose wife
was from a family of psychoanalysts in Vienna. One evening, during a long
discussion about dreams, he told me that dreams have significance: there are
symbols in dreams that can be interpreted psychoanalytically. I didn't
believe most of this stuff, but that night I had an interesting dream: We're
playing a game on a billiard table with three balls -- a white ball, a green
ball, and a gray ball -- and the name of the game is "titsies." There was
something about trying to get the balls into the pocket: the white ball and
the green ball are easy to sink into the pocket, but the gray one, I can't
get to it.
I wake up, and the dream is very easy to interpret: the name of the
game gives it away, of course -- them's girls! The white ball was easy to
figure out, because I was going out, sneakily, with a married woman who
worked at the time as a cashier in a cafeteria and wore a white uniform. The
green one was also easy, because I had gone out about two nights before to a
drive-in movie with a girl in a green dress. But the gray one -- what the
hell was the gray one? I knew it had to be somebody; I felt it. It's like
when you're trying to remember a name, and it's on the tip of your tongue,
but you can't get it.
It took me half a day before I remembered that I had said goodbye to a
girl I liked very much, who had gone to Italy about two or three months
before. She was a very nice girl, and I had decided that when she came back
I was going to see her again. I don't know if she wore a gray suit, but it
was perfectly clear, as soon as I thought of her, that she was the gray one.
I went back to my friend Deutsch, and I told him he must be right --
there is something to analyzing dreams. But when he heard about my
interesting dream, he said, "No, that one was too perfect -- too cut and
dried. Usually you have to do a bit more analysis."
--------
The Chief Research Chemist of the Metaplast Corporation
After I finished at MIT I wanted to get a summer job. I had applied two
or three times to the Bell Labs, and had gone out a few times to visit. Bill
Shockley, who knew me from the lab at MIT, would show me around each time,
and I enjoyed those visits terrifically, but I never got a job there.
I had letters from some of my professors to two specific companies. One
was to the Bausch and Lomb Company for tracing rays through lenses; the
other was to Electrical Testing Labs in New York. At that time nobody knew
what a physicist even was, and there weren't any positions in industry for
physicists. Engineers, OK; but physicists -- nobody knew how to use them.
It's interesting that very soon, after the war, it was the exact opposite:
people wanted physicists everywhere. So I wasn't getting anywhere as a
physicist looking for a job late in the Depression.
About that time I met an old friend of mine on the beach at our home
town of Far Rockaway, where we grew up together. We had gone to school
together when we were about eleven or twelve, and were very good friends. We
were both scientifically minded. He had a "laboratory," and I had a
"laboratory." We often played together, and discussed things together.
We used to put on magic shows -- chemistry magic -- for the kids on the
block. My friend was a pretty good showman, and I kind of liked that too. We
did our tricks on a little table, with Bunsen burners at each end going all
the time. On the burners we had watch glass plates (flat glass discs) with
iodine on them, which made a beautiful purple vapor that went up on each
side of the table while the show went on. It was great! We did a lot of
tricks, such as turning "wine" into water, and other chemical color changes.
For our finale, we did a trick that used something which we had discovered.
I would put my hands (secretly) first into a sink of water, and then into
benzine. Then I would "accidentally" brush by one of the Bunsen burners, and
one hand would light up. I'd clap my hands, and both hands would then be
burning. (It doesn't hurt because it burns fast and the water keeps it
cool.) Then I'd wave my hands, running around yelling, "FIRE! FIRE!" and
everybody would get all excited. They'd run out of the room, and that was
the end of the show!
Later on I told this story at college to my fraternity brothers and
they said, "Nonsense! You can't do that!"
(I often had this problem of demonstrating to these fellas something
that they didn't believe -- like the time we got into an argument as to
whether urine just ran out of you by gravity, and I had to demonstrate that
that wasn't the case by showing them that you can pee standing on your head.
Or the time when somebody claimed that if you took aspirin and Coca-Cola
you'd fall over in a dead faint directly. I told them I thought it was a lot
of baloney, and offered to take aspirin and Coca-Cola together. Then they
got into an argument whether you should have the aspirin before the Coke,
just after the Coke, or mixed in the Coke. So I had six aspirin and three
Cokes, one right after the other. First, I took aspirins and then a Coke,
then we dissolved two aspirins in a Coke and I took that, and then I took a
Coke and two aspirins. Each time the idiots who believed it were standing
around me, waiting to catch me when I fainted. But nothing happened. I do
remember that I didn't sleep very well that night, so I got up and did a lot
of figuring, and worked out some of the formulas for what is called the
Riemann-Zeta function.)
"All right, guys," I said. "Let's go out and get some benzine."
They got the benzine ready, I stuck my hand in the water in the sink
and then into the benzine and lit it... and it hurt like hell! You see, in
the meantime I had grown hairs on the back of my hand, which acted like
wicks and held the benzine in place while it burned, whereas when I had done
it earlier I had no hairs on the back of my hand. After I did the experiment
for my fraternity brothers, I didn't have any hairs on the back of my hands
either.
Well, my pal and I met on the beach, and he told me that he had a
process for metal-plating plastics. I said that was impossible, because
there's no conductivity; you can't attach a wire. But he said he could
metal-plate anything, and I still remember him picking up a peach pit that
was in the sand, and saying he could metal-plate that -- trying to impress
me.
What was nice was that he offered me a job at his little company, which
was on the top floor of a building in New York. There were only about four
people in the company. His father was the one who was getting the money
together and was, I think, the "president." He was the "vice-president,"
along with another fella who was a salesman. I was the "chief research
chemist," and my friend's brother, who was not very clever, was the
bottle-washer. We had six metal-plating baths.
They had this process for metal-plating plastics, and the scheme was:
First, deposit silver on the object by precipitating silver from a silver
nitrate bath with a reducing agent (like you make mirrors); then stick the
object, with silver on it as a conductor, into an electroplating bath, and
the silver gets plated.
The problem was, does the silver stick to the object?
It doesn't. It peels off easily. So there was a step in between, to
make the silver stick better to the object. It depended on the material. For
things like Bakelite, which was an important plastic in those days, my
friend had found that if he sandblasted it first, and then soaked it for
many hours in stannous hydroxide, which got into the pores of the Bakelite,
the silver would hold onto the surface very nicely.
But it worked only on a few plastics, and new kinds of plastics were
coming out all the time, such as methylmethacrylate (which we call
plexiglass, now), that we couldn't plate, directly, at first. And cellulose
acetate, which was very cheap, was another one we couldn't plate at first,
though we finally discovered that putting it in sodium hydroxide for a
little while before using the stannous chloride made it plate very well.
I was pretty successful as a "chemist" in the company. My advantage was
that my pal had done no chemistry at all; he had done no experiments; he
just knew how to do something once. I set to work putting lots of different
knobs in bottles, and putting all kinds of chemicals in. By trying
everything and keeping track of everything I found ways of plating a wider
range of plastics than he had done before.
I was also able to simplify his process. From looking in books I
changed the reducing agent from glucose to formaldehyde, and was able to
recover 100 percent of the silver immediately, instead of having to recover
the silver left in solution at a later time.
I also got the stannous hydroxide to dissolve in water by adding a
little bit of hydrochloric acid -- something I remembered from a college
chemistry course -- so a step that used to take hours now took about five
minutes.
My experiments were always being interrupted by the salesman, who would
come back with some plastic from a prospective customer. I'd have all these
bottles lined up, with everything marked, when all of a sudden, "You gotta
stop the experiment to do a 'super job' for the sales department!" So, a lot
of experiments had to be started more than once.
One time we got into one hell of a lot of trouble. There was some
artist who was trying to make a picture for the cover of a magazine about
automobiles. He had very carefully built a wheel out of plastic, and somehow
or other this salesman had told him we could plate anything, so the artist
wanted us to metal-plate the hub, so it would be a shiny, silver hub. The
wheel was made of a new plastic that we didn't know very well how to plate
-- the fact is, the salesman never knew what we could plate, so he was
always promising things -- and it didn't work the first time. So, to fix it
up we had to get the old silver off, and we couldn't get it off easily. I
decided to use concentrated nitric acid on it, which took the silver off all
right, but also made pits and holes in the plastic. We were really in hot
water that time! In fact, we had lots of "hot water" experiments.
The other fellas in the company decided we should run advertisements in
Modern Plastics magazine. A few things we metal-plated were very pretty.
They looked good in the advertisements. We also had a few things out in a
showcase in front, for prospective customers to look at, but nobody could
pick up the things in the advertisements or in the showcase to see how well
the plating stayed on. Perhaps some of them were, in fact, pretty good jobs.
But they were made specially; they were not regular products.
Right after I left the company at the end of the summer to go to
Princeton, they got a good offer from somebody who wanted to metal-plate
plastic pens. Now people could have silver pens that were light, and easy,
and cheap. The pens immediately sold, all over, and it was rather exciting
to see people walking around everywhere with these pens -- and you knew
where they came from.
But the company hadn't had much experience with the material -- or
perhaps with the filler that was used in the plastic (most plastics aren't
pure; they have a "filler," which in those days wasn't very well controlled)
-- and the darn things would develop a blister. When you have something in
your hand that has a little blister that starts to peel, you can't help
fiddling with it. So everybody was fiddling with all the peelings coming off
the pens.
Now the company had this emergency problem to fix the pens, and my pal
decided he needed a big microscope, and so on. He didn't know what he was
going to look at, or why, and it cost his company a lot of money for this
fake research. The result was, they had trouble: They never solved the
problem, and the company failed, because their first big job was such a
failure.
A few years later I was in Los Alamos, where there was a man named
Frederic de Hoffman, who was a sort of scientist; but more, he was also very
good at administrating. Not highly trained, he liked mathematics, and worked
very hard; he compensated for his lack of training by hard work. Later he
became the president or vice president of General Atomics and he was a big
industrial character after that. But at the time he was just a very
energetic, open-eyed, enthusiastic boy, helping along with the Project as
best he could.
One day we were eating at the Fuller Lodge, and he told me he had been
working in England before coming to Los Alamos.
"What kind of work were you doing there?" I asked.
"I was working on a process for metal-plating plastics. I was one of
the guys in the laboratory."
"How did it go?"
"It was going along pretty well, but we had our problems."
"Oh?"
"Just as we were beginning to develop our process, there was a company
in New York..."
"What company in New York?"
"It was called the Metaplast Corporation. They were developing further
than we were."
"How could you tell?"
"They were advertising all the time in Modern Plastics with full-page
advertisements showing all the things they could plate, and we realized that
they were further along than we were."
"Did you have any stuff from them?"
"No, but you could tell from the advertisements that they were way
ahead of what we could do. Our process was pretty good, but it was no use
trying to compete with an American process like that."
"How many chemists did you have working in the lab?"
"We had six chemists working."
"How many chemists do you think the Metaplast Corporation had?"
"Oh! They must have had a real chemistry department!"
"Would you describe for me what you think the chief research chemist at
the Metaplast Corporation might look like, and how his laboratory might
work?"
"I would guess they must have twenty-five or fifty chemists, and the
chief research chemist has his own office -- special, with glass. You know,
like they have in the movies -- guys coming in all the time with research
projects that they're doing, getting his advice, and rushing off to do more
research, people coming in and out all the time. With twenty-five or fifty
chemists, how the hell could we compete with them?"
"You'll be interested and amused to know that you are now talking to
the chief research chemist of the Metaplast Corporation, whose staff
consisted of one bottle-washer!"
--------
--------
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
When I was an undergraduate at MIT I loved it. I thought it was a great
place, and I wanted to go to graduate school there too, of course. But when
I went to Professor Slater and told him of my intentions, he said, "We won't
let you in here."
I said, "What?"
Slater said, "Why do you think you should go to graduate school at
MIT?"
"Because MIT is the best school for science in the country."
"You think that?"
"Yeah."
"That's why you should go to some other school. You should find out how
the rest of the world is."
So I decided to go to Princeton. Now Princeton had a certain aspect of
elegance. It was an imitation of an English school, partly. So the guys in
the fraternity, who knew my rather rough, informal manners, started making
remarks like "Wait till they find out who they've got coming to Princeton!
Wait till they see the mistake they made!" So I decided to try to be nice
when I got to Princeton.
My father took me to Princeton in his car, and I got my room, and he
left. I hadn't been there an hour when I was met by a man: "I'm the Mahstah
of Residences heah, and I should like to tell you that the Dean is having a
Tea this aftanoon, and he should like to have all of you come. Perhaps you
would be so kind as to inform your roommate, Mr. Serette."
That was my introduction to the graduate "College" at Princeton, where
all the students lived. It was like an imitation Oxford or Cambridge --
complete with accents (the master of residences was a professor of "French
littrachaw"). There was a porter downstairs, everybody had nice rooms, and
we ate all our meals together, wearing academic gowns, in a great hall which
had stained-glass windows.
So the very afternoon I arrived in Princeton I'm going to the dean's
tea, and I didn't even know what a "tea" was, or why! I had no social
abilities whatsoever; I had no experience with this sort of thing.
So I come up to the door, and there's Dean Eisenhart, greeting the new
students: "Oh, you're Mr. Feynman," he says. "We're glad to have you." So
that helped a little, because he recognized me, somehow.
I go through the door, and there are some ladies, and some girls, too.
It's all very formal and I'm thinking about where to sit down and should I
sit next to this girl, or not, and how should I behave, when I hear a voice
behind me.
"Would you like cream or lemon in your tea, Mr. Feynman?" It's Mrs.
Eisenhart, pouring tea.
"I'll have both, thank you," I say, still looking for where I'm going
to sit, when suddenly I hear "Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Surely you're joking, Mr.
Feynman."
Joking? Joking? What the hell did I just say? Then I realized what I
had done. So that was my first experience with this tea business.
Later on, after I had been at Princeton longer, I got to understand
this "Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh." In fact it was at that first tea, as I was
leaving, that I realized it meant "You're making a social error." Because
the next time I heard this same cackle, "Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh," from Mrs.
Eisenhart, somebody was kissing her hand as he left.
Another time, perhaps a year later, at another tea, I was talking to
Professor Wildt, an astronomer who had worked out some theory about the
clouds on Venus. They were supposed to be formaldehyde (it's wonderful to
know what we once worried about) and he had it all figured out, how the
formaldehyde was precipitating, and so on. It was extremely interesting. We
were talking about all this stuff, when a little lady came up and said, "Mr.
Feynman, Mrs. Eisenhart would like to see you."
"OK, just a minute..." and I kept talking to Wildt.
The little lady came back again and said, "Mr. Feynman, Mrs. Eisenhart
would like to see you."
"OK, OK!" and I go over to Mrs. Eisenhart, who's pouring tea.
"Would you like to have some coffee or tea, Mr. Feynman?"
"Mrs. So-and-so says you wanted to talk to me."
"Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Would you like to have coffee, or tea, Mr.
Feynman?"
"Tea," I said, "thank you."
A few moments later Mrs. Eisenhart's daughter and a schoolmate came
over, and we were introduced to each other. The whole idea of this
"heh-heh-heh" was: Mrs. Eisenhart didn't want to talk to me, she wanted me
over there getting tea when her daughter and friend came over, so they would
have someone to talk to. That's the way it worked. By that time I knew what
to do when I heard "Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh." I didn't say, "What do you mean,
'Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh'?"; I knew the "heh-heh-heh" meant "error," and I'd
better get it straightened out.
Every night we wore academic gowns to dinner. The first night it scared
the life out of me, because I didn't like formality. But I soon realized
that the gowns were a great advantage. Guys who were out playing tennis
could rush into their room, grab their academic gown, and put it on. They
didn't have to take time off to change their clothes or take a shower. So
underneath the gowns there were bare arms, T-shirts, everything.
Furthermore, there was a rule that you never cleaned the gown, so you could
tell a first-year man from a second-year man, from a third-year man, from a
pig! You never cleaned the gown and you never repaired it, so the first-year
men had very nice, relatively clean gowns, but by the time you got to the
third year or so, it was nothing but some kind of cardboard thing on your
shoulders with tatters hanging down from it.
So when I got to Princeton, I went to that tea on Sunday afternoon and
had dinner that evening in an academic gown at the "College." But on Monday,
the first thing I wanted to do was to see the cyclotron.
MIT had built a new cyclotron while I was a student there, and it was
just beautiful! The cyclotron itself was in one room, with the controls in
another room. It was beautifully engineered. The wires ran from the control
room to the cyclotron underneath in conduits, and there was a whole console
of buttons and meters. It was what I would call a gold-plated cyclotron.
Now I had read a lot of papers on cyclotron experiments, and there
weren't many from MIT. Maybe they were just starting. But there were lots of
results from places like Cornell, and Berkeley, and above all, Princeton.
Therefore what I really wanted to see, what I was looking forward to, was
the PRINCETON CYCLOTRON. That must be something.
So first thing on Monday, I go into the physics building and ask,
"Where is the cyclotron -- which building?"
"It's downstairs, in the basement -- at the end of the hall."
In the basement? It was an old building. There was no room in the
basement for a cyclotron. I walked down to the end of the hall, went through
the door, and in ten seconds I learned why Princeton was right for me -- the
best place for me to go to school. In this room there were wires strung all
over the place! Switches were hanging from the wires, cooling water was
dripping from the valves, the room was full of stuff, all out in the open.
Tables piled with tools were everywhere; it was the most godawful mess you
ever saw. The whole cyclotron was there in one room, and it was complete,
absolute chaos!
It reminded me of my lab at home. Nothing at MIT had ever reminded me
of my lab at home. I suddenly realized why Princeton was getting results.
They were working with the instrument. They built the instrument; they knew
where everything was, they knew how everything worked, there was no engineer
involved, except maybe he was working there too. It was much smaller than
the cyclotron at MIT, and "gold-plated"? -- it was the exact opposite. When
they wanted to fix a vacuum, they'd drip glyptal on it, so there were drops
of glyptal on the floor. It was wonderful! Because they worked with it. They
didn't have to sit in another room and push buttons! (Incidentally, they had
a fire in that room, because of all the chaotic mess that they had -- too
many wires -- and it destroyed the cyclotron. But I'd better not tell about
that!)
(When I got to Cornell I went to look at the cyclotron there. This
cyclotron hardly required a room: It was about a yard across -- the diameter
of the whole thing. It was the world's smallest cyclotron, but they had got
fantastic results. They had all kinds of special techniques and tricks. If
they wanted to change something in the "D's" -- the D-shaped half circles
that the particles go around -- they'd take a screwdriver, and remove the
D's by hand, fix them, and put them back. At Princeton it was a lot harder,
and at MIT you had to take a crane that came rolling across the ceiling,
lower the hooks, and it was a hellllll of a job.)
I learned a lot of different things from different schools. MIT is a
very good place; I'm not trying to put it down. I was just in love with it.
It has developed for itself a spirit, so that every member of the whole
place thinks that it's the most wonderful place in the world -- it's the
center, somehow, of scientific and technological development in the United
States, if not the world. It's like a New Yorker's view of New York: they
forget the rest of the country. And while you don't get a good sense of
proportion there, you do get an excellent sense of being with it and in it,
and having motivation and desire to keep on -- that you're specially chosen,
and lucky to be there.
So MIT was good, but Slater was right to warn me to go to another
school for my graduate work. And I often advise my students the same way.
Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.
I once did an experiment in the cyclotron laboratory at Princeton that
had some startling results. There was a problem in a hydrodynamics book that
was being discussed by all the physics students. The problem is this: You
have an S-shaped lawn sprinkler -- an S-shaped pipe on a pivot -- and the
water squirts out at right angles to the axis and makes it spin in a certain
direction. Everybody knows which way it goes around; it backs away from the
outgoing water. Now the question is this: If you had a lake, or swimming
pool -- a big supply of water -- and you put the sprinkler completely under
water, and sucked the water in, instead of squirting it out, which way would
it turn? Would it turn the same way as it does when you squirt water out
into the air, or would it turn the other way?
The answer is perfectly clear at first sight. The trouble was, some guy
would think it was perfectly clear one way, and another guy would think it
was perfectly clear the other way. So everybody was discussing it. I
remember at one particular seminar, or tea, somebody went up to Prof. John
Wheeler and said, "Which way do you think it goes around?"
Wheeler said, "Yesterday, Feynman convinced me that it went backwards.
Today, he's convinced me equally well that it goes around the other way. I
don't know what he'll convince me of tomorrow!"
I'll tell you an argument that will make you think it's one way, and
another argument that will make you think it's the other way, OK?
One argument is that when you're sucking water in, you're sort of
pulling the water with the nozzle, so it will go forward, towards the
incoming water.
But then another guy comes along and says, "Suppose we hold it still
and ask what kind of a torque we need to hold it still. In the case of the
water going out, we all know you have to hold it on the outside of the
curve, because of the centrifugal force of the water going around the curve.
Now, when the water goes around the same curve the other way, it still makes
the same centrifugal force toward the outside of the curve. Therefore the
two cases are the same, and the sprinkler will go around the same way,
whether you're squirting water out or sucking it in."
After some thought, I finally made up my mind what the answer was, and
in order to demonstrate it, I wanted to do an experiment.
In the Princeton cyclotron lab they had a big carboy -- a monster
bottle of water. I thought this was just great for the experiment. I got a
piece of copper tubing and bent it into an S-shape. Then in the middle I
drilled a hole, stuck in a piece of rubber hose, and led it up through a
hole in a cork I had put in the top of the bottle. The cork had another
hole, into which I put another piece of rubber hose, and connected it to the
air pressure supply of the lab. By blowing air into the bottle, I could
force water into the copper tubing exactly as if I were sucking it in. Now,
the S-shaped tubing wouldn't turn around, but it would twist (because of the
flexible rubber hose), and I was going to measure the speed of the water
flow by measuring how far it squirted out of the top of the bottle.
I got it all set up, turned on the air supply, and it went "Puup!" The
air pressure blew the cork out of the bottle. I wired it in very well, so it
wouldn't jump out. Now the experiment was going pretty good. The water was
coming out, and the hose was twisting, so I put a little more pressure on
it, because with a higher speed, the measurements would be more accurate. I
measured the angle very carefully, and measured the distance, and increased
the pressure again, and suddenly the whole thing just blew glass and water
in all directions throughout the laboratory. A guy who had come to watch got
all wet and had to go home and change his clothes (it's a miracle he didn't
get cut by the glass), and lots of cloud chamber pictures that had been
taken patiently using the cyclotron were all wet, but for some reason I was
far enough away, or in some such position that I didn't get very wet. But
I'll always remember how the great Professor Del Sasso, who was in charge of
the cyclotron, came over to me and said sternly, "The freshman experiments
should be done in the freshman laboratory!"
--------
On Wednesdays at the Princeton Graduate College, various people would
come in to give talks. The speakers were often interesting, and in the
discussions after the talks we used to have a lot of fun. For instance, one
guy in our school was very strongly anti-Catholic, so he passed out
questions in advance for people to ask a religious speaker, and we gave the
speaker a hard time.
Another time somebody gave a talk about poetry. He talked about the
structure of the poem and the emotions that come with it; he divided
everything up into certain kinds of classes. In the discussion that came
afterwards, he said, "Isn't that the same as in mathematics, Dr. Eisenhart?"
Dr. Eisenhart was the dean of the graduate school and a great professor
of mathematics. He was also very clever. He said, "I'd like to know what
Dick Feynman thinks about it in reference to theoretical physics." He was
always putting me on in this kind of situation.
I got up and said, "Yes, it's very closely related. In theoretical
physics, the analog of the word is the mathematical formula, the analog of
the structure of the poem is the interrelationship of the theoretical
bling-bling with the so-and-so" -- and I went through the whole thing,
making a perfect analogy. The speaker's eyes were beaming with happiness.
Then I said, "It seems to me that no matter what you say about poetry,
I could find a way of making up an analog with any subject, just as I did
for theoretical physics. I don't consider such analogs meaningful."
In the great big dining hall with stained-glass windows, where we
always ate, in our steadily deteriorating academic gowns, Dean Eisenhart
would begin each dinner by saying grace in Latin. After dinner he would
often get up and make some announcements. One night Dr. Eisenhart got up and
said, "Two weeks from now, a professor of psychology is coming to give a
talk about hypnosis. Now, this professor thought it would be much better if
we had a real demonstration of hypnosis instead of just talking about it.
Therefore he would like some people to volunteer to be hypnotized..."
I get all excited: There's no question but that I've got to find out
about hypnosis. This is going to be terrific!
Dean Eisenhart went on to say that it would be good if three or four
people would volunteer so that the hypnotist could try them out first to see
which ones would be able to be hypnotized, so he'd like to urge very much
that we apply for this. (He's wasting all this time, for God's sake!)
Eisenhart was down at one end of the hall, and I was way down at the
other end, in the back. There were hundreds of guys there. I knew that
everybody was going to want to do this, and I was terrified that he wouldn't
see me because I was so far back. I just had to get in on this
demonstration!
Finally Eisenhart said, "And so I would like to ask if there are going
to be any volunteers..."
I raised my hand and shot out of my seat, screaming as loud as I could,
to make sure that he would hear me: "MEEEEEEEEEEE!"
He heard me all right, because there wasn't another soul. My voice
reverberated throughout the hall -- it was very embarrassing. Eisenhart's
immediate reaction was, "Yes, of course, I knew you would volunteer, Mr.
Feynman, but I was wondering if there would be anybody else."
Finally a few other guys volunteered, and a week before the
demonstration the man came to practice on us, to see if any of us would be
good for hypnosis. I knew about the phenomenon, but I didn't know what it
was like to be hypnotized.
He started to work on me and soon I got into a position where he said,
"You can't open your eyes."
I said to myself, "I bet I could open my eyes, but I don't want to
disturb the situation: Let's see how much further it goes." It was an
interesting situation: You're only slightly fogged out, and although you've
lost a little bit, you're pretty sure you could open your eyes. But of
course, you're not opening your eyes, so in a sense you can't do it.
He went through a lot of stuff and decided that I was pretty good.
When the real demonstration came he had us walk on stage, and he
hypnotized us in front of the whole Princeton Graduate College. This time
the effect was stronger; I guess I had learned how to become hypnotized. The
hypnotist made various demonstrations, having me do things that I couldn't
normally do, and at the end he said that after I came out of hypnosis,
instead of returning to my seat directly, which was the natural way to go, I
would walk all the way around the room and go to my seat from the back.
All through the demonstration I was vaguely aware of what was going on,
and cooperating with the things the hypnotist said, but this time I decided,
"Damn it, enough is enough! I'm gonna go straight to my seat."
When it was time to get up and go off the stage, I started to walk
straight to my seat. But then an annoying feeling came over me: I felt so
uncomfortable that I couldn't continue. I walked all the way around the
hall.
I was hypnotized in another situation some time later by a woman. While
I was hypnotized she said, "I'm going to light a match, blow it out, and
immediately touch the back of your hand with it. You will feel no pain."
I thought, "Baloney!" She took a match, lit it, blew it out, and
touched it to the back of my hand. It felt slightly warm. My eyes were
closed throughout all of this, but I was thinking, "That's easy. She lit one
match, but touched a different match to my hand. There's nothin' to that;
it's a fake!"
When I came out of the hypnosis and looked at the back of my hand, I
got the biggest surprise: There was a burn on the back of my hand. Soon a
blister grew, and it never hurt at all, even when it broke.
So I found hypnosis to be a very interesting experience. All the time
you're saying to yourself, "I could do that, but I won't" -- which is just
another way of saying that you can't.
--------
In the Graduate College dining room at Princeton everybody used to sit
with his own group. I sat with the physicists, but after a bit I thought: It
would be nice to see what the rest of the world is doing, so I'll sit for a
week or two in each of the other groups.
When I sat with the philosophers I listened to them discuss very
seriously a book called Process and Reality by Whitehead. They were using
words in a funny way, and I couldn't quite understand what they were saying.
Now I didn't want to interrupt them in their own conversation and keep
asking them to explain something, and on the few occasions that I did,
they'd try to explain it to me, but I still didn't get it. Finally they
invited me to come to their seminar.
They had a seminar that was like a class. It had been meeting once a
week to discuss a new chapter out of Process and Reality -- some guy would
give a report on it and then there would be a discussion. I went to this
seminar promising myself to keep my mouth shut, reminding myself that I
didn't know anything about the subject, and I was going there just to watch.
What happened there was typical -- so typical that it was unbelievable,
but true. First of all, I sat there without saying anything, which is almost
unbelievable, but also true. A student gave a report on the chapter to be
studied that week. In it Whitehead kept using the words "essential object"
in a particular technical way that presumably he had defined, but that I
didn't understand.
After some discussion as to what "essential object" meant, the
professor leading the seminar said something meant to clarify things and
drew something that looked like lightning bolts on the blackboard. "Mr.
Feynman," he said, "would you say an electron is an 'essential object'?"
Well, now I was in trouble. I admitted that I hadn't read the book, so
I had no idea of what Whitehead meant by the phrase; I had only come to
watch. "But," I said, "I'll try to answer the professor's question if you
will first answer a question from me, so I can have a better idea of what
'essential object' means. Is a brick an essential object?"
What I had intended to do was to find out whether they thought
theoretical constructs were essential objects. The electron is a theory that
we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can
almost call it real. I wanted to make the idea of a theory clear by analogy.
In the case of the brick, my next question was going to be, "What about the
inside of the brick?" -- and I would then point out that no one has ever
seen the inside of a brick. Every time you break the brick, you only see the
surface. That the brick has an inside is a simple theory which helps us
understand things better. The theory of electrons is analogous. So I began
by asking, "Is a brick an essential object?"
Then the answers came out. One man stood up and said, "A brick as an
individual, specific brick. That is what Whitehead means by an essential
object."
Another man said, "No, it isn't the individual brick that is an
essential object; it's the general character that all bricks have in common
-- their 'brickness' -- that is the essential object."
Another guy got up and said, "No, it's not in the bricks themselves.
'Essential object' means the idea in the mind that you get when you think of
bricks."
Another guy got up, and another, and I tell you I have never heard such
ingenious different ways of looking at a brick before. And, just like it
should in all stories about philosophers, it ended up in complete chaos. In
all their previous discussions they hadn't even asked themselves whether
such a simple object as a brick, much less an electron, is an "essential
object."
After that I went around to the biology table at dinner time. I had
always had some interest in biology, and the guys talked about very
interesting things. Some of them invited me to come to a course they were
going to have in cell physiology. I knew something about biology, but this
was a graduate course. "Do you think I can handle it? Will the professor let
me in?" I asked.
They asked the instructor, E. Newton Harvey, who had done a lot of
research on light-producing bacteria. Harvey said I could join this special,
advanced course provided one thing -- that I would do all the work, and
report on papers just like everybody else.
Before the first class meeting, the guys who had invited me to take the
course wanted to show me some things under the microscope. They had some
plant cells in there, and you could see some little green spots called
chloroplasts (they make sugar when light shines on them) circulating around.
I looked at them and then looked up: "How do they circulate? What pushes
them around?" I asked.
Nobody knew. It turned out that it was not understood at that time. So
right away I found out something about biology: it was very easy to find a
question that was very interesting, and that nobody knew the answer to. In
physics you had to go a little deeper before you could find an interesting
question that people didn't know.
When the course began, Harvey started out by drawing a great, big
picture of a cell on the blackboard and labeling all the things that are in
a cell. He then talked about them, and I understood most of what he said.
After the lecture, the guy who had invited me said, "Well, how did you
like it?"
"Just fine," I said. "The only part I didn't understand was the part
about lecithin. What is lecithin?"
The guy begins to explain in a monotonous voice: "All living creatures,
both plant and animal, are made of little bricklike objects called
'cells'..."
"Listen," I said, impatiently, "I know all that; otherwise I wouldn't
be in the course. What is lecithin?"
"I don't know."
I had to report on papers along with everyone else, and the first one I
was assigned was on the effect of pressure on cells -- Harvey chose that
topic for me because it had something that had to do with physics. Although
I understood what I was doing, I mispronounced everything when I read my
paper, and the class was always laughing hysterically when I'd talk about
"blastospheres" instead of "blastomeres," or some other such thing.
The next paper selected for me was by Adrian and Bronk. They
demonstrated that nerve impulses were sharp, single-pulse phenomena. They
had done experiments with cats in which they had measured voltages on
nerves.
I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors,
the gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I
hadn't the foggiest idea of where they were located in relation to the
nerves or to the cat. So I went to the librarian in the biology section and
asked her if she could find me a map of the cat.
"A map of the cat, sir?" she asked, horrified. "You mean a zoological
chart!" From then on there were rumors about some dumb biology graduate
student who was looking for a "map of the cat."
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off
by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"
"Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast
after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time
memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
After the war, every summer I would go traveling by car somewhere in
the United States. One year, after I was at Caltech, I thought, "This
summer, instead of going to a different place, I'll go to a different
field."
It was right after Watson and Crick's discovery of the DNA spiral.
There were some very good biologists at Caltech because Delbrück had his lab
there, and Watson came to Caltech to give some lectures on the coding
systems of DNA. I went to his lectures and to seminars in the biology
department and got full of enthusiasm. It was a very exciting time in
biology, and Caltech was a wonderful place to be.
I didn't think I was up to doing actual research in biology, so for my
summer visit to the field of biology I thought I would just hang around the
biology lab and "wash dishes," while I watched what they were doing. I went
over to the biology lab to tell them my desire, and Bob Edgar, a young
post-doc who was sort of in charge there, said he wouldn't let me do that.
He said, "You'll have to really do some research, just like a graduate
student, and we'll give you a problem to work on." That suited me fine.
I took a phage course, which told us how to do research with
bacteriophages (a phage is a virus that contains DNA and attacks bacteria).
Right away I found that I was saved a lot of trouble because I knew some
physics and mathematics. I knew how atoms worked in liquids, so there was
nothing mysterious about how the centrifuge worked. I knew enough statistics
to understand the statistical errors in counting little spots in a dish. So
while all the biology guys were trying to understand these "new" things, I
could spend my time learning the biology part.
There was one useful lab technique I learned in that course which I
still use today. They taught us how to hold a test tube and take its cap off
with one hand (you use your middle and index fingers), while leaving the
other hand free to do something else (like hold a pipette that you're
sucking cyanide up into). Now, I can hold my toothbrush in one hand, and
with the other hand, hold the tube of toothpaste, twist the cap off, and put
it back on.
It had been discovered that phages could have mutations which would
affect their ability to attack bacteria, and we were supposed to study those
mutations. There were also some phages that would have a second mutation
which would reconstitute their ability to attack bacteria. Some phages which
mutated back were exactly the same as they were before. Others were not:
There was a slight difference in their effect on bacteria -- they would act
faster or slower than normal, and the bacteria would grow slower or faster
than normal. In other words, there were "back mutations," but they weren't
always perfect; sometimes the phage would recover only part of the ability
it had lost.
Bob Edgar suggested that I do an experiment which would try to find out
if the back mutations occurred in the same place on the DNA spiral. With
great care and a lot of tedious work I was able to find three examples of
back mutations which had occurred very close together -- closer than
anything they had ever seen so far -- and which partially restored the
phage's ability to function. It was a slow job. It was sort of accidental:
You had to wait around until you got a double mutation, which was very rare.
I kept trying to think of ways to make a phage mutate more often and
how to detect mutations more quickly, but before I could come up with a good
technique the summer was over, and I didn't feel like continuing on that
problem.
However, my sabbatical year was coming up, so I decided to work in the
same biology lab but on a different subject. I worked with Matt Meselson to
some extent, and then with a nice fella from England named J. D. Smith. The
problem had to do with ribosomes, the "machinery" in the cell that makes
protein from what we now call messenger RNA. Using radioactive substances,
we demonstrated that the RNA could come out of ribosomes and could be put
back in.
I did a very careful job in measuring and trying to control everything,
but it took me eight months to realize that there was one step that was
sloppy. In preparing the bacteria, to get the ribosomes out, in those days
you ground it up with alumina in a mortar. Everything else was chemical and
all under control, but you could never repeat the way you pushed the pestle
around when you were grinding the bacteria. So nothing ever came of the
experiment.
Then I guess I have to tell about the time I tried with Hildegarde
Lamfrom to discover whether peas could use the same ribosomes as bacteria.
The question was whether the ribosomes of bacteria can manufacture the
proteins of humans or other organisms. She had just developed a scheme for
getting the ribosomes out of peas and giving them messenger RNA so that they
would make pea proteins. We realized that a very dramatic and important
question was whether ribosomes from bacteria, when given the peas' messenger
RNA, would make pea protein or bacteria protein. It was to be a very
dramatic and fundamental experiment.
Hildegarde said, "I'll need a lot of ribosomes from bacteria."
Meselson and I had extracted enormous quantities of ribosomes from E.
coli for some other experiment. I said, "Hell, I'll just give you the
ribosomes we've got. We have plenty of them in my refrigerator at the lab."
It would have been a fantastic and vital discovery if I had been a good
biologist. But I wasn't a good biologist. We had a good idea, a good
experiment, the right equipment, but I screwed it up: I gave her infected
ribosomes -- the grossest possible error that you could make in an
experiment like that. My ribosomes had been in the refrigerator for almost a
month, and had become contaminated with some other living things. Had I
prepared those ribosomes promptly over again and given them to her in a
serious and careful way, with everything under control, that experiment
would have worked,, and we would have been the first to demonstrate the
uniformity of life: the machinery of making proteins, the ribosomes, is the
same in every creature. We were there at the right place, we were doing the
right things, but I was doing things as an amateur -- stupid and sloppy.
You know what it reminds me of? The husband of Madame Bovary in
Flaubert's book, a dull country doctor who had some idea of how to fix club
feet, and all he did was screw people up. I was similar to that unpracticed
surgeon. The other work on the phage I never wrote up -- Edgar kept asking
me to write it up, but I never got around to it. That's the trouble with not
being in your own field: You don't take it seriously.
I did write something informally on it. I sent it to Edgar, who laughed
when he read it. It wasn't in the standard form that biologists use --
first, procedures, and so forth. I spent a lot of time explaining things
that all the biologists knew. Edgar made a shortened version, but I couldn't
understand it. I don't think they ever published it. I never published it
directly.
Watson thought the stuff I had done with phages was of some interest,
so he invited me to go to Harvard. I gave a talk to the biology department
about the double mutations which occurred so close together. I told them my
guess was that one mutation made a change in the protein, such as changing
the pH of an amino acid, while the other mutation made the opposite change
on a different amino acid in the same protein, so that it partially balanced
the first mutation -- not perfectly, but enough to let the phage operate
again. I thought they were two changes in the same protein, which chemically
compensated each other.
That turned out not to be the case. It was found out a few years later
by people who undoubtedly developed a technique for producing and detecting
the mutations faster, that what happened was, the first mutation was a
mutation in which an entire DNA base was missing. Now the "code" was shifted
and could not be "read" any more. The second mutation was either one in
which an extra base was put back in, or two more were taken out. Now the
code could be read again. The closer the second mutation occurred to the
first, the less message would be altered by the double mutation, and the
more completely the phage would recover its lost abilities. The fact that
there are three "letters" to code each amino acid was thus demonstrated.
While I was at Harvard that week, Watson suggested something and we did
an experiment together for a few days. It was an incomplete experiment, but
I learned some new lab techniques from one of the best men in the field.
But that was my big moment: I gave a seminar in the biology department
of Harvard! I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.
I learned a lot of things in biology, and I gained a lot of experience.
I got better at pronouncing the words, knowing what not to include in a
paper or a seminar, and detecting a weak technique in an experiment. But I
love physics, and I love to go back to it.
--------
While I was still a graduate student at Princeton, I worked as a
research assistant under John Wheeler. He gave me a problem to work on, and
it got hard, and I wasn't getting anywhere. So I went back to an idea that I
had had earlier, at MIT. The idea was that electrons don't act on
themselves, they only act on other electrons.
There was this problem: When you shake an electron, it radiates energy,
and so there's a loss. That means there must be a force on it. And there
must be a different force when it's charged than when it's not charged. (If
the force were exactly the same when it was charged and not charged, in one
case it would lose energy, and in the other it wouldn't. You can't have two
different answers to the same problem.)
The standard theory was that it was the electron acting on itself that
made that force (called the force of radiation reaction), and I had only
electrons acting on other electrons. So I was in some difficulty, I
realized, by that time. (When I was at MIT, I got the idea without noticing
the problem, but by the time I got to Princeton, I knew that problem.)
What I thought was: I'll shake this electron. It will make some nearby
electron shake, and the effect back from the nearby electron would be the
origin of the force of radiation reaction. So I did some calculations and
took them to Wheeler.
Wheeler, right away, said, "Well, that isn't right because it varies
inversely as the square of the distance of the other electrons, whereas it
should not depend on any of these variables at all. It'll also depend
inversely upon the mass of the other electron; it'll be proportional to the
charge on the other electron."
What bothered me was, I thought he must have done the calculation. I
only realized later that a man like Wheeler could immediately see all that
stuff when you give him the problem. I had to calculate, but he could see.
Then he said, "And it'll be delayed -- the wave returns late -- so all
you've described is reflected light."
"Oh! Of course," I said.
"But wait," he said. "Let's suppose it returns by advanced waves --
reactions backward in time -- so it comes back at the right time. We saw the
effect varied inversely as the square of the distance, but suppose there are
a lot of electrons, all over space: the number is proportional to the square
of the distance. So maybe we can make it all compensate."
We found out we could do that. It came out very nicely, and fit very
well. It was a classical theory that could be right, even though it differed
from Maxwell's standard, or Lorentz's standard theory. It didn't have any
trouble with the infinity of self-action, and it was ingenious. It had
actions and delays, forwards and backwards in time -- we called it
"half-advanced and half-retarded potentials."
Wheeler and I thought the next problem was to turn to the quantum
theory of electrodynamics, which had difficulties (I thought) with the
self-action of the electron. We figured if we could get rid of the
difficulty first in classical physics, and then make a quantum theory out of
that, we could straighten out the quantum theory as well.
Now that we had got the classical theory right, Wheeler said, "Feynman,
you're a young fella -- you should give a seminar on this. You need
experience in giving talks. Meanwhile, I'll work out the quantum theory part
and give a seminar on that later."
So it was to be my first technical talk, and Wheeler made arrangements
with Eugene Wigner to put it on the regular seminar schedule.
A day or two before the talk I saw Wigner in the hall. "Feynman," he
said, "I think that work you're doing with Wheeler is very interesting, so
I've invited Russell to the seminar." Henry Norris Russell, the famous,
great astronomer of the day, was coming to the lecture!
Wigner went on. "I think Professor von Neumann would also be
interested." Johnny von Neumann was the greatest mathematician around. "And
Professor Pauli is visiting from Switzerland, it so happens, so I've invited
Professor Pauli to come" -- Pauli was a very famous physicist -- and by this
time, I'm turning yellow. Finally, Wigner said, "Professor Einstein only
rarely comes to our weekly seminars, but your work is so interesting that
I've invited him specially, so he's coming, too."
By this time I must have turned green, because Wigner said, "No, no!
Don't worry! I'll just warn you, though: If Professor Russell falls asleep
-- and he will undoubtedly fall asleep -- it doesn't mean that the seminar
is bad; he falls asleep in all the seminars. On the other hand, if Professor
Pauli is nodding all the time, and seems to be in agreement as the seminar
goes along, pay no attention. Professor Pauli has palsy."
I went back to Wheeler and named all the big, famous people who were
coming to the talk he got me to give, and told him I was uneasy about it.
"It's all right," he said. "Don't worry. I'll answer all the
questions."
So I prepared the talk, and when the day came, I went in and did
something that young men who have had no experience in giving talks often do
-- I put too many equations up on the blackboard. You see, a young fella
doesn't know how to say, "Of course, that varies inversely, and this goes
this way..." because everybody listening already knows; they can see it. But
he doesn't know. He can only make it come out by actually doing the algebra
-- and therefore the reams of equations.
As I was writing these equations all over the blackboard ahead of time,
Einstein came in and said pleasantly, "Hello, I'm coming to your seminar.
But first, where is the tea?"
I told him, and continued writing the equations.
Then the time came to give the talk, and here are these monster minds
in front of me, waiting! My first technical talk -- and I have this
audience! I mean they would put me through the wringer! I remember very
clearly seeing my hands shaking as they were pulling out my notes from a
brown envelope.
But then a miracle occurred, as it has occurred again and again in my
life, and it's very lucky for me: the moment I start to think about the
physics, and have to concentrate on what I'm explaining, nothing else
occupies my mind -- I'm completely immune to being nervous. So after I
started to go, I just didn't know who was in the room. I was only explaining
this idea, that's all.
But then the end of the seminar came, and it was time for questions.
First off, Pauli, who was sitting next to Einstein, gets up and says, "I do
not sink dis teory can be right, because of dis, and dis, and dis," and he
turns to Einstein and says, "Don't you agree, Professor Einstein?"
Einstein says, "Nooooooooooooo," a nice, German-sounding "No," -- very
polite. "I find only that it would be very difficult to make a corresponding
theory for gravitational interaction." He meant for the general theory of
relativity, which was his baby. He continued: "Since we have at this time
not a great deal of experimental evidence, I am not absolutely sure of the
correct gravitational theory." Einstein appreciated that things might be
different from what his theory stated; he was very tolerant of other ideas.
I wish I had remembered what Pauli said, because I discovered years
later that the theory was not satisfactory when it came to making the
quantum theory. It's possible that that great man noticed the difficulty
immediately and explained it to me in the question, but I was so relieved at
not having to answer the questions that I didn't really listen to them
carefully. I do remember walking up the steps of Palmer Library with Pauli,
who said to me, "What is Wheeler going to say about the quantum theory when
he gives his talk?"
I said, "I don't know. He hasn't told me. He's working it out himself."
"Oh?" he said. "The man works and doesn't tell his assistant what he's
doing on the quantum theory?" He came closer to me and said in a low,
secretive voice, "Wheeler will never give that seminar."
And it's true. Wheeler didn't give the seminar. He thought it would be
easy to work out the quantum part; he thought he had it, almost. But he
didn't. And by the time the seminar came around, he realized he didn't know
how to do it, and therefore didn't have anything to say.
I never solved it, either -- a quantum theory of half-advanced,
half-retarded potentials -- and I worked on it for years.
--------
The reason why I say I'm "uncultured" or "anti-intellectual" probably
goes all the way back to the time when I was in high school. I was always
worried about being a sissy; I didn't want to be too delicate. To me, no
real man ever paid any attention to poetry and such things. How poetry ever
got written -- that never struck me! So I developed a negative attitude
toward the guy who studies French literature, or studies too much music or
poetry -- all those "fancy" things. I admired better the steel-worker, the
welder, or the machine shop man. I always thought the guy who worked in the
machine shop and could make things, now he was a real guy! That was my
attitude. To be a practical man was, to me, always somehow a positive
virtue, and to be "cultured" or "intellectual" was not. The first was right,
of course, but the second was crazy.
I still had this feeling when I was doing my graduate study at
Princeton, as you'll see. I used to eat often in a nice little restaurant
called Papa's Place. One day, while I was eating there, a painter in his
painting clothes came down from an upstairs room he'd been painting, and sat
near me. Somehow we struck up a conversation and he started talking about
how you've got to learn a lot to be in the painting business. "For example,"
he said, "in this restaurant, what colors would you use to paint the walls,
if you had the job to do?"
I said I didn't know, and he said, "You have a dark band up to
such-and-such a height, because, you see, people who sit at the tables rub
their elbows against the walls, so you don't want a nice, white wall there.
It gets dirty too easily. But above that, you do want it white to give a
feeling of cleanliness to the restaurant."
The guy seemed to know what he was doing, and I was sitting there,
hanging on his words, when he said, "And you also have to know about colors
-- how to get different colors when you mix the paint. For example, what
colors would you mix to get yellow?"
I didn't know how to get yellow by mixing paints. If it's light, you
mix green and red, but I knew he was talking paints. So I said, "I don't
know how you get yellow without using yellow."
"Well," he said, "if you mix red and white, you'll get yellow."
"Are you sure you don't mean pink?" "No," he said, "you'll get yellow"
-- and I believed that he got yellow, because he was a professional painter,
and I always admired guys like that. But I still wondered how he did it.
I got an idea. "It must be some kind of chemical change. Were you using
some special kind of pigments that make a chemical change?"
"No," he said, "any old pigments will work. You go down to the
five-and-ten and get some paint -- just a regular can of red paint and a
regular can of white paint -- and I'll mix 'em, and I'll show how you get
yellow."
At this juncture I was thinking, "Something is crazy. I know enough
about paints to know you won't get yellow, but he must know that you do get
yellow, and therefore something interesting happens. I've got to see what it
is!" So I said, "OK, I'll get the paints." The painter went back upstairs to
finish his painting job, and the restaurant owner came over and said to me,
"What's the idea of arguing with that man? The man is a painter; he's been a
painter all his life, and he says he gets yellow. So why argue with him?"
I felt embarrassed. I didn't know what to say. Finally I said, "All my
life, I've been studying light. And I think that with red and white you
can't get yellow -- you can only get pink."
So I went to the five-and-ten and got the paint, and brought it back to
the restaurant. The painter came down from upstairs, and the restaurant
owner was there too. I put the cans of paint on an old chair, and the
painter began to mix the paint. He put a little more red, he put a little
more white -- it still looked pink to me -- and he mixed some more. Then he
mumbled something like, "I used to have a little tube of yellow here to
sharpen it up -- a bit -- then this'll be yellow."
"Oh!" I said. "Of course! You add yellow, and you can get yellow, but
you couldn't do it without the yellow."
The painter went back upstairs to paint.
The restaurant owner said, "That guy has his nerve, arguing with a guy
who's studied light all his life!"
But that shows you how much I trusted these "real guys." The painter
had told me so much stuff that was reasonable that I was ready to give a
certain chance that there was an odd phenomenon I didn't know. I was
expecting pink, but my set of thoughts were, "The only way to get yellow
will be something new and interesting, and I've got to see this."
I've very often made mistakes in my physics by thinking the theory
isn't as good as it really is, thinking that there are lots of complications
that are going to spoil it -- an attitude that anything can happen, in spite
of what you're pretty sure should happen.
--------
At the Princeton graduate school, the physics department and the math
department shared a common lounge, and every day at four o'clock we would
have tea. It was a way of relaxing in the afternoon, in addition to
imitating an English college. People would sit around playing Go, or
discussing theorems. In those days topology was the big thing.
I still remember a guy sitting on the couch, thinking very hard, and
another guy standing in front of him, saying, "And therefore such-and-such
is true."
"Why is that?" the guy on the couch asks.
"It's trivial! It's trivial!" the standing guy says, and he rapidly
reels off a series of logical steps: "First you assume thus-and-so, then we
have Kerchoff's this-and-that; then there's Waffenstoffer's Theorem, and we
substitute this and construct that. Now you put the vector which goes around
here and then thus-and-so..." The guy on the couch is struggling to
understand all this stuff, which goes on at high speed for about fifteen
minutes!
Finally the standing guy comes out the other end, and the guy on the
couch says, "Yeah, yeah. It's trivial."
We physicists were laughing, trying to figure them out. We decided that
"trivial" means "proved." So we joked with the mathematicians: "We have a
new theorem -- that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because
every theorem that's proved is trivial."
The mathematicians didn't like that theorem, and I teased them about
it. I said there are never any surprises -- that the mathematicians only
prove things that are obvious. Topology was not at all obvious to the
mathematicians. There were all kinds of weird possibilities that were
"counterintuitive." Then I got an idea. I challenged them: "I bet there
isn't a single theorem that you can tell me -- what the assumptions are and
what the theorem is in terms I can understand -- where I can't tell you
right away whether it's true or false."
It often went like this: They would explain to me, "You've got an
orange, OK? Now you cut the orange into a finite number of pieces, put it
back together, and it's as big as the sun. True or false?"
"No holes?"
"No holes."
"Impossible! There ain't no such a thing."
"Ha! We got him! Everybody gather around! It's So-and-so's theorem of
immeasurable measure!"
Just when they think they've got me, I remind them, "But you said an
orange! You can't cut the orange peel any thinner than the atoms."
"But we have the condition of continuity: We can keep on cutting!"
"No, you said an orange, so I assumed that you meant a real orange."
So I always won. If I guessed it right, great. If I guessed it wrong,
there was always something I could find in their simplification that they
left out.
Actually, there was a certain amount of genuine quality to my guesses.
I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining
something that I'm trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For
instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and
they're all excited. As they're telling me the conditions of the theorem, I
construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set
(one ball) -- disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs,
or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state
the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn't true for my
hairy green ball thing, so I say, "False!"
If it's true, they get all excited, and I let them go on for a while.
Then I point out my counterexample.
"Oh. We forgot to tell you that it's Class 2 Hausdorff homomorphic."
"Well, then," I say, "It's trivial! It's trivial!" By that time I know
which way it goes, even though I don't know what Hausdorff homomorphic
means.
I guessed right most of the time because although the mathematicians
thought their topology theorems were counterintuitive, they weren't really
as difficult as they looked. You can get used to the funny properties of
this ultra-fine cutting business and do a pretty good job of guessing how it
will come out.
Although I gave the mathematicians a lot of trouble, they were always
very kind to me. They were a happy bunch of boys who were developing things,
and they were terrifically excited about it. They would discuss their
"trivial" theorems, and always try to explain something to you if you asked
a simple question.
Paul Olum and I shared a bathroom. We got to be good friends, and he
tried to teach me mathematics. He got me up to homotopy groups, and at that
point I gave up. But the things below that I understood fairly well.
One thing I never did learn was contour integration. I had learned to
do integrals by various methods shown in a book that my high school physics
teacher Mr. Bader had given me.
One day he told me to stay after class. "Feynman," he said, "you talk
too much and you make too much noise. I know why. You're bored. So I'm going
to give you a book. You go up there in the back, in the corner, and study
this book, and when you know everything that's in this book, you can talk
again."
So every physics class, I paid no attention to what was going on with
Pascal's Law, or whatever they were doing. I was up in the back with this
book: Advanced Calculus, by Woods. Bader knew I had studied Calculus for the
Practical Man a little bit, so he gave me the real works -- it was for a
junior or senior course in college. It had Fourier series, Bessel functions,
determinants, elliptic functions -- all kinds of wonderful stuff that I
didn't know anything about.
That book also showed how to differentiate parameters under the
integral sign -- it's a certain operation. It turns out that's not taught
very much in the universities; they don't emphasize it. But I caught on how
to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and again. So
because I was self-taught using that book, I had peculiar methods of doing
integrals.
The result was, when guys at MIT or Princeton had trouble doing a
certain integral, it was because they couldn't do it with the standard
methods they had learned in school. If it was contour integration, they
would have found it; if it was a simple series expansion, they would have
found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under the integral sign,
and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only
because my box of tools was different from everybody else's, and they had
tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.
--------
My father was always interested in magic and carnival tricks, and
wanting to see how they worked. One of the things he knew about was
mindreaders. When he was a little boy, growing up in a small town called
Patchogue, in the middle of Long Island, it was announced on advertisements
posted all over that a mindreader was coming next Wednesday. The posters
said that some respected citizens -- the mayor, a judge, a banker -- should
take a five-dollar bill and hide it somewhere, and when the mindreader came
to town, he would find it.
When he came, the people gathered around to watch him do his work. He
takes the hands of the banker and the judge, who had hidden the five-dollar
bill, and starts to walk down the street. He gets to an intersection, turns
the corner, walks down another street, then another, to the correct house.
He goes with them, always holding their hands, into the house, up to the
second floor, into the right room, walks up to a bureau, lets go of their
hands, opens the correct drawer, and there's the five-dollar bill. Very
dramatic!
In those days it was difficult to get a good education, so the
mindreader was hired as a tutor for my father. Well, my father, after one of
his lessons, asked the mindreader how he was able to find the money without
anyone telling him where it was.
The mindreader explained that you hold onto their hands, loosely, and
as you move, you jiggle a little bit. You come to an intersection, where you
can go forward, to the left, or to the right. You jiggle a little bit to the
left, and if it's incorrect, you feel a certain amount of resistance,
because they don't expect you to move that way. But when you move in the
right direction, because they think you might be able to do it, they give
way more easily, and there's no resistance. So you must always be jiggling a
little bit, testing out which seems to be the easiest way.
My father told me the story and said he thought it would still take a
lot of practice. He never tried it himself.
Later, when I was doing graduate work at Princeton, I decided to try it
on a fellow named Bill Woodward. I suddenly announced that I was a
mindreader, and could read his mind. I told him to go into the "laboratory"
-- a big room with rows of tables covered with equipment of various kinds,
with electric circuits, tools, and junk all over the place -- pick out a
certain object, somewhere, and come out. I explained, "Now I'll read your
mind and take you right up to the object."
He went into the lab, noted a particular object, and came out. I took
his hand and started jiggling. We went down this aisle, then that one, right
to the object. We tried it three times. One time I got the object right on
-- and it was in the middle of a whole bunch of stuff. Another time I went
to the right place but missed the object by a few inches -- wrong object.
The third time, something went wrong. But it worked better than I thought.
It was very easy.
Some time after that, when I was about twenty-six or so, my father and
I went to Atlantic City, where they had various carnival things going on
outdoors. While my father was doing some business, I went to see a
mindreader. He was seated on the stage with his back to the audience,
dressed in robes and wearing a great big turban. He had an assistant, a
little guy who was running around through the audience, saying things like,
"Oh, Great Master, what is the color of this pocketbook?"
"Blue!" says the master.
"And oh, Illustrious Sir, what is the name of this woman?"
"Marie!"
Some guy gets up: "What's my name?"
"Henry."
I get up and say, "What's my name?"
He doesn't answer. The other guy was obviously a confederate, but I
couldn't figure out how the mindreader did the other tricks, like telling
the color of the pocketbook. Did he wear earphones underneath the turban?
When I met up with my father, I told him about it. He said, "They have
a code worked out, but I don't know what it is. Let's go back and find out."
We went back to the place, and my father said to me, "Here's fifty
cents. Go get your fortune read in the booth back there, and I'll see you in
half an hour."
I knew what he was doing. He was going to tell the man a story, and it
would go smoother if his son wasn't there going, "Ooh, ooh!" all the time.
He had to get me out of the way.
When he came back he told me the whole code: "Blue is 'Oh, Great
Master,' Green is 'Oh, Most Knowledgeable One,'" and so forth. He explained,
"I went up to him, afterwards, and told him I used to do a show in
Patchogue, and we had a code, but it couldn't do many numbers, and the range
of colors was shorter. I asked him, 'How do you carry so much information?'"
The mindreader was so proud of his code that he sat down and explained
the whole works to my father. My father was a salesman. He could set up a
situation like that. I can't do stuff like that.
--------
When I was a kid I had a "lab." It wasn't a laboratory in the sense
that I would measure, or do important experiments.
Instead, I would play: I'd make a motor, I'd make a gadget that would
go off when something passed a photocell. I'd play around with selenium; I
was piddling around all the time. I did calculate a little bit for the lamp
bank, a series of switches and bulbs I used as resistors to control
voltages. But all that was for application. I never did any laboratory kind
of experiments.
I also had a microscope and loved to watch things under the microscope.
It took patience: I would get something under the microscope and I would
watch it interminably. I saw many interesting things, like everybody sees --
a diatom slowly making its way across the slide, and so on.
One day I was watching a paramecium and I saw something that was not
described in the books I got in school -- in college, even. These books
always simplify things so the world will be more like they want it to be:
When they're talking about the behavior of animals, they always start out
with, "The paramecium is extremely simple; it has a simple behavior. It
turns as its slipper shape moves through the water until it hits something,
at which time it recoils, turns through an angle, and then starts out
again."
It isn't really right. First of all, as everybody knows, the paramecia,
from time to time, conjugate with each other -- they meet and exchange
nuclei. How do they decide when it's time to do that? (Never mind; that's
not my observation.)
I watched these paramecia hit something, recoil, turn through an angle,
and go again. The idea that it's mechanical, like a computer program -- it
doesn't look that way. They go different distances, they recoil different
distances, they turn through angles that are different in various cases;
they don't always turn to the right; they're very irregular. It looks
random, because you don't know what they're hitting; you don't know all the
chemicals they're smelling, or what.
One of the things I wanted to watch was what happens to the paramecium
when the water that it's in dries up. It was claimed that the paramecium can
dry up into a sort of hardened seed. I had a drop of water on the slide
under my microscope, and in the drop of water was a paramecium and some
"grass" -- at the scale of the paramecium, it looked like a network of
jackstraws. As the drop of water evaporated, over a time of fifteen or
twenty minutes, the paramecium got into a tighter and tighter situation:
there was more and more of this back-and-forth until it could hardly move.
It was stuck between these "sticks," almost jammed.
Then I saw something I had never seen or heard of: the paramecium lost
its shape. It could flex itself, like an amoeba. It began to push itself
against one of the sticks, and began dividing into two prongs until the
division was about halfway up the paramecium, at which time it decided that
wasn't a very good idea, and backed away.
So my impression of these animals is that their behavior is much too
simplified in the books. It is not so utterly mechanical or one-dimensional
as they say. They should describe the behavior of these simple animals
correctly. Until we see how many dimensions of behavior even a one-celled
animal has, we won't be able to fully understand the behavior of more
complicated animals.
I also enjoyed watching bugs. I had an insect book when I was about
thirteen. It said that dragonflies are not harmful; they don't sting. In our
neighborhood it was well known that "darning needles," as we called them,
were very dangerous when they'd sting. So if we were outside somewhere
playing baseball, or something, and one of these things would fly around,
everybody would run for cover, waving their arms, yelling, "A darning
needle! A darning needle!"
So one day I was on the beach, and I'd just read this book that said
dragonflies don't sting. A darning needle came along, and everybody was
screaming and running around, and I just sat there. "Don't worry!" I said.
"Darning needles don't sting!"
The thing landed on my foot. Everybody was yelling and it was a big
mess, because this darning needle was sitting on my foot. And there I was,
this scientific wonder, saying it wasn't going to sting me.
You're sure this is a story that's going to come out that it stings me
-- but it didn't. The book was right. But I did sweat a bit.
I also had a little hand microscope. It was a toy microscope, and I
pulled the magnification piece out of it, and would hold it in my hand like
a magnifying glass, even though it was a microscope of forty or fifty power.
With care you could hold the focus. So I could go around and look at things
right out in the street.
So when I was in graduate school at Princeton, I once took it out of my
pocket to look at some ants that were crawling around on some ivy. I had to
exclaim out loud, I was so excited. What I saw was an ant and an aphid,
which ants take care of -- they carry them from plant to plant if the plant
they're on is dying. In return the ants get partially digested aphid juice,
called "honeydew." I knew that; my father had told me about it, but I had
never seen it.
So here was this aphid and sure enough, an ant came along, and patted
it with its feet -- all around the aphid, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat. This was
terribly exciting! Then the juice came out of the back of the aphid. And
because it was magnified, it looked like a big, beautiful, glistening ball,
like a balloon, because of the surface tension. Because the microscope
wasn't very good, the drop was colored a little bit from chromatic
aberration in the lens -- it was a gorgeous thing!
The ant took this ball in its two front feet, lifted it off the aphid,
and held it. The world is so different at that scale that you can pick up
water and hold it! The ants probably have a fatty or greasy material on
their legs that doesn't break the surface tension of the water when they
hold it up. Then the ant broke the surface of the drop with its mouth, and
the surface tension collapsed the drop right into his gut. It was very
interesting to see this whole thing happen!
In my room at Princeton I had a bay window with a U-shaped windowsill.
One day some ants came out on the windowsill and wandered around a little
bit. I got curious as to how they found things. I wondered, how do they know
where to go? Can they tell each other where food is, like bees can? Do they
have any sense of geometry?
This is all amateurish; everybody knows the answer, but I didn't know
the answer, so the first thing I did was to stretch some string across the U
of the bay window and hang a piece of folded cardboard with sugar on it from
the string. The idea of this was to isolate the sugar from the ants, so they
wouldn't find it accidentally. I wanted to have everything under control.
Next I made a lot of little strips of paper and put a fold in them, so
I could pick up ants and ferry them from one place to another. I put the
folded strips of paper in two places: Some were by the sugar (hanging from
the string), and the others were near the ants in a particular location. I
sat there all afternoon, reading and watching, until an ant happened to walk
onto one of my little paper ferries. Then I took him over to the sugar.
After a few ants had been ferried over to the sugar, one of them
accidentally walked onto one of the ferries nearby, and I carried him back.
I wanted to see how long it would take the other ants to get the
message to go to the "ferry terminal." It started slowly, but rapidly
increased until I was going mad ferrying the ants back and forth.
But suddenly, when everything was going strong, I began to deliver the
ants from the sugar to a different spot. The question now was, does the ant
learn to go back to where it just came from, or does it go where it went the
time before?
After a while there were practically no ants going to the first place
(which would take them to the sugar), whereas there were many ants at the
second place, milling around, trying to find the sugar. So I figured out so
far that they went where they just came from.
In another experiment, I laid out a lot of glass microscope slides, and
got the ants to walk on them, back and forth, to some sugar I put on the
windowsill. Then, by replacing an old slide with a new one, or by
rearranging the slides, I could demonstrate that the ants had no sense of
geometry: they couldn't figure out where something was. If they went to the
sugar one way, and there was a shorter way back, they would never figure out
the short way.
It was also pretty clear from rearranging the glass slides that the
ants left some sort of trail. So then came a lot of easy experiments to find
out how long it takes a trail to dry up, whether it can be easily wiped off,
and so on. I also found out the trail wasn't directional. If I'd pick up an
ant on a piece of paper, turn him around and around, and then put him back
onto the trail, he wouldn't know that he was going the wrong way until he
met another ant. (Later, in Brazil, I noticed some leaf-cutting ants and
tried the same experiment on them. They could tell, within a few steps,
whether they were going toward the food or away from it -- presumably from
the trail, which might be a series of smells in a pattern: A, B, space, A,
B, space, and so on.)
I tried at one point to make the ants go around in a circle, but I
didn't have enough patience to set it up. I could see no reason, other than
lack of patience, why it couldn't be done.
One thing that made experimenting difficult was that breathing on the
ants made them scurry. It must be an instinctive thing against some animal
that eats them or disturbs them. I don't know if it was the warmth, the
moisture, or the smell of my breath that bothered them, but I always had to
hold my breath and kind of look to one side so as not to confuse the
experiment while I was ferrying the ants.
One question that I wondered about was why the ant trails look so
straight and nice. The ants look as if they know what they're doing, as if
they have a good sense of geometry. Yet the experiments that I did to try to
demonstrate their sense of geometry didn't work.
Many years later, when I was at Caltech and lived in a little house on
Alameda Street, some ants came out around the bathtub. I thought, "This is a
great opportunity." I put some sugar on the other end of the bathtub, and
sat there the whole afternoon until an ant finally found the sugar. It's
only a question of patience.
The moment the ant found the sugar, I picked up a colored pencil that I
had ready (I had previously done experiments indicating that the ants don't
give a damn about pencil marks -- they walk right over them -- so I knew I
wasn't disturbing anything), and behind where the ant went I drew a line so
I could tell where his trail was. The ant wandered a little bit wrong to get
back to the hole, so the line was quite wiggly, unlike a typical ant trail.
When the next ant to find the sugar began to go back, I marked his
trail with another color. (By the way, he followed the first ant's return
trail back, rather than his own incoming trail. My theory is that when an
ant has found some food, he leaves a much stronger trail than when he's just
wandering around.)
This second ant was in a great hurry and followed, pretty much, the
original trail. But because he was going so fast he would go straight out,
as if he were coasting, when the trail was wiggly. Often, as the ant was
"coasting," he would find the trail again. Already it was apparent that the
second ant's return was slightly straighter. With successive ants the same
"improvement" of the trail by hurriedly and carelessly "following" it
occurred.
I followed eight or ten ants with my pencil until their trails became a
neat line right along the bathtub. It's something like sketching: You draw a
lousy line at first; then you go over it a few times and it makes a nice
line after a while.
I remember that when I was a kid my father would tell me how wonderful
ants are, and how they cooperate. I would watch very carefully three or four
ants carrying a little piece of chocolate back to their nest. At first
glance it looks like efficient, marvelous, brilliant cooperation. But if you
look at it carefully, you'll see that it's nothing of the kind: They're all
behaving as if the chocolate is held up by something else. They pull at it
one way or the other way. An ant may crawl over it while it's being pulled
at by the others. It wobbles, it wiggles, the directions are all confused.
The chocolate doesn't move in a nice way toward the nest.
The Brazilian leaf-cutting ants, which are otherwise so marvelous, have
a very interesting stupidity associated with them that I'm surprised hasn't
evolved out. It takes considerable work for the ant to cut the circular arc
in order to get a piece of leaf. When the cutting is done, there's a
fifty-fifty chance that the ant will pull on the wrong side, letting the
piece he just cut fall to the ground. Half the time, the ant will yank and
pull and yank and pull on the wrong part of the leaf, until it gives up and
starts to cut another piece. There is no attempt to pick up a piece that it,
or any other ant, has already cut. So it's quite obvious, if you watch very
carefully, that it's not a brilliant business of cutting leaves and carrying
them away; they go to a leaf, cut an arc, and pick the wrong side half the
time while the right piece falls down.
In Princeton the ants found my larder, where I had jelly and bread and
stuff, which was quite a distance from the window. A long line of ants
marched along the floor across the living room. It was during the time I was
doing these experiments on the ants, so I thought to myself, "What can I do
to stop them from coming to my larder without killing any ants? No poison;
you gotta be humane to the ants!"
What I did was this: In preparation, I put a bit of sugar about six or
eight inches from their entry point into the room, that they didn't know
about. Then I made those ferry things again, and whenever an ant returning
with food walked onto my little ferry, I'd carry him over and put him on the
sugar. Any ant coming toward the larder that walked onto a ferry I also
carried over to the sugar. Eventually the ants found their way from the
sugar to their hole, so this new trail was being doubly reinforced, while
the old trail was being used less and less. I knew that after half an hour
or so the old trail would dry up, and in an hour they were out of my larder.
I didn't wash the floor; I didn't do anything but ferry ants.
--------
Feynman, the Bomb, and the Military
--------
When the war began in Europe but had not yet been declared in the
United States, there was a lot of talk about getting ready and being
patriotic. The newspapers had big articles on businessmen volunteering to go
to Plattsburg, New York, to do military training, and so on.
I began to think I ought to make some kind of contribution, too. After
I finished up at MIT, a friend of mine from the fraternity, Maurice Meyer,
who was in the Army Signal Corps, took me to see a colonel at the Signal
Corps offices in New York.
"I'd like to aid my country, sir, and since I'm technically-minded,
maybe there's a way I could help."
"Well, you'd better just go up to Plattsburg to boot camp and go
through basic training. Then we'll be able to use you," the colonel said.
"But isn't there some way to use my talent more directly?"
"No; this is the way the army is organized. Go through the regular
way."
I went outside and sat in the park to think about it. I thought and
thought: Maybe the best way to make a contribution is to go along with their
way. But fortunately, I thought a little more, and said, "To hell with it!
I'll wait awhile. Maybe something will happen where they can use me more
effectively."
I went to Princeton to do graduate work, and in the spring I went once
again to the Bell Labs in New York to apply for a summer job. I loved to
tour the Bell Labs. Bill Shockley, the guy who invented transistors, would
show me around. I remember somebody's room where they had marked a window:
The George Washington Bridge was being built, and these guys in the lab were
watching its progress. They had plotted the original curve when the main
cable was first put up, and they could measure the small differences as the
bridge was being suspended from it, as the curve turned into a parabola. It
was just the kind of thing I would like to be able to think of doing. I
admired those guys; I was always hoping I could work with them one day.
Some guys from the lab took me out to this seafood restaurant for
lunch, and they were all pleased that they were going to have oysters. I
lived by the ocean and I couldn't look at this stuff; I couldn't eat fish,
let alone oysters.
I thought to myself, "I've gotta be brave. I've gotta eat an oyster."
I took an oyster, and it was absolutely terrible. But I said to myself,
"That doesn't really prove you're a man. You didn't know how terrible it was
gonna be. It was easy enough when it was uncertain."
The others kept talking about how good the oysters were, so I had
another oyster, and that was really harder than the first one.
This time, which must have been my fourth or fifth time touring the
Bell Labs, they accepted me. I was very happy. In those days it was hard to
find a job where you could be with other scientists.
But then there was a big excitement at Princeton. General Trichel from
the army came around and spoke to us; "We've got to have physicists!
Physicists are very important to us in the army! We need three physicists!"
You have to understand that, in those days, people hardly knew what a
physicist was. Einstein was known as a mathematician, for instance -- so it
was rare that anybody needed physicists. I thought, "This is my opportunity
to make a contribution," and I volunteered to work for the army.
I asked the Bell Labs if they would let me work for the army that
summer, and they said they had war work, too, if that was what I wanted. But
I was caught up in a patriotic fever and lost a good opportunity. It would
have been much smarter to work in the Bell Labs. But one gets a little silly
during those times.
I went to the Frankfort Arsenal, in Philadelphia, and worked on a
dinosaur: a mechanical computer for directing artillery. When airplanes flew
by, the gunners would watch them in a telescope, and this mechanical
computer, with gears and cams and so forth, would try to predict where the
plane was going to be. It was a most beautifully designed and built machine,
and one of the important ideas in it was non-circular gears -- gears that
weren't circular, but would mesh anyway. Because of the changing radii of
the gears, one shaft would turn as a function of the other. However, this
machine was at the end of the line. Very soon afterwards, electronic
computers came in.
After saying all this stuff about how physicists were so important to
the army, the first thing they had me doing was checking gear drawings to
see if the numbers were right. This went on for quite a while. Then,
gradually, the guy in charge of the department began to see I was useful for
other things, and as the summer went on, he would spend more time discussing
things with me.
One mechanical engineer at Frankfort was always trying to design things
and could never get everything right. One time he designed a box full of
gears, one of which was a big, eight-inch-diameter gear wheel that had six
spokes. The fella says excitedly, "Well, boss, how is it? How is it?"
"Just fine!" the boss replies. "All you have to do is specify a shaft
passer on each of the spokes, so the gear wheel can turn!" The guy had
designed a shaft that went right between the spokes!
The boss went on to tell us that there was such a thing as a shaft
passer (I thought he must have been joking). It was invented by the Germans
during the war to keep the British minesweepers from catching the cables
that held the German mines floating under water at a certain depth. With
these shaft passers, the German cables could allow the British cables to
pass through as if they were going through a revolving door. So it was
possible to put shaft passers on all the spokes, but the boss didn't mean
that the machinists should go to all that trouble; the guy should instead
just redesign it and put the shaft somewhere else.
Every once in a while the army sent down a lieutenant to check on how
things were going. Our boss told us that since we were a civilian section,
the lieutenant was higher in rank than any of us. "Don't tell the lieutenant
anything," he said. "Once he begins to think he knows what we're doing,
he'll be giving us all kinds of orders and screwing everything up."
By that time I was designing some things, but when the lieutenant came
by, I pretended I didn't know what I was doing, that I was only following
orders.
"What are you doing here, Mr. Feynman?"
"Well, I draw a sequence of lines at successive angles, and then I'm
supposed to measure out from the center different distances according to
this table, and lay it out..."
"Well, what is it?"
"I think it's a cam." I had actually designed the thing, but I acted as
if somebody had just told me exactly what to do.
The lieutenant couldn't get any information from anybody, and we went
happily along, working on this mechanical computer, without any
interference.
One day the lieutenant came by, and asked us a simple question:
"Suppose that the observer is not at the same location as the gunner -- how
do you handle that?"
We got a terrible shock. We had designed the whole business using polar
coordinates, using angles and the radius distance. With X and Y coordinates,
it's easy to correct for a displaced observer. It's simply a matter of
addition or subtraction. But with polar coordinates, it's a terrible mess!
So it turned out that this lieutenant whom we were trying to keep from
telling us anything ended up telling us something very important that we had
forgotten in the design of this device: the possibility that the gun and the
observing station are not at the same place! It was a big mess to fix it.
Near the end of the summer I was given my first real design job: a machine
that would make a continuous curve out of a set of points -- one point
coming in every fifteen seconds -- from a new invention developed in England
for tracking airplanes, called "radar." It was the first time I had ever
done any mechanical designing, so I was a little bit frightened.
I went over to one of the other guys and said, "You're a mechanical
engineer; I don't know how to do any mechanical engineering, and I just got
this job..."
"There's nothin' to it," he said. "Look, I'll show you. There's two
rules you need to know to design these machines. First, the friction in
every bearing is so-and-so much, and in every gear junction, so-and-so much.
From that, you can figure out how much force you need to drive the thing.
Second, when you have a gear ratio, say 2 to 1, and you are wondering
whether you should make it 10 to 5 or 24 to 12 or 48 to 24, here's how to
decide: You look in the Boston Gear Catalogue, and select those gears that
are in the middle of the list. The ones at the high end have so many teeth
they're hard to make, if they could make gears with even finer teeth, they'd
have made the list go even higher. The gears at the low end of the list have
so few teeth they break easy. So the best design uses gears from the middle
of the list."
I had a lot of fun designing that machine. By simply selecting the
gears from the middle of the list and adding up the little torques with the
two numbers he gave me, I could be a mechanical engineer!
The army didn't want me to go back to Princeton to work on my degree
after that summer. They kept giving me this patriotic stuff, and offered a
whole project that I could run, if I would stay.
The problem was to design a machine like the other one -- what they
called a director -- but this time I thought the problem was easier, because
the gunner would be following behind in another airplane at the same
altitude. The gunner would set into my machine his altitude and an estimate
of his distance behind the other airplane. My machine would automatically
tilt the gun up at the correct angle and set the fuse.
As director of this project, I would be making trips down to Aberdeen
to get the firing tables. However, they already had some preliminary data. I
noticed that for most of the higher altitudes where these airplanes would be
flying, there wasn't any data. So I called up to find out why there wasn't
any data and it turned out that the fuses they were going to use were not
clock fuses, but powder-train fuses, which didn't work at those altitudes --
they fizzled out in the thin air.
I thought I only had to correct the air resistance at different
altitudes. Instead, my job was to invent a machine that would make the shell
explode at the right moment, when the fuse won't burn!
I decided that was too hard for me and went back to Princeton.
--------
When I was at Los Alamos and would get a little time off, I would often
go visit my wife, who was in a hospital in Albuquerque, a few hours away.
One time I went to visit her and couldn't go in right away, so I went to the
hospital library to read.
I read an article in Science about bloodhounds, and how they could
smell so very well. The authors described the various experiments that they
did -- the bloodhounds could identify which items had been touched by
people, and so on -- and I began to think: It is very remarkable how good
bloodhounds are at smelling, being able to follow trails of people, and so
forth, but how good are we, actually?
When the time came that I could visit my wife, I went to see her, and I
said, "We're gonna do an experiment. Those Coke bottles over there (she had
a six-pack of empty Coke bottles that she was saving to send out) -- now you
haven't touched them in a couple of days, right?"
"That's right."
I took the six-pack over to her without touching the bottles, and said,
"OK. Now I'll go out, and you take out one of the bottles, handle it for
about two minutes, and then put it back. Then I'll come in, and try to tell
which bottle it was."
So I went out, and she took out one of the bottles and handled it for
quite a while -- lots of time, because I'm no bloodhound! According to the
article, they could tell if you just touched it.
Then I came back, and it was absolutely obvious! I didn't even have to
smell the damn thing, because, of course, the temperature was different. And
it was also obvious from the smell. As soon as you put it up near your face,
you could smell it was dampish and warmer. So that experiment didn't work
because it was too obvious.
Then I looked at the bookshelf and said, "Those books you haven't
looked at for a while, right? This time, when I go out, take one book off
the shelf, and just open it -- that's all -- and close it again; then put it
back."
So I went out again, she took a book, opened it and closed it, and put
it back. I came in -- and nothing to it! It was easy. You just smell the
books. It's hard to explain, because we're not used to saying things about
it. You put each book up to your nose and sniff a few times, and you can
tell. It's very different. A book that's been standing there a while has a
dry, uninteresting kind of smell. But when a hand has touched it, there's a
dampness and a smell that's very distinct.
We did a few more experiments, and I discovered that while bloodhounds
are indeed quite capable, humans are not as incapable as they think they
are: it's just that they carry their nose so high off the ground!
(I've noticed that my dog can correctly tell which way I've gone in the
house, especially if I'm barefoot, by smelling my footprints. So I tried to
do that: I crawled around the rug on my hands and knees, sniffing, to see if
I could tell the difference between where I walked and where I didn't, and I
found it impossible. So the dog is much better than I am.)
Many years later, when I was first at Caltech, there was a party at
Professor Bacher's house, and there were a lot of people from Caltech. I
don't know how it came up, but I was telling them this story about smelling
the bottles and the books. They didn't believe a word, naturally, because
they always thought I was a faker. I had to demonstrate it.
We carefully took eight or nine books off the shelf without touching
them directly with our hands, and then I went out. Three different people
touched three different books: they picked one up, opened it, closed it, and
put it back.
Then I came back, and smelled everybody's hands, and smelled all the
books -- I don't remember which I did first -- and found all three books
correctly; I got one person wrong.
They still didn't believe me; they thought it was some sort of magic
trick. They kept trying to figure out how I did it. There's a famous trick
of this kind, where you have a confederate in the group who gives you
signals as to what it is, and they were trying to figure out who the
confederate was. Since then I've often thought that it would be a good card
trick to take a deck of cards and tell someone to pick a card and put it
back, while you're in the other room. You say, "Now I'm going to tell you
which card it is, because I'm a bloodhound: I'm going to smell all these
cards and tell you which card you picked." Of course, with that kind of
patter, people wouldn't believe for a minute that that's what you were
actually doing!
People's hands smell very different -- that's why dogs can identify
people; you have to try it! All hands have a sort of moist smell, and a
person who smokes has a very different smell on his hands from a person who
doesn't; ladies often have different kinds of perfumes, and so on. If
somebody happened to have some coins in his pocket and happened to be
handling them, you can smell that.
--------
* Adapted from a talk given in the First Annual Santa Barbara Lectures
on Science and Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara in
1975. "Los Alamos from Below" was one of nine lectures in a series published
as Reminiscences of Los Alamos, 1943-1945, edited by L. Badash et al., pp.
105-132. Copyright (c) 1980 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht,
Holland.
When I say "Los Alamos from below," I mean that. Although in my field
at the present time I'm a slightly famous man, at that time I was not
anybody famous at all. I didn't even have a degree when I started to work
with the Manhattan Project. Many of the other people who tell you about Los
Alamos -- people in higher echelons -- worried about some big decisions. I
worried about no big decisions. I was always flittering about underneath.
I was working in my room at Princeton one day when Bob Wilson came in
and said that he had been funded to do a job that was a secret, and he
wasn't supposed to tell anybody, but he was going to tell me because he knew
that as soon as I knew what he was going to do, I'd see that I had to go
along with it. So he told me about the problem of separating different
isotopes of uranium to ultimately make a bomb. He had a process for
separating the isotopes of uranium (different from the one which was
ultimately used) that he wanted to try to develop. He told me about it, and
he said, "There's a meeting..."
I said I didn't want to do it.
He said, "All right, there's a meeting at three o'clock. I'll see you
there."
I said, "It's all right that you told me the secret because I'm not
going to tell anybody, but I'm not going to do it."
So I went back to work on my thesis -- for about three minutes. Then I
began to pace the floor and think about this thing. The Germans had Hitler
and the possibility of developing an atomic bomb was obvious, and the
possibility that they would develop it before we did was very much of a
fright. So I decided to go to the meeting at three o'clock.
By four o'clock I already had a desk in a room and was trying to
calculate whether this particular method was limited by the total amount of
current that you get in an ion beam, and so on. I won't go into the details.
But I had a desk, and I had paper, and I was working as hard as I could and
as fast as I could, so the fellas who were building the apparatus could do
the experiment right there.
It was like those moving pictures where you see a piece of equipment go
bruuuuup, bruuuuup, bruuuuup. Every time I'd look up, the thing was getting
bigger. What was happening, of course, was that all the boys had decided to
work on this and to stop their research in science. All science stopped
during the war except the little bit that was done at Los Alamos. And that
was not much science; it was mostly engineering.
All the equipment from different research projects was being put
together to make the new apparatus to do the experiment -- to try to
separate the isotopes of uranium. I stopped my own work for the same reason,
though I did take a six-week vacation after a while and finished writing my
thesis. And I did get my degree just before I got to Los Alamos -- so I
wasn't quite as far down the scale as I led you to believe.
One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at
Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before.
But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and
help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium.
This committee had men like Compton and Tolman and Smyth and Urey and Rabi
and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how
our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they'd ask me questions
and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then
Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say
it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say,
well, maybe, but there's this other possibility we have to consider against
it.
So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and
disturbed that Compton doesn't repeat and emphasize his point. Finally, at
the end, Tolman, who's the chairman, would say, "Well, having heard all
these arguments, I guess it's true that Compton's argument is the best of
all, and now we have to go ahead."
It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present
a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering
what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to
which idea was the best -- summing it all up -- without having to say it
three times. These were very great men indeed.
It was ultimately decided that this project was not to be the one they
were going to use to separate uranium. We were told then that we were going
to stop, because in Los Alamos, New Mexico, they would be starting the
project that would actually make the bomb. We would all go out there to make
it. There would be experiments that we would have to do, and theoretical
work to do. I was in the theoretical work. All the rest of the fellas were
in experimental work.
The question was -- What to do now? Los Alamos wasn't ready yet. Bob
Wilson tried to make use of this time by, among other things, sending me to
Chicago to find out all that we could find out about the bomb and the
problems. Then, in our laboratories, we could start to build equipment,
counters of various kinds, and so on, that would be useful when we got to
Los Alamos. So no time was wasted.
I was sent to Chicago with the instructions to go to each group, tell
them I was going to work with them, and have them tell me about a problem in
enough detail that I could actually sit down and start to work on it. As
soon as I got that far, I was to go to another guy and ask for another
problem. That way I would understand the details of everything.
It was a very good idea, but my conscience bothered me a little bit
because they would all work so hard to explain things to me, and I'd go away
without helping them. But I was very lucky. When one of the guys was
explaining a problem, I said, "Why don't you do it by differentiating under
the integral sign?" In half an hour he had it solved, and they'd been
working on it for three months. So, I did something, using my "different box
of tools." Then I came back from Chicago, and I described the situation --
how much energy was released, what the bomb was going to be like, and so
forth.
I remember a friend of mine who worked with me, Paul Olum, a
mathematician, came up to me afterwards and said, "When they make a moving
picture about this, they'll have the guy coming back from Chicago to make
his report to the Princeton men about the bomb. He'll be wearing a suit and
carrying a briefcase and so on -- and here you're in dirty shirtsleeves and
just telling us all about it, in spite of its being such a serious and
dramatic thing."
There still seemed to be a delay, and Wilson went to Los Alamos to find
out what was holding things up. When he got there, he found that the
construction company was working very hard and had finished the theater, and
a few other buildings that they understood, but they hadn't gotten
instructions clear on how to build a laboratory -- how many pipes for gas,
how much for water. So Wilson simply stood around and decided, then and
there, how much water, how much gas, and so on, and told them to start
building the laboratories.
When he came back to us, we were all ready to go and we were getting
impatient. So they all got together and decided we'd go out there anyway,
even though it wasn't ready.
We were recruited, by the way, by Oppenheimer and other people, and he
was very patient. He paid attention to everybody's problems. He worried
about my wife, who had TB, and whether there would be a hospital out there,
and everything. It was the first time I met him in such a personal way; he
was a wonderful man.
We were told to be very careful -- not to buy our train ticket in
Princeton, for example, because Princeton was a very small station, and if
everybody bought train tickets to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in Princeton,
there would be some suspicions that something was up. And so everybody
bought their tickets somewhere else, except me, because I figured if
everybody bought their tickets somewhere else...
So when I went to the train station and said, "I want to go to
Albuquerque, New Mexico," the man says, "Oh, so all this stuff is for you!"
We had been shipping out crates full of counters for weeks and expecting
that they didn't notice the address was Albuquerque. So at least I explained
why it was that we were shipping all those crates; I was going out to
Albuquerque.
Well, when we arrived, the houses and dormitories and things like that
were not ready. In fact, even the laboratories weren't quite ready. We were
pushing them by coming down ahead of time. So they just went crazy and
rented ranch houses all around the neighborhood. We stayed at first in a
ranch house and would drive in in the morning. The first morning I drove in
was tremendously impressive. The beauty of the scenery, for a person from
the East who didn't travel much, was sensational. There are the great cliffs
that you've probably seen in pictures. You'd come up from below and be very
surprised to see this high mesa. The most impressive thing to me was that,
as I was going up, I said that maybe there had been Indians living here, and
the guy who was driving stopped the car and walked around the corner and
pointed out some Indian caves that you could inspect. It was very exciting.
When I got to the site the first time, I saw there was a technical area
that was supposed to have a fence around it ultimately, but it was still
open. Then there was supposed to be a town, and then a big fence further
out, around the town. But they were still building, and my friend Paul Olum,
who was my assistant, was standing at the gate with a clipboard, checking
the trucks coming in and out and telling them which way to go to deliver the
materials in different places.
When I went into the laboratory, I would meet men I had heard of by
seeing their papers in the Physical Review and so on. I had never met them
before. "This is John Williams," they'd say. Then a guy stands up from a
desk that is covered with blueprints, his sleeves all rolled up, and he's
calling out the windows, ordering trucks and things going in different
directions with building material. In other words, the experimental
physicists had nothing to do until their buildings and apparatus were ready,
so they just built the buildings -- or assisted in building the buildings.
The theoretical physicists, on the other hand, could start working
right away, so it was decided that they wouldn't live in the ranch houses,
but would live up at the site. We started working immediately. There were no
blackboards except for one on wheels, and we'd roll it around and Robert
Serber would explain to us all the things that they'd thought of in Berkeley
about the atomic bomb, and nuclear physics, and all these things. I didn't
know very much about it; I had been doing other kinds of things. So I had to
do an awful lot of work.
Every day I would study and read, study and read. It was a very hectic
time. But I had some luck. All the big shots except for Hans Bethe happened
to be away at the time, and what Bethe needed was someone to talk to, to
push his ideas against. Well, he comes in to this little squirt in an office
and starts to argue, explaining his idea. I say, "No, no, you're crazy.
It'll go like this." And he says, "Just a moment," and explains how he's not
crazy, I'm crazy. And we keep on going like this. You see, when I hear about
physics, I just think about physics, and I don't know who I'm talking to, so
I say dopey things like "no, no, you're wrong," or "you're crazy." But it
turned out that's exactly what he needed. I got a notch up on account of
that, and I ended up as a group leader under Bethe with four guys under me.
Well, when I was first there, as I said, the dormitories weren't ready.
But the theoretical physicists had to stay up there anyway. The first place
they put us was in an old school building -- a boys' school that had been
there previously. I lived in a thing called the Mechanics' Lodge. We were
all jammed in there in bunk beds, and it wasn't organized very well because
Bob Christy and his wife had to go to the bathroom through our bedroom. So
that was very uncomfortable.
At last the dormitory was built. I went down to the place where rooms
were assigned, and they said, you can pick your room now. You know what I
did? I looked to see where the girls' dormitory was, and then I picked a
room that looked right across -- though later I discovered a big tree was
growing right in front of the window of that room.
They told me there would be two people in a room, but that would only
be temporary. Every two rooms would share a bathroom, and there would be
double-decker bunks in each room. But I didn't want two people in the room.
The night I got there, nobody else was there, and I decided to try to
keep my room to myself. My wife was sick with TB in Albuquerque, but I had
some boxes of stuff of hers. So I took out a little nightgown, opened the
top bed, and threw the nightgown carelessly on it. I took out some slippers,
and I threw some powder on the floor in the bathroom. I just made it look
like somebody else was there. So, what happened? Well, it's supposed to be a
men's dormitory, see? So I came home that night, and my pajamas are folded
nicely, and put under the pillow at the bottom, and my slippers put nicely
at the bottom of the bed. The lady's nightgown is nicely folded under the
pillow, the bed is all fixed up and made, and the slippers are put down
nicely. The powder is cleaned from the bathroom and nobody is sleeping in
the upper bed.
Next night, the same thing. When I wake up, I rumple up the top bed, I
throw the nightgown on it sloppily and scatter the powder in the bathroom
and so on. I went on like this for four nights until everybody was settled
and there was no more danger that they would put a second person in the
room. Each night, everything was set out very neatly, even though it was a
men's dormitory.
I didn't know it then, but this little ruse got me involved in
politics. There were all kinds of factions there, of course -- the
housewives' faction, the mechanics' faction, the technical peoples' faction,
and so on. Well, the bachelors and bachelor girls who lived in the dormitory
felt they had to have a faction too, because a new rule had been
promulgated: No Women in the Men's Dorm. Well, this is absolutely
ridiculous! After all, we are grown people! What kind of nonsense is this?
We had to have political action. So we debated this stuff, and I was elected
to represent the dormitory people in the town council.
After I'd been in it for about a year and a half, I was talking to Hans
Bethe about something. He was on the big governing council all this time,
and I told him about this trick with my wife's nightgown and bedroom
slippers. He started to laugh. "So that's how you got on the town council,"
he said.
It turned out that what happened was this. The woman who cleans the
rooms in the dormitory opens this door, and all of a sudden there is
trouble: somebody is sleeping with one of the guys! She reports to the chief
charwoman, the chief charwoman reports to the lieutenant, the lieutenant
reports to the major. It goes all the way up through the generals to the
governing board.
What are they going to do? They're going to think about it, that's
what! But, in the meantime, what instructions go down through the captains,
down through the majors, through the lieutenants, through the chars' chief,
through the charwoman? "Just put things back the way they are, clean 'em up,
and see what happens." Next day, same report. For four days, they worried up
there about what they were going to do. Finally they promulgated a rule: No
Women in the Men's Dormitory! And that caused such a stink down below that
they had to elect somebody to represent the...
I would like to tell you something about the censorship that we had
there. They decided to do something utterly illegal and censor the mail of
people inside the United States -- which they have no right to do. So it had
to be set up very delicately as a voluntary thing. We would all volunteer
not to seal the envelopes of the letters we sent out, and it would be all
right for them to open letters coming in to us; that was voluntarily
accepted by us. We would leave our letters open; and they would seal them if
they were OK. If they weren't OK in their opinion, they would send the
letter back to us with a note that there was a violation of such and such a
paragraph of our "understanding."
So, very delicately amongst all these liberal-minded scientific guys,
we finally got the censorship set up, with many rules. We were allowed to
comment on the character of the administration if we wanted to, so we could
write our senator and tell him we didn't like the way things were run, and
things like that. They said they would notify us if there were any
difficulties.
So it was all set up, and here comes the first day for censorship:
Telephone! Briiing!
Me: "What?"
"Please come down."
I come down.
"What's this?"
"It's a letter from my father."
"Well, what is it?"
There's lined paper, and there's these lines going out with dots --
four dots under, one dot above, two dots under, one dot above, dot under
dot...
"What's that?"
I said, "It's a code."
They said, "Yeah, it's a code, but what does it say?"
I said, "I don't know what it says."
They said, "Well, what's the key to the code? How do you decipher it?"
I said, "Well, I don't know."
Then they said, "What's this?"
I said, "It's a letter from my wife -- it says TJXYWZ TW1X3."
"What's that?"
I said, "Another code."
"What's the key to it?"
"I don't know."
They said, "You're receiving codes, and you don't know the key?"
I said, "Precisely. I have a game. I challenge them to send me a code
that I can't decipher, see? So they're making up codes at the other end, and
they're sending them in, and they're not going to tell me what the key is."
Now one of the rules of the censorship was that they aren't going to
disturb anything that you would ordinarily send in the mail. So they said,
"Well, you're going to have to tell them please to send the key in with the
code."
I said, "I don't want to see the key!"
They said, "Well, all right, we'll take the key out."
So we had that arrangement. OK? All right. Next day I get a letter from
my wife that says, "It's very difficult writing because I feel that the
--------
splotch made with ink eradicator.
So I went down to the bureau, and I said, "You're not supposed to touch
the incoming mail if you don't like it. You can look at it, but you're not
supposed to take anything out."
They said, "Don't be ridiculous. Do you think that's the way censors
work -- with ink eradicator? They cut things out with scissors."
I said OK. So I wrote a letter back to my wife and said, "Did you use
ink eradicator in your letter?" She writes back, "No, I didn't use ink
eradicator in my letter, it must have been the _____" -- and there's a hole
cut out of the paper.
So I went back to the major who was supposed to be in charge of all
this and complained. You know, this took a little time, but I felt I was
sort of the representative to get the thing straightened out. The major
tried to explain to me that these people who were the censors had been
taught how to do it, but they didn't understand this new way that we had to
be so delicate about.
So, anyway, he said, "What's the matter, don't you think I have good
will?"
I said, "Yes, you have perfectly good will but I don't think you have
power." Because, you see, he had already been on the job three or four days.
He said, "We'll see about that!" He grabs the telephone, and everything
is straightened out. No more is the letter cut.
However, there were a number of other difficulties. For example, one
day I got a letter from my wife and a note from the censor that said, "There
was a code enclosed without the key, and so we removed it."
So when I went to see my wife in Albuquerque that day, she said, "Well,
where's all the stuff?"
I said, "What stuff?"
She said, "Litharge, glycerine, hot dogs, laundry."
I said, "Wait a minute -- that was a list?"
She said, "Yes."
"That was a code," I said. "They thought it was a code-litharge,
glycerine, etc." (She wanted litharge and glycerine to make a cement to fix
an onyx box.)
All this went on in the first few weeks before we got everything
straightened out. Anyway, one day I'm piddling around with the computing
machine, and I notice something very peculiar. If you take 1 divided by 243
you get .004115226337... It's quite cute: It goes a little cockeyed after
559 when you're carrying but it soon straightens itself out and repeats
itself nicely. I thought it was kind of amusing.
Well, I put that in the mail, and it comes back to me. It doesn't go
through, and there's a little note: "Look at Paragraph 17B." I look at
Paragraph 17B. It says, "Letters are to be written only in English, Russian,
Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, German, and so forth. Permission to use any
other language must be obtained in writing." And then it said, "No codes."
So I wrote back to the censor a little note included in my letter which
said that I feel that of course this cannot be a code, because if you
actually do divide 1 by 243, you do, in fact, get all that, and therefore
there's no more information in the number .004115226337... than there is in
the number 243 -- which is hardly any information at all. And so forth. I
therefore asked for permission to use Arabic numerals in my letters. So I
got that through all right.
There was always some kind of difficulty with the letters going back
and forth. For example, my wife kept mentioning the fact that she felt
uncomfortable writing with the feeling that the censor is looking over her
shoulder. Now, as a rule, we aren't supposed to mention censorship. We
aren't, but how can they tell her? So they keep sending me a note: "Your
wife mentioned censorship." Certainly, my wife mentioned censorship. So
finally they sent me a note that said, "Please inform your wife not to
mention censorship in her letters." So I start my letter: "I have been
instructed to inform you not to mention censorship in your letters." Phoom,
phoooom, it comes right back! So I write, "I have been instructed to inform
my wife not to mention censorship. How in the heck am I going to do it?
Furthermore, why do I have to instruct her not to mention censorship? You
keeping something from me?"
It is very interesting that the censor himself has to tell me to tell
my wife not to tell me that she's... But they had an answer. They said, yes,
that they are worried about mail being intercepted on the way from
Albuquerque, and that someone might find out that there was censorship if
they looked in the mail, and would she please act much more normal.
So I went down the next time to Albuquerque, and I talked to her and I
said, "Now, look, let's not mention censorship." But we had had so much
trouble that we at last worked out a code, something illegal. If I would put
a dot at the end of my signature, it meant I had had trouble again, and she
would move on to the next of the moves that she had concocted. She would sit
there all day long, because she was ill, and she would think of things to
do. The last thing she did was to send me an advertisement which she found
perfectly legitimately. It said, "Send your boyfriend a letter on a jigsaw
puzzle. We sell you the blank, you write the letter on it, take it all
apart, put it in a little sack, and mail it." I received that one with a
note saying, "We do not have time to play games. Please instruct your wife
to confine herself to ordinary letters."
Well, we were ready with the one more dot, but they straightened out
just in time and we didn't have to use it. The thing we had ready for the
next one was that the letter would start, "I hope you remembered to open
this letter carefully because I have included the Pepto-Bismol powder for
your stomach as we arranged." It would be a letter full of powder. In the
office we expected they would open it quickly, the powder would go all over
the floor, and they would get all upset because you are not supposed to
upset anything. They'd have to gather up all this Pepto-Bismol... But we
didn't have to use that one.
As a result of all these experiences with the censor, I knew exactly
what could get through and what could not get through. Nobody else knew as
well as I. And so I made a little money out of all of this by making bets.
One day I discovered that the workmen who lived further out and wanted
to come in were too lazy to go around through the gate, and so they had cut
themselves a hole in the fence. So I went out the gate, went over to the
hole and came in, went out again, and so on, until the sergeant at the gate
began to wonder what was happening. How come this guy is always going out
and never coming in? And, of course, his natural reaction was to call the
lieutenant and try to put me in jail for doing this. I explained that there
was a hole.
You see, I was always trying to straighten people out. And so I made a
bet with somebody that I could tell about the hole in the fence in a letter,
and mail it out. And sure enough, I did. And the way I did it was I said,
You should see the way they administer this place (that's what we were
allowed to say). There's a hole in the fence seventy-one feet away from
such-and-such a place, that's this size and that size, that you can walk
through.
Now, what can they do? They can't say to me that there is no such hole.
I mean, what are they going to do? It's their own hard luck that there's
such a hole. They should fix the hole. So I got that one through.
I also got through a letter that told about how one of the boys who
worked in one of my groups, John Kemeny, had been wakened up in the middle
of the night and grilled with lights in front of him by some idiots in the
army there because they found out something about his father, who was
supposed to be a communist or something. Kemeny is a famous man now.
There were other things. Like the hole in the fence, I was always
trying to point these things out in a non-direct manner. And one of the
things I wanted to point out was this -- that at the very beginning we had
terribly important secrets; we'd worked out lots of stuff about bombs and
uranium and how it worked, and so on; and all this stuff was in documents
that were in wooden filing cabinets that had little, ordinary, common
padlocks on them. Of course, there were various things made by the shop,
like a rod that would go down and then a padlock to hold it, but it was
always just a padlock. Furthermore, you could get the stuff out without even
opening the padlock. You just tilt the cabinet over backwards. The bottom
drawer has a little rod that's supposed to hold the papers together, and
there's a long wide hole in the wood underneath. You can pull the papers out
from below.
So I used to pick the locks all the time and point out that it was very
easy to do. And every time we had a meeting of everybody together, I would
get up and say that we have important secrets and we shouldn't keep them in
such things; we need better locks. One day Teller got up at the meeting, and
he said to me, "I don't keep my most important secrets in my filing cabinet;
I keep them in my desk drawer. Isn't that better?"
I said, "I don't know. I haven't seen your desk drawer."
He was sitting near the front of the meeting, and I'm sitting further
back. So the meeting continues, and I sneak out and go down to see his desk
drawer.
I don't even have to pick the lock on the desk drawer. It turns out
that if you put your hand in the back, underneath, you can pull out the
paper like those toilet paper dispensers. You pull out one, it pulls
another, it pulls another... I emptied the whole damn drawer, put everything
away to one side, and went back upstairs.
The meeting was just ending, and everybody was coming out, and I joined
the crew and ran to catch up with Teller, and I said, "Oh, by the way, let
me see your desk drawer."
"Certainly," he said, and he showed me the desk.
I looked at it and said, "That looks pretty good to me. Let's see what
you have in there."
"I'll be very glad to show it to you," he said, putting in the key and
opening the drawer. "If," he said, "you hadn't already seen it yourself."
The trouble with playing a trick on a highly intelligent man like Mr.
Teller is that the time it takes him to figure out from the moment that he
sees there is something wrong till he understands exactly what happened is
too damn small to give you any pleasure!
Some of the special problems I had at Los Alamos were rather
interesting. One thing had to do with the safety of the plant at Oak Ridge,
Tennessee. Los Alamos was going to make the bomb, but at Oak Ridge they were
trying to separate the isotopes of uranium -- uranium 238 and uranium 235,
the explosive one. They were just beginning to get infinitesimal amounts
from an experimental thing of 235, and at the same time they were practicing
the chemistry. There was going to be a big plant, they were going to have
vats of the stuff, and then they were going to take the purified stuff and
repurify and get it ready for the next stage. (You have to purify it in
several stages.) So they were practicing on the one hand, and they were just
getting a little bit of U235 from one of the pieces of apparatus
experimentally on the other hand. And they were trying to learn how to assay
it, to determine how much uranium 235 there is in it. Though we would send
them instructions, they never got it right.
So finally Emil Segre said that the only possible way to get it right
was for him to go down there and see what they were doing. The army people
said, "No, it is our policy to keep all the information of Los Alamos at one
place."
The people in Oak Ridge didn't know anything about what it was to be
used for; they just knew what they were trying to do. I mean the higher
people knew they were separating uranium, but they didn't know how powerful
the bomb was, or exactly how it worked or anything. The people underneath
didn't know at all what they were doing. And the army wanted to keep it that
way. There was no information going back and forth. But Segre insisted
they'd never get the assays right, and the whole thing would go up in smoke.
So he finally went down to see what they were doing, and as he was walking
through he saw them wheeling a tank carboy of water, green water -- which is
uranium nitrate solution.
He said, "Uh, you're going to handle it like that when it's purified
too? Is that what you're going to do?"
They said, "Sure -- why not?"
"Won't it explode?" he said.
Huh! Explode?
Then the army said, "You see! We shouldn't have let any information get
to them! Now they are all upset."
It turned out that the army had realized how much stuff we needed to
make a bomb -- twenty kilograms or whatever it was -- and they realized that
this much material, purified, would never be in the plant, so there was no
danger. But they did not know that the neutrons were enormously more
effective when they are slowed down in water. In water it takes less than a
tenth -- no, a hundredth -- as much material to make a reaction that makes
radioactivity. It kills people around and so on. It was very dangerous, and
they had not paid any attention to the safety at all.
So a telegram goes from Oppenheimer to Segre: "Go through the entire
plant. Notice where all the concentrations are supposed to be, with the
process as they designed it. We will calculate in the meantime how much
material can come together before there's an explosion."
Two groups started working on it. Christy's group worked on water
solutions and my group worked on dry powder in boxes. We calculated about
how much material they could accumulate safely. And Christy was going to go
down and tell them all at Oak Ridge what the situation was, because this
whole thing is broken down and we have to go down and tell them now. So I
happily gave all my numbers to Christy and said, you have all the stuff, so
go. Christy got pneumonia; I had to go.
I had never traveled on an airplane before. They strapped the secrets
in a little thing on my back! The airplane in those days was like a bus,
except the stations were further apart. You stopped off every once in a
while to wait.
There was a guy standing there next to me swinging a chain, saying
something like, "It must be terribly difficult to fly without a priority on
airplanes these days."
I couldn't resist. I said, "Well, I don't know. I have a priority."
A little bit later he tried again. "There are some generals coming.
They are going to put off some of us number threes."
"It's all right," I said. "I'm a number two."
He probably wrote to his congressman -- if he wasn't a congressman
himself -- saying, "What are they doing sending these little kids around
with number two priorities in the middle of the war?"
At any rate, I arrived at Oak Ridge. The first thing I did was have
them take me to the plant, and I said nothing. I just looked at everything.
I found out that the situation was even worse than Segre reported, because
he noticed certain boxes in big lots in a room, but he didn't notice a lot
of boxes in another room on the other side of the same wall -- and things
like that. Now, if you have too much stuff together, it goes up, you see.
So I went through the entire plant. I have a very bad memory, but when
I work intensively I have a good short-term memory, and so I could remember
all kinds of crazy things like building 90-207, vat number so-and-so, and so
forth.
I went to my room that night, and went through the whole thing,
explained where all the dangers were, and what you would have to do to fix
this. It's rather easy. You put cadmium in solutions to absorb the neutrons
in the water, and you separate the boxes so they are not too dense,
according to certain rules.
The next day there was going to be a big meeting. I forgot to say that
before I left Los Alamos Oppenheimer said to me, "Now, the following people
are technically able down there at Oak Ridge: Mr. Julian Webb, Mr.
So-and-so, and so on. I want you to make sure that these people are at the
meeting, that you tell them how the thing can be made safe, so that they
really understand."
I said, "What if they're not at the meeting? What am I supposed to do?"
He said, "Then you should say: Los Alamos cannot accept the
responsibility for the safety of the Oak Ridge plant unless...!"
I said, "You mean me, little Richard, is going to go in there and say
--?"
He said, "Yes, little Richard, you go and do that."
I really grew up fast!
When I arrived, sure enough, the big shots in the company and the
technical people that I wanted were there, and the generals and everyone who
was interested in this very serious problem. That was good because the plant
would have blown up if nobody had paid attention to this problem.
There was a Lieutenant Zumwalt who took care of me. He told me that the
colonel said I shouldn't tell them how the neutrons work and all the details
because we want to keep things separate, so just tell them what to do to
keep it safe.
I said, "In my opinion it is impossible for them to obey a bunch of
rules unless they understand how it works. It's my opinion that it's only
going to work if I tell them, and Los Alamos cannot accept the
responsibility for the safety of the Oak Ridge plant unless they are fully
informed as to how it works!"
It was great. The lieutenant takes me to the colonel and repeats my
remark. The colonel says, "Just five minutes," and then he goes to the
window and he stops and thinks. That's what they're very good at -- making
decisions. I thought it was very remarkable how a problem of whether or not
information as to how the bomb works should be in the Oak Ridge plant had to
be decided and could be decided in five minutes. So I have a great deal of
respect for these military guys, because I never can decide anything very
important in any length of time at all.
In five minutes he said, "All right, Mr. Feynman, go ahead."
I sat down and I told them all about neutrons, how they worked, da da,
ta ta ta, there are too many neutrons together, you've got to keep the
material apart, cadmium absorbs, and slow neutrons are more effective than
fast neutrons, and yak yak -- all of which was elementary stuff at Los
Alamos, but they had never heard of any of it, so I appeared to be a
tremendous genius to them.
The result was that they decided to set up little groups to make their
own calculations to learn how to do it. They started to redesign plants, and
the designers of the plants were there, the construction designers, and
engineers, and chemical engineers for the new plant that was going to handle
the separated material.
They told me to come back in a few months, so I came back when the
engineers had finished the design of the plant. Now it was for me to look at
the plant.
How do you look at a plant that isn't built yet? I don't know.
Lieutenant Zumwalt, who was always coming around with me because I had to
have an escort everywhere, takes me into this room where there are these two
engineers and a loooooong table covered with a stack of blueprints
representing the various floors of the proposed plant.
I took mechanical drawing when I was in school, but I am not good at
reading blueprints. So they unroll the stack of blueprints and start to
explain it to me, thinking I am a genius. Now, one of the things they had to
avoid in the plant was accumulation. They had problems like when there's an
evaporator working, which is trying to accumulate the stuff, if the valve
gets stuck or something like that and too much stuff accumulates, it'll
explode. So they explained to me that this plant is designed so that if any
one valve gets stuck nothing will happen. It needs at least two valves
everywhere.
Then they explain how it works. The carbon tetrachloride comes in here,
the uranium nitrate from here comes in here, it goes up and down, it goes up
through the floor, comes up through the pipes, coming up from the second
floor, bluuuuurp -- going through the stack of blueprints, down-up-down-up,
talking very fast, explaining the very, very complicated chemical plant.
I'm completely dazed. Worse, I don't know what the symbols on the
blueprint mean! There is some kind of a thing that at first I think is a
window. It's a square with a little cross in the middle, all over the damn
place. I think it's a window, but no, it can't be a window, because it isn't
always at the edge. I want to ask them what it is.
You must have been in a situation like this when you didn't ask them
right away. Right away it would have been OK. But now they've been talking a
little bit too long. You hesitated too long. If you ask them now they'll
say, "What are you wasting my time all this time for?"
What am I going to do? I get an idea. Maybe it's a valve. I take my
finger and I put it down on one of the mysterious little crosses in the
middle of one of the blueprints on page three, and I say, "What happens if
this valve gets stuck?" -- figuring they're going to say, "That's not a
valve, sir, that's a window."
So one looks at the other and says, "Well, if that valve gets stuck --"
and he goes up and down on the blueprint, up and down, the other guy goes up
and down, back and forth, back and forth, and they both look at each other.
They turn around to me and they open their mouths like astonished fish and
say, "You're absolutely right, sir."
So they rolled up the blueprints and away they went and we walked out.
And Mr. Zumwalt, who had been following me all the way through, said,
"You're a genius. I got the idea you were a genius when you went through the
plant once and you could tell them about evaporator C-21 in building 90-207
the next morning," he says, "but what you have just done is so fantastic I
want to know how, how do you do that?"
I told him you try to find out whether it's a valve or not.
Another kind of problem I worked on was this. We had to do lots of
calculations, and we did them on Marchant calculating machines. By the way,
just to give you an idea of what Los Alamos was like: We had these Marchant
computers -- hand calculators with numbers. You push them, and they
multiply, divide, add, and so on, but not easy like they do now. They were
mechanical gadgets, failing often, and they had to be sent back to the
factory to be repaired. Pretty soon you were running out of machines. A few
of us started to take the covers off (We weren't supposed to. The rules
read: "You take the covers off, we cannot be responsible...") So we took the
covers off and we got a nice series of lessons on how to fix them, and we
got better and better at it as we got more and more elaborate repairs. When
we got something too complicated, we sent it back to the factory, but we'd
do the easy ones and kept the things going. I ended up doing all the
computers and there was a guy in the machine shop who took care of
typewriters.
Anyway, we decided that the big problem -- which was to figure out
exactly what happened during the bomb's implosion, so you can figure out
exactly how much energy was released and so on -- required much more
calculating than we were capable of. A clever fellow by the name of Stanley
Frankel realized that it could possibly be done on IBM machines. The IBM
company had machines for business purposes, adding machines called
tabulators for listing sums, and a multiplier that you put cards in and it
would take two numbers from a card and multiply them. There were also
collators and sorters and so on.
So Frankel figured out a nice program. If we got enough of these
machines in a room, we could take the cards and put them through a cycle.
Everybody who does numerical calculations now knows exactly what I'm talking
about, but this was kind of a new thing then -- mass production with
machines. We had done things like this on adding machines. Usually you go
one step across, doing everything yourself. But this was different -- where
you go first to the adder, then to the multiplier, then to the adder, and so
on. So Frankel designed this system and ordered the machines from the IBM
company, because we realized it was a good way of solving our problems.
We needed a man to repair the machines, to keep them going and
everything. And the army was always going to send this fellow they had, but
he was always delayed. Now, we always were in a hurry. Everything we did, we
tried to do as quickly as possible. In this particular case, we worked out
all the numerical steps that the machines were supposed to do -- multiply
this, and then do this, and subtract that. Then we worked out the program,
but we didn't have any machine to test it on. So we set up this room with
girls in it. Each one had a Marchant: one was the multiplier, another was
the adder. This one cubed -- all she did was cube a number on an index card
and send it to the next girl.
We went through our cycle this way until we got all the bugs out. It
turned out that the speed at which we were able to do it was a hell of a lot
faster than the other way, where every single person did all the steps. We
got speed with this system that was the predicted speed for the IBM machine.
The only difference is that the IBM machines didn't get tired and could work
three shifts. But the girls got tired after a while.
Anyway, we got the bugs out during this process, and finally the
machines arrived, but not the repairman. These were some of the most
complicated machines of the technology of those days, big things that came
partially disassembled, with lots of wires and blueprints of what to do. We
went down and we put them together, Stan Frankel and I and another fellow,
and we had our troubles. Most of the trouble was the big shots coming in all
the time and saying, "You're going to break something!"
We put them together, and sometimes they would work, and sometimes they
were put together wrong and they didn't work. Finally I was working on some
multiplier and I saw a bent part inside, but I was afraid to straighten it
because it might snap off -- and they were always telling us we were going
to bust something irreversibly. When the repairman finally got there, he
fixed the machines we hadn't got ready, and everything was going. But he had
trouble with the one that I had had trouble with. After three days he was
still working on that one last machine.
I went down. I said, "Oh, I noticed that was bent."
He said, "Oh, of course. That's all there is to it!" Bend! It was all
right. So that was it.
Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the
computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's
a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The
trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. You
have these switches -- if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd
number you do that -- and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate
things if you are clever enough, on one machine.
After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any
attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very
slowly --while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one
tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it
would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the
arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole
table in one operation.
Absolutely useless. We had tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever
worked with computers, you understand the disease -- the delight in being
able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time,
the poor fellow who invented the thing.
I was asked to stop working on the stuff I was doing in my group and go
down and take over the IBM group, and I tried to avoid the disease. And,
although they had done only three problems in nine months, I had a very good
group.
The real trouble was that no one had ever told these fellows anything.
The army had selected them from all over the country for a thing called
Special Engineer Detachment -- clever boys from high school who had
engineering ability. They sent them up to Los Alamos. They put them in
barracks. And they would tell them nothing.
Then they came to work, and what they had to do was work on IBM
machines -- punching holes, numbers that they didn't understand. Nobody told
them what it was. The thing was going very slowly. I said that the first
thing there has to be is that these technical guys know what we're doing.
Oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special permission so I
could give a nice lecture about what we were doing, and they were all
excited: "We're fighting a war! We see what it is!" They knew what the
numbers meant. If the pressure came out higher, that meant there was more
energy released, and so on and so on. They knew what they were doing.
Complete transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better.
They improved the scheme. They worked at night. They didn't need supervising
in the night; they didn't need anything. They understood everything; they
invented several of the programs that we used.
So my boys really came through, and all that had to be done was to tell
them what it was. As a result, although it took them nine months to do three
problems before, we did nine problems in three months, which is nearly ten
times as fast.
But one of the secret ways we did our problems was this. The problems
consisted of a bunch of cards that had to go through a cycle. First add,
then multiply -- and so it went through the cycle of machines in this room,
slowly, as it went around and around. So we figured a way to put a different
colored set of cards through a cycle too, but out of phase. We'd do two or
three problems at a time.
But this got us into another problem. Near the end of the war, for
instance, just before we had to make a test in Albuquerque, the question
was: How much energy would be released? We had been calculating the release
from various designs, but we hadn't computed for the specific design that
was ultimately used. So Bob Christy came down and said, "We would like the
results for how this thing is going to work in one month" -- or some very
short time, like three weeks.
I said, "It's impossible."
He said, "Look, you're putting out nearly two problems a month. It
takes only two weeks per problem, or three weeks per problem."
I said, "I know. It really takes much longer to do the problem, but
we're doing them in parallel. As they go through, it takes a long time and
there's no way to make it go around faster."
He went out, and I began to think. Is there a way to make it go around
faster? What if we did nothing else on the machine, so nothing else was
interfering? I put a challenge to the boys on the blackboard -- CAN WE DO
IT? They all start yelling, "Yes, we'll work double shifts, we'll work
overtime," all this kind of thing. "We'll try it. We'll try it!"
And so the rule was: All other problems out. Only one problem and just
concentrate on this one. So they started to work.
My wife, Arlene, was ill with tuberculosis -- very ill indeed. It
looked as if something might happen at any minute, so I arranged ahead of
time with a friend of mine in the dormitory to borrow his car in an
emergency so I could get to Albuquerque quickly. His name was Klaus Fuchs.
He was the spy, and he used his automobile to take the atomic secrets away
from Los Alamos down to Santa Fe. But nobody knew that.
The emergency arrived. I borrowed Fuchs's car and picked up a couple of
hitchhikers, in case something happened with the car on the way to
Albuquerque. Sure enough, just as we were driving into Santa Fe, we got a
flat tire. The two guys helped me change the tire, and just as we were
leaving Santa Fe, another tire went flat. We pushed the car into a nearby
gas station.
The gas station guy was repairing somebody else's car, and it was going
to take a while before he could help us. I didn't even think to say
anything, but the two hitchhikers went over to the gas station man and told
him the situation. Soon we had a new tire (but no spare -- tires were hard
to get during the war).
About thirty miles outside Albuquerque a third tire went flat, so I
left the car on the road and we hitchhiked the rest of the way. I phoned a
garage to go out and get the car while I went to the hospital to see my
wife.
Arlene died a few hours after I got there. A nurse came in to fill out
the death certificate, and went out again. I spent a little more time with
my wife. Then I looked at the clock I had given her seven years before, when
she had first become sick with tuberculosis. It was something which in those
days was very nice: a digital clock whose numbers would change by turning
around mechanically. The clock was very delicate and often stopped for one
reason or another -- I had to repair it from time to time -- but I kept it
going for all those years. Now, it had stopped once more -- at 9:22, the
time on the death certificate!
I remembered the time I was in my fraternity house at MIT when the idea
came into my head completely out of the blue that my grandmother was dead.
Right after that there was a telephone call, just like that. It was for Pete
Bernays -- my grandmother wasn't dead. So I remembered that, in case
somebody told me a story that ended the other way. I figured that such
things can sometimes happen by luck -- after all, my grandmother was very
old -- although people might think they happened by some sort of
supernatural phenomenon.
Arlene had kept this clock by her bedside all the time she was sick,
and now it stopped the moment she died. I can understand how a person who
half believes in the possibility of such things, and who hasn't got a
doubting mind -- especially in a circumstance like that -- doesn't
immediately try to figure out what happened, but instead explains that no
one touched the clock, and there was no possibility of explanation by normal
phenomena. The clock simply stopped. It would become a dramatic example of
these fantastic phenomena.
I saw that the light in the room was low, and then I remembered that
the nurse had picked up the clock and turned it toward the light to see the
face better. That could easily have stopped it.
I went for a walk outside. Maybe I was fooling myself, but I was
surprised how I didn't feel what I thought people would expect to feel under
the circumstances. I wasn't delighted, but I didn't feel terribly upset,
perhaps because I had known for seven years that something like this was
going to happen.
I didn't know how I was going to face all my friends up at Los Alamos.
I didn't want people with long faces talking to me about it. When I got back
(yet another tire went flat on the way), they asked me what happened.
"She's dead. And how's the program going?"
They caught on right away that I didn't want to moon over it.
(I had obviously done something to myself psychologically: Reality was
so important -- I had to understand what really happened to Arlene,
physiologically -- that I didn't cry until a number of months later, when I
was in Oak Ridge. I was walking past a department store with dresses in the
window, and I thought Arlene would like one of them. That was too much for
me.)
When I went back to work on the calculation program, I found it in a
mess: There were white cards, there were blue cards, there were yellow
cards, and I started to say, "You're not supposed to do more than one
problem -- only one problem!" They said, "Get out, get out, get out. Wait --
and we'll explain everything."
So I waited, and what happened was this. As the cards went through,
sometimes the machine made a mistake, or they put a wrong number in. What we
used to have to do when that happened was to go back and do it over again.
But they noticed that a mistake made at some point in one cycle only affects
the nearby numbers, the next cycle affects the nearby numbers, and so on. It
works its way through the pack of cards. If you have fifty cards and you
make a mistake at card number thirty-nine, it affects thirty-seven,
thirty-eight, and thirty-nine. The next, card thirty-six, thirty-seven,
thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and forty. The next time it spreads like a
disease.
So they found an error back a way, and they got an idea. They would
only compute a small deck of ten cards around the error. And because ten
cards could be put through the machine faster than the deck of fifty cards,
they would go rapidly through with this other deck while they continued with
the fifty cards with the disease spreading. But the other thing was
computing faster, and they would seal it all up and correct it. Very clever.
That was the way those guys worked to get speed. There was no other
way. If they had to stop to try to fix it, we'd have lost time. We couldn't
have got it. That was what they were doing.
Of course, you know what happened while they were doing that. They
found an error in the blue deck. And so they had a yellow deck with a little
fewer cards; it was going around faster than the blue deck. Just when they
are going crazy -- because after they get this straightened out, they have
to fix the white deck -- the boss comes walking in.
"Leave us alone," they say. I left them alone and everything came out.
We solved the problem in time and that's the way it was.
I was an underling at the beginning. Later I became a group leader. And
I met some very great men. It is one of the great experiences of my life to
have met all these wonderful physicists.
There was, of course, Enrico Fermi. He came down once from Chicago, to
consult a little bit, to help us if we had some problems. We had a meeting
with him, and I had been doing some calculations and gotten some results.
The calculations were so elaborate -- it was very difficult. Now, usually I
was the expert at this; I could always tell you what the answer was going to
look like, or when I got it I could explain why. But this thing was so
complicated I couldn't explain why it was like that.
So I told Fermi I was doing this problem, and I started to describe the
results. He said, "Wait, before you tell me the result, let me think. It's
going to come out like this (he was right), and it's going to come out like
this because of so and so. And there's a perfectly obvious explanation for
this --"
He was doing what I was supposed to be good at, ten times better. That
was quite a lesson to me.
Then there was John von Neumann, the great mathematician. We used to go
for walks on Sunday. We'd walk in the canyons, often with Bethe and Bob
Bacher. It was a great pleasure. And von Neumann gave me an interesting
idea: that you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in. So
I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a
result of von Neumann's advice. It's made me a very happy man ever since.
But it was von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active
irresponsibility!
I also met Niels Bohr. His name was Nicholas Baker in those days, and
he came to Los Alamos with Jim Baker, his son, whose name is really Aage
Bohr. They came from Denmark, and they were very famous physicists, as you
know. Even to the big shot guys, Bohr was a great god.
We were at a meeting once, the first time he came, and everybody wanted
to see the great Bohr. So there were a lot of people there, and we were
discussing the problems of the bomb. I was back in a corner somewhere. He
came and went, and all I could see of him was from between people's heads.
In the morning of the day he's due to come next time, I get a telephone
call.
"Hello -- Feynman?"
"Yes."
"This is Jim Baker." It's his son. "My father and I would like to speak
to you."
"Me? I'm Feynman, I'm just a --"
"That's right. Is eight o'clock OK?"
So, at eight o'clock in the morning, before anybody's awake, I go down
to the place. We go into an office in the technical area and he says, "We
have been thinking how we could make the bomb more efficient and we think of
the following idea."
I say, "No, it's not going to work. It's not efficient... Blah, blah,
blah."
So he says, "How about so and so?"
I said, "That sounds a little bit better, but it's got this damn fool
idea in it."
This went on for about two hours, going back and forth over lots of
ideas, back and forth, arguing. The great Niels kept lighting his pipe; it
always went out. And he talked in a way that was un-understandable --
mumble, mumble, hard to understand. His son I could understand better.
"Well," he said finally, lighting his pipe, "I guess we can call in the
big shots now." So then they called all the other guys and had a discussion
with them.
Then the son told me what happened. The last time he was there, Bohr
said to his son, "Remember the name of that little fellow in the back over
there? He's the only guy who's not afraid of me, and will say when I've got
a crazy idea. So next time when we want to discuss ideas, we're not going to
be able to do it with these guys who say everything is yes, yes, Dr. Bohr.
Get that guy and we'll talk with him first."
I was always dumb in that way. I never knew who I was talking to. I was
always worried about the physics. If the idea looked lousy, I said it looked
lousy. If it looked good, I said it looked good. Simple proposition.
I've always lived that way. It's nice, it's pleasant -- if you can do
it. I'm lucky in my life that I can do this.
After we'd made the calculations, the next thing that happened, of
course, was the test. I was actually at home on a short vacation at that
time, after my wife died, and so I got a message that said, "The baby is
expected on such and such a day."
I flew back, and I arrived just when the buses were leaving, so I went
straight out to the site and we waited out there, twenty miles away. We had
a radio, and they were supposed to tell us when the thing was going to go
off and so forth, but the radio wouldn't work, so we never knew what was
happening. But just a few minutes before it was supposed to go off the radio
started to work, and they told us there was twenty seconds or something to
go, for people who were far away like we were. Others were closer, six miles
away.
They gave out dark glasses that you could watch it with. Dark glasses!
Twenty miles away, you couldn't see a damn thing through dark glasses. So I
figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes (bright light can
never hurt your eyes) is ultraviolet light. I got behind a truck windshield,
because the ultraviolet can't go through glass, so that would be safe, and
so I could see the damn thing.
Time comes, and this tremendous flash out there is so bright that I
duck, and I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck. I said,
"That's not it. That's an after-image." So I look back up, and I see this
white light changing into yellow and then into orange. Clouds form and
disappear again -- from the compression and expansion of the shock wave.
Finally, a big ball of orange, the center that was so bright, becomes a
ball of orange that starts to rise and billow a little bit and get a little
black around the edges, and then you see it's a big ball of smoke with
flashes on the inside, with the heat of the fire going outwards.
All this took about one minute. It was a series from bright to dark,
and I had seen it. I am about the only guy who actually looked at the damn
thing -- the first Trinity test. Everybody else had dark glasses, and the
people at six miles couldn't see it because they were all told to lie on the
floor. I'm probably the only guy who saw it with the human eye.
Finally, after about a minute and a half, there's suddenly a tremendous
noise -- BANG, and then a rumble, like thunder -- and that's what convinced
me. Nobody had said a word during this whole thing. We were all just
watching quietly. But this sound released everybody -- released me
particularly because the solidity of the sound at that distance meant that
it had really worked.
The man standing next to me said, "What's that?"
I said, "That was the Bomb."
The man was William Laurence. He was there to write an article
describing the whole situation. I had been the one who was supposed to have
taken him around. Then it was found that it was too technical for him, and
so later H. D. Smyth came and I showed him around. One thing we did, we went
into a room and there on the end of a narrow pedestal was a small
silver-plated ball. You could put your hand on it. It was warm. It was
radioactive. It was plutonium. And we stood at the door of this room,
talking about it. This was a new element that was made by man, that had
never existed on the earth before, except for a very short period possibly
at the very beginning. And here it was all isolated and radioactive and had
these properties. And we had made it. And so it was tremendously valuable.
Meanwhile, you know how people do when they talk -- you kind of jiggle
around and so forth. He was kicking the doorstop, you see, and I said, "Yes,
the doorstop certainly is appropriate for this door." The doorstop was a
ten-inch hemisphere of yellowish metal-gold, as a matter of fact.
What had happened was that we needed to do an experiment to see how
many neutrons were reflected by different materials, in order to save the
neutrons so we didn't use so much material. We had tested many different
materials. We had tested platinum, we had tested zinc, we had tested brass,
we had tested gold. So, in making the tests with the gold, we had these
pieces of gold and somebody had the clever idea of using that great ball of
gold for a doorstop for the door of the room that contained the plutonium.
After the thing went off, there was tremendous excitement at Los
Alamos. Everybody had parties, we all ran around. I sat on the end of a jeep
and beat drums and so on. But one man, I remember, Bob Wilson, was just
sitting there moping.
I said, "What are you moping about?" He said, "It's a terrible thing
that we made." I said, "But you started it. You got us into it." You see,
what happened to me -- what happened to the rest of us -- is we started for
a good reason, then you're working very hard to accomplish something and
it's a pleasure, it's excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just
stop. Bob Wilson was the only one who was still thinking about it, at that
moment.
I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to
teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it
any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York,
for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you
know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so
forth... How far from here was 34th Street?... All those buildings, all
smashed -- and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a
bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they
just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new
things? It's so useless.
But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't
it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad
those other people had the sense to go ahead.
--------
Safecracker Meets Safecracker
I learned to pick locks from a guy named Leo Lavatelli. It turns out
that picking ordinary tumbler locks -- like Yale locks -- is easy. You try
to turn the lock by putting a screwdriver in the hole (you have to push from
the side in order to leave the hole open). It doesn't turn because there are
some pins inside which have to be lifted to just the right height (by the
key). Because it is not made perfectly, the lock is held more by one pin
than the others. Now, if you push a little wire gadget -- maybe a paper clip
with a slight bump at the end -- and jiggle it back and forth inside the
lock, you'll eventually push that one pin that's doing the most holding, up
to the right height. The lock gives, just a little bit, so the first pin
stays up -- it's caught on the edge. Now most of the load is held by another
pin, and you repeat the same random process for a few more minutes, until
all the pins are pushed up.
What often happens is that the screwdriver will slip and you hear
tic-tic-tic, and it makes you mad. There are little springs that push the
pins back down when a key is removed, and you can hear them click when you
let go of the screwdriver. (Sometimes you intentionally let go of the
screwdriver to see if you're getting anywhere -- you might be pushing the
wrong way, for instance.) The process is something like Sisyphus: you're
always falling back downhill.
It's a simple process, but practice helps a lot. You learn how hard to
push on things -- hard enough so the pins will stay up, but not so hard that
they won't go up in the first place. What is not really appreciated by most
people is that they're perpetually locking themselves in with locks
everywhere, and it's not very hard to pick them.
When we started to work on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos,
everything was in such a hurry that it wasn't really ready. All the secrets
of the project -- everything about the atomic bomb -- were kept in filing
cabinets which, if they had locks at all, were locked with padlocks which
had maybe only three pins: they were as easy as pie to open.
To improve security the shop outfitted every filing cabinet with a long
rod that went down through the handles of the drawers and that was fastened
by a padlock.
Some guy said to me, "Look at this new thing the shop put on -- can you
open the cabinet now?"
I looked at the back of the cabinet and saw that the drawers didn't
have a solid bottom. There was a slot with a wire rod in each one that held
a slidable piece (which holds the papers up inside the drawer). I poked in
from the back, slid the piece back, and began pulling the papers out through
the slot. "Look!" I said. "I don't even have to pick the lock."
Los Alamos was a very cooperative place, and we felt it our
responsibility to point out things that should be improved. I'd keep
complaining that the stuff was unsafe, and although everybody thought it was
safe because there were steel rods and padlocks, it didn't mean a damn
thing.
To demonstrate that the locks meant nothing, whenever I wanted
somebody's report and they weren't around, I'd just go in their office, open
the filing cabinet, and take it out. When I was finished I would give it
back to the guy: "Thanks for your report."
"Where'd you get it?"
"Out of your filing cabinet."
"But I locked it!"
"I know you locked it. The locks are no good."
Finally some filing cabinets came which had combination locks on them
made by the Mosler Safe Company. They had three drawers. Pulling the top
drawer out would release the other drawers by a catch. The top drawer was
opened by turning a combination wheel to the left, right, and left for the
combination, and then right to number ten, which would draw back a bolt
inside. The whole filing cabinet could be locked by closing the bottom
drawers first, then the top drawer, and spinning the combination wheel away
from number ten, which pushed up the bolt.
These new filing cabinets were an immediate challenge, naturally. I
love puzzles. One guy tries to make something to keep another guy out; there
must be a way to beat it!
I had first to understand how the lock worked, so I took apart the one
in my office. The way it worked is this: There are three discs on a single
shaft, one behind the other; each has a notch in a different place. The idea
is to line up the notches so that when you turn the wheel to ten, the little
friction drive will draw the bolt down into the slot generated by the
notches of the three discs.
Now, to turn the discs, there's a pin sticking out from the back of the
combination wheel, and a pin sticking up from the first disc at the same
radius. Within one turn of the combination wheel, you've picked up the first
disc.
On the back of the first disc there's a pin at the same radius as a pin
on the front of the second disc, so by the time you've spun the combination
wheel around twice, you've picked up the second disc as well.
Keep turning the wheel, and a pin on the back of the second disc will
catch a pin on the front of the third disc, which you now set into the
proper position with the first number of the combination.
Now you have to turn the combination wheel the other way one full turn
to catch the second disc from the other side, and then continue to the
second number of the combination to set the second disc.
Again you reverse direction and set the first disc to its proper place.
Now the notches are lined up, and by turning the wheel to ten, you open the
cabinet.
Well, I struggled, and I couldn't get anywhere. I bought a couple of
Safecracker books, but they were all the same. In the beginning of the book
there are some stories of the fantastic achievements of the safecracker,
such as the woman caught in a meat refrigerator who is freezing to death,
but the safecracker, hanging upside down, opens it in two minutes. Or there
are some precious furs or gold bullion under water, down in the sea, and the
safecracker dives down and opens the chest.
In the second part of the book, they tell you how to crack a safe.
There are all kinds of ninny-pinny, dopey things, like "It might be a good
idea to try a date for the combination, because lots of people like to use
dates." Or "Think of the psychology of the owner of the safe, and what he
might use for the combination." And "The secretary is often worried that she
might forget the combination of the safe, so she might write it down in one
of the following places -- along the edge of her desk drawer, on a list of
names and addresses..." and so on.
They did tell me something sensible about how to open ordinary safes,
and it's easy to understand. Ordinary safes have an extra handle, so if you
push down on the handle while you're turning the combination wheel, things
being unequal (as with locks), the force of the handle trying to push the
bolt down into the notches (which are not lined up) is held up more by one
disc than another. When the notch on that disc comes under the bolt, there's
a tiny click that you can hear with a stethoscope, or a slight decrease in
friction that you can feel (you don't have to sandpaper your fingertips),
and you know, "There's a number!"
You don't know whether it's the first, second, or third number, but you
can get a pretty good idea of that by finding out how many times you have to
turn the wheel the other way to hear the same click again. If it's a little
less than once, it's the first disc; if it's a little less than twice, it's
the second disc (you have to make a correction for the thickness of the
pins).
This useful trick only works on ordinary safes, which have the extra
handle, so I was stymied.
I tried all kinds of subsidiary tricks with the cabinets, such as
finding out how to release the latches on the lower drawers, without opening
the top drawer, by taking off a screw in front and poking around with a
piece of hanger wire.
I tried spinning the combination wheel very rapidly and then going to
ten, thus putting a little friction on, which I hoped would stop a disc at
the right point in some manner. I tried all kinds of things. I was
desperate.
I also did a certain amount of systematic study. For instance, a
typical combination was 69-32-21. How far off could a number be when you're
opening the safe? If the number was 69, would 68 work? Would 67 work? On the
particular locks we had, the answer was yes for both, but 66 wouldn't work.
You could be off by two in either direction. That meant you only had to try
one out of five numbers, so you could try zero, five, ten, fifteen, and so
on. With twenty such numbers on a wheel of 100, that was 8000 possibilities
instead of the 1,000,000 you would get if you had to try every single
number.
Now the question was, how long would it take me to try the 8000
combinations? Suppose I've got the first two numbers right of a combination
I'm trying to get. Say the numbers are 69-32, but I don't know it -- I've
got them as 70-30. Now I can try the twenty possible third numbers without
having to set up the first two numbers each time. Now let's suppose I have
only the first number of the combination right. After trying the twenty
numbers on the third disc, I move the second wheel only a little bit, and
then do another twenty numbers on the third wheel.
I practiced all the time on my own safe so I could do this process as
fast as I could and not get lost in my mind as to which number I was pushing
and mess up the first number. Like a guy who practices sleight of hand, I
got it down to an absolute rhythm so I could try the 400 possible back
numbers in less than half an hour. That meant I could open a safe in a
maximum of eight hours -- with an average time of four hours.
There was another guy there at Los Alamos named Staley who was also
interested in locks. We talked about it from time to time, but we weren't
getting anywhere much. After I got this idea how to open a safe in an
average time of four hours, I wanted to show Staley how to do it, so I went
into a guy's office over in the computing department and asked, "Do you mind
if I use your safe? I'd like to show Staley something."
Meanwhile some guys in the computing department came around and one of
them said, "Hey, everybody; Feynman's gonna show Staley how to open a safe,
ha, ha, ha!" I wasn't going to actually open the safe; I was just going to
show Staley this way of quickly trying the back two numbers without losing
your place and having to set up the first number again.
I began. "Let's suppose that the first number is forty, and we're
trying fifteen for the second number. We go back and forth, ten; back five
more and forth, ten; and so on. Now we've tried all the possible third
numbers. Now we try twenty for the second number: we go back and forth, ten;
back five more and forth, ten; back five more and forth, CLICK!" My jaw
dropped: the first and second numbers happened to be right!
Nobody saw my expression because my back was towards them. Staley
looked very surprised, but both of us caught on very quickly as to what
happened, so I pulled the top drawer out with a flourish and said, "And
there you are!"
Staley said, "I see what you mean; it's a very good scheme" -- and we
walked out. Everybody was amazed. It was complete luck. Now I really had a
reputation for opening safes.
It took me about a year and a half to get that far (of course, I was
working on the bomb, too!) but I figured that I had the safes beaten, in the
sense that if there was a real difficulty -- if somebody was lost, or dead,
and nobody else knew the combination but the stuff in the filing cabinet was
needed -- I could open it. After reading what preposterous things the
safecrackers claimed, I thought that was a rather respectable
accomplishment.
We had no entertainment there at Los Alamos, and we had to amuse
ourselves somehow, so fiddling with the Mosler lock on my filing cabinet was
one of my entertainments. One day I made an interesting observation: When
the lock is opened and the drawer has been pulled out and the wheel is left
on ten (which is what people do when they've opened their filing cabinet and
are taking papers out of it), the bolt is still down. Now what does that
mean, the bolt is still down? It means the bolt is in the slot made by the
three discs, which are still properly lined up. Ahhhh!
Now, if I turn the wheel away from ten a little bit, the bolt comes up;
if I immediately go back to ten, the bolt goes back down again, because I
haven't yet disturbed the slot. If I keep going away from ten in steps of
five, at some point the bolt won't go back down when I go back to ten: the
slot has just been disturbed. The number just before, which still let the
bolt go down, is the last number of the combination!
I realized that I could do the same thing to find the second number: As
soon as I know the last number, I can turn the wheel around the other way
and again, in lumps of five, push the second disc bit by bit until the bolt
doesn't go down. The number just before would be the second number.
If I were very patient I would be able to pick up all three numbers
that way, but the amount of work involved in picking up the first number of
the combination by this elaborate scheme would be much more than just trying
the twenty possible first numbers with the other two numbers that you
already know, when the filing cabinet is closed.
I practiced and I practiced until I could get the last two numbers off
an open filing cabinet, hardly looking at the dial. Then, when I'd be in
some guy's office discussing some physics problem, I'd lean against his
opened filing cabinet, and just like a guy who's jiggling keys
absent-mindedly while he's talking, I'd just wobble the dial back and forth,
back and forth. Sometimes I'd put my finger on the bolt so I wouldn't have
to look to see if it's coming up. In this way I picked off the last two
numbers of various filing cabinets. When I got back to my office I would
write the two numbers down on a piece of paper that I kept inside the lock
of my filing cabinet. I took the lock apart each time to get the paper -- I
thought that was a very safe place for them.
After a while my reputation began to sail, because things like this
would happen: Somebody would say, "Hey, Feynman! Christy's out of town and
we need a document from his safe -- can you open it?"
If it was a safe I knew I didn't have the last two numbers of, I would
simply say, "I'm sorry, but I can't do it now; I've got this work that I
have to do." Otherwise, I would say, "Yeah, but I gotta get my tools." I
didn't need any tools, but I'd go back to my office, open my filing cabinet,
and look at my little piece of paper: "Christy -- 35, 60." Then I'd get a
screwdriver and go over to Christy's office and close the door behind me.
Obviously not everybody is supposed to be allowed to know how to do this!
I'd be in there alone and I'd open the safe in a few minutes. All I had
to do was try the first number at most twenty times, then sit around,
reading a magazine or something, for fifteen or twenty minutes. There was no
use trying to make it look too easy; somebody would figure out there was a
trick to it! After a while I'd open the door and say, "It's open."
People thought I was opening the safes from scratch. Now I could
maintain the idea, which began with that accident with Staley, that I could
open safes cold. Nobody figured out that I was picking the last two numbers
off their safes, even though -- perhaps because -- I was doing it all the
time, like a card sharp walking around all the time with a deck of cards.
I often went to Oak Ridge to check up on the safety of the uranium
plant. Everything was always in a hurry because it was wartime, and one time
I had to go there on a weekend. It was Sunday, and we were in this fella's
office -- a general, a head or a vice president of some company, a couple of
other big muck-a-mucks, and me. We were gathered together to discuss a
report that was in the fella's safe -- a secret safe -- when suddenly he
realized that he didn't know the combination. His secretary was the only one
who knew it, so he called her home and it turned out she had gone on a
picnic up in the hills.
While all this was going on, I asked, "Do you mind if I fiddle with the
safe?"
"Ha, ha, ha -- not at all!" So I went over to the safe and started to
fool around.
They began to discuss how they could get a car to try to find the
secretary, and the guy was getting more and more embarrassed because he had
all these people waiting and he was such a jackass he didn't know how to
open his own safe. Everybody was all tense and getting mad at him, when
CLICK! -- the safe opened.
In 10 minutes I had opened the safe that contained all the secret
documents about the plant. They were astonished. The safes were apparently
not very safe. It was a terrible shock: All this "eyes only" stuff, top
secret, locked in this wonderful secret safe, and this guy opens it in ten
minutes! Of course I was able to open the safe because of my perpetual habit
of taking the last two numbers off. While in Oak Ridge the month before, I
was in the same office when the safe was open and I took the numbers off in
an absent-minded way -- I was always practicing my obsession. Although I
hadn't written them down, I was able to vaguely remember what they were.
First I tried 40-15, then 15-40, but neither of those worked. Then I tried
10-45 with all the first numbers, and it opened.
A similar thing happened on another weekend when I was visiting Oak
Ridge. I had written a report that had to be OKed by a colonel, and it was
in his safe. Everybody else keeps documents in filing cabinets like the ones
at Los Alamos, but he was a colonel, so he had a much fancier, two-door safe
with big handles that pull four 3/4-inch-thick steel bolts from the frame.
The great brass doors swung open and he took out my report to read.
Not having had an opportunity to see any really good safes, I said to
him, "Would you mind, while you're reading my report, if I looked at your
safe?"
"Go right ahead," he said, convinced that there was nothing I could do.
I looked at the back of one of the solid brass doors, and I discovered that
the combination wheel was connected to a little lock that looked exactly the
same as the little unit that was on my filing cabinet at Los Alamos. Same
company, same little bolt, except that when the bolt came down, the big
handles on the safe could then move some rods sideways, and with a bunch of
levers you could pull back all those 3/4-inch steel rods. The whole lever
system, it appeared, depends on the same little bolt that locks filing
cabinets.
Just for the sake of professional perfection, to make sure it was the
same, I took the two numbers off the same way I did with the filing cabinet
safes.
Meanwhile, he was reading the report. When he'd finished he said, "All
right, it's fine." He put the report in the safe, grabbed the big handles,
and swung the great brass doors together. It sounds so good when they close,
but I know it's all psychological, because it's nothing but the same damn
lock.
I couldn't help but needle him a little bit (I always had a thing about
military guys, in such wonderful uniforms) so I said, "The way you close
that safe, I get the idea that you think things are safe in there."
"Of course."
"The only reason you think they're safe in there is because civilians
call it a 'safe.' " (I put the word "civilians" in there to make it sound as
if he'd been had by civilians.)
He got very angry. "What do you mean -- it's not safe?"
"A good safecracker could open it in thirty minutes."
"Can you open it in thirty minutes?"
"I said a good safecracker. It would take me about forty-five."
"Well!" he said. "My wife is waiting at home for me with supper, but
I'm gonna stay here and watch you, and you're gonna sit down there and work
on that damn thing for forty-five minutes and not open it!" He sat down in
his big leather chair, put his feet up on his desk, and read.
With complete confidence I picked up a chair, carried it over to the
safe and sat down in front of it. I began to turn the wheel at random, just
to make some action.
After about five minutes, which is quite a long time when you're just
sitting and waiting, he lost some patience: "Well, are you making any
progress?"
"With a thing like this, you either open it or you don't."
I figured one or two more minutes would be about time, so I began to
work in earnest and two minutes later, CLINK -- it opened.
The colonel's jaw dropped and his eyes bugged out. "Colonel," I said,
in a serious tone, "let me tell you something about these locks: When the
door to the safe or the top drawer of the filing cabinet is left open, it's
very easy for someone to get the combination. That's what I did while you
were reading my report, just to demonstrate the danger. You should insist
that everybody keep their filing cabinet drawers locked while they're
working, because when they're open, they're very, very vulnerable."
"Yeah! I see what you mean! That's very interesting!" We were on the
same side after that.
The next time I went to Oak Ridge, all the secretaries and people who
knew who I was were telling me, "Don't come through here! Don't come through
here!"
The colonel had sent a note around to everyone in the plant which said,
"During his last visit, was Mr. Feynman at any time in your office, near
your office, or walking through your office?" Some people answered yes;
others said no. The ones who said yes got another note: "Please change the
combination of your safe."
That was his solution: I was the danger. So they all had to change
their combinations on account of me. It's a pain in the neck to change a
combination and remember the new one, so they were all mad at me and didn't
want me to come near them: they might have to change their combination once
again. Of course, their filing cabinets were still left open while they were
working!
A library at Los Alamos held all of the documents we had ever worked
on: It was a solid, concrete room with a big, beautiful door which had a
metal wheel that turns -- like a safe-deposit vault. During the war I had
tried to look at it closely. I knew the girl who was the librarian, and I
begged her to let me play with it a little bit. I was fascinated by it: it
was the biggest lock I ever saw! I discovered that I could never use my
method of picking off the last two numbers to get in. In fact, while turning
the knob while the door was open, I made the lock close, so it was sticking
out, and they couldn't close the door again until the girl came and opened
the lock again. That was the end of my fiddling around with that lock. I
didn't have time to figure out how it worked; it was much beyond my
capacity.
During the summer after the war I had some documents to write and work
to finish up, so I went back to Los Alamos from Cornell, where I had taught
during the year. In the middle of my work I had to refer to a document that
I had written before but couldn't remember, and it was down in the library.
I went down to get the document, and there was a soldier walking back
and forth, with a gun. It was a Saturday, and after the war the library was
closed on Saturdays.
Then I remembered what a good friend of mine, Frederic de Hoffman, had
done. He was in the Declassification Section. After the war the army was
thinking of declassifying some documents, and he had to go back and forth to
the library so much -- look at this document, look at that document, check
this, check that -- that he was going nuts! So he had a copy of every
document -- all the secrets to the atomic bomb -- in nine filing cabinets in
his office.
I went down to his office, and the lights were on. It looked as if
whoever was there -- perhaps his secretary -- had just stepped out for a few
minutes, so I waited. While I was waiting I started to fiddle around with
the combination wheel on one of the filing cabinets. (By the way, I didn't
have the last two numbers for de Hoffman's safes; they were put in after the
war, after I had left.)
I started to play with one of the combination wheels and began to think
about the safecracker books. I thought to myself, "I've never been much
impressed by the tricks described in those books, so I've never tried them,
but let's see if we can open de Hoffman's safe by following the book."
First trick, the secretary: she's afraid she's going to forget the
combination, so she writes it down somewhere. I started to look in some of
the places mentioned in the book. The desk drawer was locked, but it was an
ordinary lock like Leo Lavatelli taught me how to open -- ping! I look along
the edge: nothing.
Then I looked through the secretary's papers. I found a sheet of paper
that all the secretaries had, with the Greek letters carefully made -- so
they could recognize them in mathematical formulas -- and named. And there,
carelessly written along the top of the paper, was pi = 3.14159. Now, that's
six digits, and why does a secretary have to know the numerical value of pi?
It was obvious; there was no other reason!
I went over to the filing cabinets and tried the first one: 31-41-59.
It didn't open. Then I tried 59-41-31. That didn't work either. Then
95-14-13. Backwards, forwards, upside down, turn it this way, turn it that
-- nothing!
I closed the desk drawer and started to walk out the door, when I
thought of the safecracker books again: Next, try the psychology method. I
said to myself, "Freddy de Hoffman is just the kind of guy to use a
mathematical constant for a safe combination."
I went back to the first filing cabinet and tried 27-18-28 -- CLICK! It
opened! (The mathematical constant second in importance to pi is the base of
natural logarithms, e:2.71828...) There were nine filing cabinets, and I had
opened the first one, but the document I wanted was in another one -- they
were in alphabetical order by author. I tried the second filing cabinet:
27-18-28 -- CLICK! It opened with the same, combination. I thought, "This is
wonderful! I've opened the secrets to the atomic bomb, but if I'm ever going
to tell this story, I've got to make sure that all the combinations are
really the same!" Some of the filing cabinets were in the next room, so I
tried 27-18-28 on one of them, and it opened. Now I'd opened three safes --
all the same.
I thought to myself, "Now I could write a safecracker book that would
beat every one, because at the beginning I would tell how I opened safes
whose contents were bigger and more valuable than what any safecracker
anywhere had opened -- except for a life, of course -- but compared to the
furs or the gold bullion, I have them all beat: I opened the safes which
contained all the secrets to the atomic bomb: the schedules for the
production of the plutonium, the purification procedures, how much material
is needed, how the bomb works, how the neutrons are generated, what the
design is, the dimensions -- the entire information that was known at Los
Alamos: the whole shmeer!"
I went back to the second filing cabinet and took out the document I
wanted. Then I took a red grease pencil and a piece of yellow paper that was
lying around in the office and wrote, "I borrowed document no. LA4312 --
Feynman the safe-cracker." I put the note on top of the papers in the filing
cabinet and closed it.
Then I went to the first one I had opened and wrote another note: "This
one was no harder to open than the other one -- Wise Guy" and shut the
cabinet.
Then in the other cabinet, in the other room, I wrote, "When the
combinations are all the same, one is no harder to open than another -- Same
Guy" and I shut that one. I went back to my office and wrote my report.
That evening I went to the cafeteria and ate supper. There was Freddy
de Hoffman. He said he was going over to his office to work, so just for fun
I went with him.
He started to work, and soon he went into the other room to open one of
the filing cabinets in there -- something I hadn't counted on -- and he
happened to open the filing cabinet I had put the third note in, first. He
opened the drawer, and he saw this foreign object in there -- this bright
yellow paper with something scrawled on it in bright red crayon.
I had read in books that when somebody is afraid, his face gets sallow,
but I had never seen it before. Well, it's absolutely true. His face turned
a gray, yellow green -- it was really frightening to see. He picked up the
paper, and his hand was shaking. "L-l-look at this!" he said, trembling.
The note said, "When the combinations are all the same, one is no
harder to open than another -- Same Guy."
"What does it mean?" I said.
"All the c-c-combinations of my safes are the s-s-same!" he stammered.
"That ain't such a good idea."
"I-I know that n-now!" he said, completely shaken.
Another effect of the blood draining from the face must be that the
brain doesn't work right. "He signed who it was! He signed who it was!" he
said.
"What?" (I hadn't put my name on that one.)
"Yes," he said, "it's the same guy who's been trying to get into
Building Omega!"
All during the war, and even after, there were these perpetual rumors:
"Somebody's been trying to get into Building Omega!" You see, during the war
they were doing experiments for the bomb in which they wanted to get enough
material together for the chain reaction to just get started. They would
drop one piece of material through another, and when it went through, the
reaction would start and they'd measure how many neutrons they got. The
piece would fall through so fast that nothing should build up and explode.
Enough of a reaction would begin, however, so they could tell that things
were really starting correctly, that the rates were right, and everything
was going according to prediction -- a very dangerous experiment!
Naturally, they were not doing this experiment in the middle of Los
Alamos, but off several miles, in a canyon several mesas over, all isolated.
This Building Omega had its own fence around it with guard towers. In the
middle of the night when everything's quiet, some rabbit comes out of the
brush and smashes against the fence and makes a noise. The guard shoots. The
lieutenant in charge comes around. What's the guard going to say -- that it
was only a rabbit? No. "Somebody's been trying to get into Building Omega
and I scared him off!"
So de Hoffman was pale and shaking, and he didn't realize there was a
flaw in his logic: it was not clear that the same guy who'd been trying to
get into Building Omega was the same guy who was standing next to him. He
asked me what to do. "Well, see if any documents are missing." "It looks all
right," he said. "I don't see any missing." I tried to steer him to the
filing cabinet I took my document out of. "Well, uh, if all the combinations
are the same, perhaps he's taken something from another drawer."
"Right!" he said, and he went back into his office and opened the first
filing cabinet and found the second note I wrote: "This one was no harder
than the other one -- Wise Guy."
By that time it didn't make any difference whether it was "Same Guy" or
"Wise Guy": It was completely clear to him that it was the guy who was
trying to get into Building Omega. So to convince him to open the filing
cabinet with my first note in it was particularly difficult, and I don't
remember how I talked him into it.
He started to open it, so I began to walk down the hall, because I was
a little bit afraid that when he found out who did it to him, I was going to
get my throat cut!
Sure enough, he came running down the hall after me, but instead of
being angry, he practically put his arms around me because he was so
completely relieved that this terrible burden of the atomic secrets being
stolen was only me doing mischief.
A few days later de Hoffman told me that he needed something from
Kerst's safe. Donald Kerst had gone back to Illinois and was hard to reach.
"If you can open all my safes using the psychological method," de Hoffman
said (I had told him how I did it), "maybe you could open Kerst's safe that
way."
By now the story had gotten around, so several people came to watch
this fantastic process where I was going to open Kerst's safe -- cold. There
was no need for me to be alone. I didn't have the last two numbers to
Kerst's safe, and to use the psychology method I needed people around who
knew Kerst.
We all went over to Kerst's office and I checked the drawers for clues;
there was nothing. Then I asked them, "What kind of a combination would
Kerst use -- a mathematical constant?"
"Oh, no!" de Hoffman said. "Kerst would do something very simple."
I tried 10-20-30, 20-40-60, 60-40-20, 30-20-10. Nothing.
Then I said, "Do you think he would use a date?"
"Yeah!" they said. "He's just the kind of guy to use a date."
We tried various dates: 8-6-45, when the bomb went off; 86-19-45; this
date; that date; when the project started. Nothing worked.
By this time most of the people had drifted off. They didn't have the
patience to watch me do this, but the only way to solve such a thing is
patience!
Then I decided to try everything from around 1900 until now. That
sounds like a lot, but it's not: the first number is a month, one through
twelve, and I can try that using only three numbers: ten, five, and zero.
The second number is a day, from one to thirty-one, which I can try with six
numbers. The third number is the year, which was only forty-seven numbers at
that time, which I could try with nine numbers. So the 8000 combinations had
been reduced to 162, something I could try in fifteen or twenty minutes.
Unfortunately I started with the high end of the numbers for the
months, because when I finally opened it, the combination was 0-5-35.
I turned to de Hoffman. "What happened to Kerst around January 5,
1935?"
"His daughter was born in 1936," de Hoffman said. "It must be her
birthday."
Now I had opened two safes cold. I was getting good. Now I was
professional.
That same summer after the war, the guy from the property section was
trying to take back some of the things the government had bought, to sell
again as surplus. One of the things was a Captain's safe. We all knew about
this safe. The Captain, when he arrived during the war, decided that the
filing cabinets weren't safe enough for the secrets he was going to get, so
he had to have a special safe.
The Captain's office was on the second floor of one of the flimsy
wooden buildings that we all had our offices in, and the safe he ordered was
a heavy steel safe. The workmen had to put down platforms of wood and use
special jacks to get it up the steps. Since there wasn't much amusement, we
all watched this big safe being moved up to his office with great effort,
and we all made jokes about what kind of secrets he was going to keep in
there. Some fella said we oughta put our stuff in his safe, and let him put
his stuff in ours. So everyone knew about this safe.
The property section man wanted it for Surplus, but first it had to be
emptied, and the only people who knew the combination were the Captain, who
was in Bikini, and Alvarez, who'd forgotten it. The man asked me to open it.
I went up to his old office and said to the secretary, "Why don't you
phone the Captain and ask him the combination?"
"I don't want to bother him," she said.
"Well, you're gonna bother me for maybe eight hours. I won't do it
unless you make an attempt to call him."
"OK, OK!" she said. She picked up the telephone and I went into the
other room to look at the safe. There it was, that huge, steel safe, and its
doors were wide open.
I went back to the secretary. "It's open."
"Marvelous!" she said, as she put down the phone.
"No," I said, "it was already open."
"Oh! I guess the property section was able to open it after all."
I went down to the man in the property section. "I went up to the safe
and it was already open."
"Oh, yeah," he said; "I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I sent our regular
locksmith up there to drill it, but before he drilled it he tried to open
it, and he opened it."
So! First information: Los Alamos now has a regular locksmith. Second
information: This man knows how to drill safes, something I know nothing
about. Third information:
He can open a safe cold -- in a few minutes. This is a real
professional, a real source of information. This guy I have to meet.
I found out he was a locksmith they had hired after the war (when they
weren't as concerned about security) to take care of such things. It turned
out that he didn't have enough work to do opening safes, so he also repaired
the Marchant calculators we had used. During the war I repaired those things
all the time -- so I had a way to meet him.
Now I have never been surreptitious or tricky about meeting somebody; I
just go right up and introduce myself. But in this case it was so important
to meet this man, and I knew that before he would tell me any of his secrets
on how to open safes, I would have to prove myself.
I found out where his room was -- in the basement of the theoretical
physics section, where I worked -- and I knew he worked in the evening, when
the machines weren't being used. So, at first I would walk past his door on
my way to my office in the evening. That's all; I'd just walk past.
A few nights later, just a "Hi." After a while, when he saw it was the
same guy walking past, he'd say "Hi," or "Good evening."
A few weeks of this slow process and I see he's working on the Marchant
calculators. I say nothing about them; it isn't time yet.
We gradually say a little more: "Hi! I see you're working pretty hard!"
"Yeah, pretty hard" -- that kind of stuff.
Finally, a breakthrough: he invites me for soup. It's going very good
now. Every evening we have soup together. Now I begin to talk a little bit
about the adding machines, and he tells me he has a problem. He's been
trying to put a succession of spring-loaded wheels back onto a shaft, and he
doesn't have the right tool, or something; he's been working on it for a
week. I tell him that I used to work on those machines during the war, and
"I'll tell you what: you just leave the machine out tonight, and I'll have a
look at it tomorrow."
"OK," he says, because he's desperate.
The next day I looked at the damn thing and tried to load it by holding
all the wheels in my hand. It kept snapping back. I thought to myself, "If
he's been trying the same thing for a week, and I'm trying it and can't do
it, it ain't the way to do it!" I stopped and looked at it very carefully,
and I noticed that each wheel had a little hole -- just a little hole. Then
it dawned on me: I sprung the first one; then I put a piece of wire through
the little hole. Then I sprung the second one and put the wire through it.
Then the next one, the next one -- like putting beads on a string -- and I
strung the whole thing the first time I tried it, got it all in line, pulled
the wire out, and everything was OK.
That night I showed him the little hole and how I did it, and from then
on we talked a lot about machines; we got to be good friends. Now, in his
office there were a lot of little cubbyholes that contained locks half taken
apart, and pieces from safes, too. Oh, they were beautiful! But I still
didn't say a word about locks and safes.
Finally, I figured the day was coming, so I decided to put out a little
bit of bait about safes: I'd tell him the only thing worth a damn that I
knew about them -- that you can take the last two numbers off while it's
open. "Hey!" I said, looking over at the cubbyholes. "I see you're working
on Mosler safes."
"Yeah."
"You know, these locks are weak. If they're open, you can take the last
two numbers off..."
"You can?" he said, finally showing some interest.
"Yeah."
"Show me how," he said. I showed him how to do it, and he turned to me.
"What's your name?" All this time we had never exchanged names.
"Dick Feynman," I said.
"God! You're Feynman!" he said in awe. "The great safecracker! I've
heard about you; I've wanted to meet you for so long! I want to learn how to
crack a safe from you."
"What do you mean? You know how to open safes cold."
"I don't."
"Listen, I heard about the Captain's safe, and I've been working pretty
hard all this time because I wanted to meet you. And you tell me you don't
know how to open a safe cold."
"That's right."
"Well you must know how to drill a safe."
"I don't know how to do that either."
"WHAT?" I exclaimed. "The guy in the property section said you picked
up your tools and went up to drill the Captain's safe."
"Suppose you had a job as a locksmith," he said, "and a guy comes down
and asks you to drill a safe. What would you do?"
"Well," I replied, "I'd make a fancy thing of putting my tools
together, pick them up and take them to the safe. Then I'd put my drill up
against the safe somewhere at random and I'd go vvvvvvvvvvv, so I'd save my
job."
"That's exactly what I was going to do."
"But you opened it! You must know how to crack safes."
"Oh, yeah. I knew that the locks come from the factory set at 25-0-25
or 50-25-50, so I thought, 'Who knows; maybe the guy didn't bother to change
the combination,' and the second one worked."
So I did learn something from him -- that he cracked safes by the same
miraculous methods that I did. But even funnier was that this big shot
Captain had to have a super, super safe, and had people go to all that
trouble to hoist the thing up into his office, and he didn't even bother to
set the combination.
I went from office to office in my building, trying those two factory
combinations, and I opened about one safe in five.
--------
Uncle Sam Doesn't Need You!
After the war the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel to get the
guys for the occupation forces in Germany. Up until then the army deferred
people for some reason other than physical first (I was deferred because I
was working on the bomb), but now they reversed that and gave everybody a
physical first.
That summer I was working for Hans Bethe at General Electric in
Schenectady, New York, and I remember that I had to go some distance -- I
think it was to Albany -- to take the physical.
I get to the draft place, and I'm handed a lot of forms to fill out,
and then I start going around to all these different booths. They check your
vision at one, your hearing at another, they take your blood sample at
another, and so forth.
Anyway, finally you come to booth number thirteen: psychiatrist. There
you wait, sitting on one of the benches, and while I'm waiting I can see
what is happening. There are three desks, with a psychiatrist behind each
one, and the "culprit" sits across from the psychiatrist in his BVDs and
answers various questions.
At that time there were a lot of movies about psychiatrists. For
example, there was Spellbound, in which a woman who used to be a great piano
player has her hands stuck in some awkward position and she can't move them,
and her family calls in a psychiatrist to try to help her, and the
psychiatrist goes upstairs into a room with her, and you see the door close
behind them, and downstairs the family is discussing what's going to happen,
and then she comes out of the room, hands still stuck in the horrible
position, walks dramatically down the stairs over to the piano and sits
down, lifts her hands over the keyboard, and suddenly -- dum diddle dum
diddle dum, dum, dum -- she can play again. Well, I can't stand this kind of
baloney, and I had decided that psychiatrists are fakers, and I'll have
nothing to do with them. So that was the mood I was in when it was my turn
to talk to the psychiatrist.
I sit down at the desk, and the psychiatrist starts looking through my
papers. "Hello, Dick!" he says in a cheerful voice. "Where do you work?"
I'm thinking, "Who does he think he is, calling me by my first name?"
and I say coldly, "Schenectady."
"Who do you work for, Dick?" says the psychiatrist, smiling again.
"General Electric."
"Do you like your work, Dick?" he says, with that same big smile on his
face.
"So-so." I just wasn't going to have anything to do with him.
Three nice questions, and then the fourth one is completely different.
"Do you think people talk about you?" he asks, in a low, serious tone.
I light up and say, "Sure! When I go home, my mother often tells me how
she was telling her friends about me." He isn't listening to the
explanation; instead, he's writing something down on my paper.
Then again, in a low, serious tone, he says, "Do you think people stare
at you?"
I'm all ready to say no, when he says, ''For instance, do you think any
of the boys waiting on the benches are staring at you now?"
While I had been waiting to talk to the psychiatrist, I had noticed
there were about twelve guys on the benches waiting for the three
psychiatrists, and they've got nothing else to look at, so I divide twelve
by three -- that makes four each -- but I'm conservative, so I say, "Yeah,
maybe two of them are looking at us."
He says, "Well just turn around and look" -- and he's not even
bothering to look himself!
So I turn around, and sure enough, two guys are looking. So I point to
them and I say, "Yeah -- there's that guy, and that guy over there looking
at us." Of course, when I'm turned around and pointing like that, other guys
start to look at us, so I say, "Now him, and those two over there -- and now
the whole bunch." He still doesn't look up to check. He's busy writing more
things on my paper.
Then he says, "Do you ever hear voices in your head?"
"Very rarely," and I'm about to describe the two occasions on which it
happened when he says, "Do you talk to yourself?"
"Yeah, sometimes when I'm shaving, or thinking; once in a while." He's
writing down more stuff.
"I see you have a deceased wife -- do you talk to her?"
This question really annoyed me, but I contained myself and said,
"Sometimes, when I go up on a mountain and I'm thinking about her."
More writing. Then he asks, "Is anyone in your family in a mental
institution?"
"Yeah, I have an aunt in an insane asylum."
"Why do you call it an insane asylum?" he says, resentfully. "Why don't
you call it a mental institution?"
"I thought it was the same thing."
"Just what do you think insanity is?" he says, angrily.
"It's a strange and peculiar disease in human beings," I say honestly.
"There's nothing any more strange or peculiar about it than
appendicitis!" he retorts.
"I don't think so. In appendicitis we understand the causes better, and
something about the mechanism of it, whereas with insanity it's much more
complicated and mysterious." I won't go through the whole debate; the point
is that I meant insanity is physiologically peculiar, and he thought I meant
it was socially peculiar.
Up until this time, although I had been unfriendly to the psychiatrist,
I had nevertheless been honest in everything I said. But when he asked me to
put out my hands, I couldn't resist pulling a trick a guy in the
"bloodsucking line" had told me about. I figured nobody was ever going to
get a chance to do this, and as long as I was halfway under water, I would
do it. So I put out my hands with one palm up and the other one down.
The psychiatrist doesn't notice. He says, "Turn them over."
I turn them over. The one that was up goes down, and the one that was
down goes up, and he still doesn't notice, because he's always looking very
closely at one hand to see if it is shaking. So the trick had no effect.
Finally, at the end of all these questions, he becomes friendly again.
He lights up and says, "I see you have a Ph.D., Dick. Where did you study?"
"MIT and Princeton. And where did you study?"
"Yale and London. And what did you study, Dick?"
"Physics. And what did you study?"
"Medicine."
"And this is medicine?"
"Well, yes. What do you think it is? You go and sit down over there and
wait a few minutes!"
So I sit on the bench again, and one of the other guys waiting sidles
up to me and says, "Gee! You were in there twenty-five minutes! The other
guys were in there only five minutes!"
"Yeah."
"Hey," he says. "You wanna know how to fool the psychiatrist? All you
have to do is pick your nails, like this."
"Then why don't you pick your nails like that?"
"Oh," he says, "I wanna get in the army!"
"You wanna fool the psychiatrist?" I say. "You just tell him that!"
After a while I was called over to a different desk to see another
psychiatrist. While the first psychiatrist had been rather young and
innocent-looking, this one was gray-haired and distinguished-looking --
obviously the superior psychiatrist. I figure all of this is now going to
get straightened out, but no matter what happens, I'm not going to become
friendly.
The new psychiatrist looks at my papers, puts a big smile on his face,
and says, "Hello, Dick. I see you worked at Los Alamos during the war."
"Yeah."
"There used to be a boys' school there, didn't there?"
"That's right."
"Were there a lot of buildings in the school?"
"Only a few."
Three questions -- same technique -- and the next question is
completely different. "You said you hear voices in your head. Describe that,
please."
"It happens very rarely, when I've been paying attention to a person
with a foreign accent. As I'm falling asleep I can hear his voice very
clearly. The first time it happened was while I was a student at MIT. I
could hear old Professor Vallarta say, 'Dee-a dee-a electric field-a.' And
the other time was in Chicago during the war, when Professor Teller was
explaining to me how the bomb worked. Since I'm interested in all kinds of
phenomena, I wondered how I could hear these voices with accents so
precisely, when I couldn't imitate them that well... Doesn't everybody have
something like that happen once in a while?"
The psychiatrist put his hand over his face, and I could see through
his fingers a little smile (he wouldn't answer the question).
Then the psychiatrist checked into something else. "You said that you
talk to your deceased wife. What do you say to her?"
I got angry. I figure it's none of his damn business, and I say, "I
tell her I love her, if it's all right with you!"
After some more bitter exchanges he says, "Do you believe in the
supernormal?"
I say, "I don't know what the 'supernormal' is."
"What? You, a Ph.D. in physics, don't know what the supernormal is?"
"That's right."
"It's what Sir Oliver Lodge and his school believe in."
That's not much of a clue, but I knew it. "You mean the supernatural."
"You can call it that if you want."
"All right, I will."
"Do you believe in mental telepathy?"
"No. Do you?"
"Well, I'm keeping an open mind."
"What? You, a psychiatrist, keeping an open mind? Ha!" It went on like
this for quite a while.
Then at some point near the end he says, "How much do you value life?"
"Sixty-four."
"Why did you say 'sixty-four'?"
"How are you supposed to measure the value of life?"
"No! I mean, why did you say 'sixty-four,' and not 'seventy-three,' for
instance?"
"If I had said 'seventy-three,' you would have asked me the same
question!"
The psychiatrist finished with three friendly questions, just as the
other psychiatrist had done, handed me my papers, and I went off to the next
booth.
While I'm waiting in the line, I look at the paper which has the
summary of all the tests I've taken so far. And just for the hell of it I
show my paper to the guy next to me, and I ask him in a rather
stupid-sounding voice, "Hey! What did you get in 'Psychiatric'? Oh! You got
an 'N.' I got an 'N' in everything else, but I got a 'D' in 'Psychiatric.'
What does that mean?" I knew what it meant: "N" is normal, "D" is deficient.
The guy pats me on the shoulder and says, "Buddy, it's perfectly all
right. It doesn't mean anything. Don't worry about it!" Then he walks way
over to the other corner of the room, frightened: It's a lunatic!
I started looking at the papers the psychiatrists had written, and it
looked pretty serious! The first guy wrote: Thinks people talk about him.
Thinks people stare at him.
Auditory hypnogogic hallucinations.
Talks to self.
Talks to deceased wife.
Maternal aunt in mental institution.
Very peculiar stare. (I knew what that was -- that was when I said,
"And this is medicine?")
The second psychiatrist was obviously more important, because his
scribble was harder to read. His notes said things like "auditory hypnogogic
hallucinations confirmed." ("Hypnogogic" means you get them while you're
falling asleep.)
He wrote a lot of other technical-sounding notes, and I looked them
over, and they looked pretty bad. I figured I'd have to get all of this
straightened out with the army somehow.
At the end of the whole physical examination there's an army officer
who decides whether you're in or you're out. For instance, if there's
something the matter with your hearing, he has to decide if it's serious
enough to keep you out of the army. And because the army was scraping the
bottom of the barrel for new recruits, this officer wasn't going to take
anything from anybody. He was tough as nails. For instance, the fellow ahead
of me had two bones sticking out from the back of his neck -- some kind of
displaced vertebra, or something -- and this army officer had to get up from
his desk and feel them -- he had to make sure they were real!
I figure this is the place I'll get this whole misunderstanding
straightened out. When it's my turn, I hand my papers to the officer, and
I'm ready to explain everything, but the officer doesn't look up. He sees
the "D" next to "Psychiatric," immediately reaches for the rejection stamp,
doesn't ask me any questions, doesn't say anything; he just stamps my papers
"REJECTED," and hands me my 4-F paper, still looking at his desk.
So I went out and got on the bus for Schenectady, and while I was
riding on the bus I thought about the crazy thing that had happened, and I
started to laugh -- out loud -- and I said to myself, "My God! If they saw
me now, they would be sure!"
When I finally got back to Schenectady I went in to see Harts Bethe. He
was sitting behind his desk, and he said to me in a joking voice, "Well,
Dick, did you pass?"
I made a long face and shook my head slowly. "No."
Then he suddenly felt terrible, thinking that they had discovered some
serious medical problem with me, so he said in a concerned voice, "What's
the matter, Dick?"
I touched my finger to my forehead.
He said, "No!"
"Yes!"
He cried, "No-o-o-o-o-o-o!!!" and he laughed so hard that the roof of
the General Electric Company nearly came off.
I told the story to many other people, and everybody laughed, with a
few exceptions.
When I got back to New York, my father, mother, and sister called for
me at the airport, and on the way home in the car I told them all the story.
At the end of it my mother said, "Well, what should we do, Mel?"
My father said, "Don't be ridiculous, Lucille. It's absurd!"
So that was that, but my sister told me later that when we got home and
they were alone, my father said, "Now, Lucille, you shouldn't have said
anything in front of him. Now what should we do?"
By that time my mother had sobered up, and she said, "Don't be
ridiculous, Mel!"
One other person was bothered by the story. It was at a Physical
Society meeting dinner, and Professor Slater, my old professor at MIT, said,
"Hey, Feynman! Tell us that story about the draft I heard."
I told the whole story to all these physicists -- I didn't know any of
them except Slater -- and they were all laughing throughout, but at the end
one guy said, "Well, maybe the psychiatrist had something in mind."
I said resolutely, "And what profession are you, sir?" Of course, that
was a dumb question, because we were all physicists at a professional
meeting. But I was surprised that a physicist would say something like that.
He said, "Well, uh, I'm really not supposed to be here, but I came as
the guest of my brother, who's a physicist. I'm a psychiatrist." I smoked
him right out!
After a while I began to worry. Here's a guy who's been deferred all
during the war because he's working on the bomb, and the draft board gets
letters saying he's important, and now he gets a "D" in "Psychiatric" -- it
turns out he's a nut! Obviously he isn't a nut; he's just trying to make us
believe he's a nut -- we'll get him!
The situation didn't look good to me, so I had to find a way out. After
a few days, I figured out a solution. I wrote a letter to the draft board
that went something like this:
Dear Sirs:
I do not think I should be drafted because I am teaching science
students, and it is partly in the strength of our future scientists that the
national welfare lies. Nevertheless, you may decide that I should be
deferred because of the result of my medical report, namely, that I am
psychiatrically unfit. I feel that no weight whatsoever should be attached
to this report because I consider it to be a gross error.
I am calling this error to your attention because I am insane enough
not to wish to take advantage of it.
Sincerely,
R. P. Feynman
Result: "Deferred. 4F. Medical Reasons."
--------
From Cornell to Caltech, With A Touch of Brazil
--------
I don't believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have
to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting
anywhere I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing
something; I'm making some contribution" -- it's just psychological.
When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those
great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially
selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to
sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with
no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think
clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They
have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I
believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms
inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And
nothing happens. Still no ideas come.
Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge:
You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think
how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!
In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good
and you've got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it's the
greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer
periods of time when not much is coming to you. You're not getting any
ideas, and if you're doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can't
even say "I'm teaching my class."
If you're teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things
that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It
doesn't do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to
present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any
new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are easy to
think about; if you can't think of a new thought, no harm done; what you
thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of
something new, you're rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at
it.
The questions of the students are often the source of new research.
They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then
given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think
about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not
be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think
about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the
neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these
things.
So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would
never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation
for me where I don't have to teach. Never.
But once I was offered such a position.
During the war, when I was still in Los Alamos, Hans Bethe got me this
job at Cornell, for $3700 a year. I got an offer from some other place for
more, but I like Bethe, and I had decided to go to Cornell and wasn't
worried about the money. But Bethe was always watching out for me, and when
he found out that others were offering more, he got Cornell to give me a
raise to $4000 even before I started.
Cornell told me that I would be teaching a course in mathematical
methods of physics, and they told me what day I should come -- November 6, I
think, but it sounds funny that it could be so late in the year. I took the
train from Los Alamos to Ithaca, and spent most of my time writing final
reports for the Manhattan Project. I still remember that it was on the night
train from Buffalo to Ithaca that I began to work on my course.
You have to understand the pressures at Los Alamos. You did everything
as fast as you could; everybody worked very, very hard; and everything was
finished at the last minute. So, working out my course on the train a day or
two before the first lecture seemed natural to me.
Mathematical methods of physics was an ideal course for me to teach. It
was what I had done during the war -- apply mathematics to physics. I knew
which methods were really useful, and which were not. I had lots of
experience by that time, working so hard for four years using mathematical
tricks. So I laid out the different subjects in mathematics and how to deal
with them, and I still have the papers -- the notes I made on the train.
I got off the train in Ithaca, carrying my heavy suitcase on my
shoulder, as usual. A guy called out, "Want a taxi, sir?"
I had never wanted to take a taxi: I was always a young fella, short on
money, wanting to be my own man. But I thought to myself, "I'm a professor
-- I must be dignified." So I took my suitcase down from my shoulder and
carried it in my hand, and said, "Yes."
"Where to?" "The hotel." "Which hotel?"
"One of the hotels you've got in Ithaca."
"Have you got a reservation?"
"No."
"It's not so easy to get a room."
"We'll just go from one hotel to another. Stay and wait for me."
I try the Hotel Ithaca: no room. We go over to the Traveller's Hotel:
they don't have any room either. I say to the taxi guy, "No use driving
around town with me; it's gonna cost a lot of money, I'll walk from hotel to
hotel." I leave my suitcase in the Traveller's Hotel and I start to wander
around, looking for a room. That shows you how much preparation I had, a new
professor.
I found some other guy wandering around looking for a room too. It
turned out that the hotel room situation was utterly impossible. After a
while we wandered up some sort of a hill, and gradually realized we were
coming near the campus of the university.
We saw something that looked like a rooming house, with an open window,
and you could see bunk beds in there. By this time it was night, so we
decided to ask if we could sleep there. The door was open, but there was
nobody in the whole place. We walked up into one of the rooms, and the other
guy said, "Come on, let's just sleep here!"
I didn't think that was so good. It seemed like stealing to me.
Somebody had made the beds; they might come home and find us sleeping in
their beds, and we'd get into trouble. So we go out. We walk a little
further, and we see, under a streetlight, an enormous mass of leaves that
had been collected -- it was autumn -- from the lawns. I say, "Hey! We could
crawl in these leaves and sleep here!" I tried it; they were rather soft. I
was tired of walking around, it would have been perfectly all right. But I
didn't want to get into trouble right away. Back at Los Alamos people had
teased me (when I played drums and so on) about what kind of "professor"
Cornell was going to get. They said I'd get a reputation right off by doing
something silly, so I was trying to be a little dignified. I reluctantly
gave up the idea of sleeping in the pile of leaves.
We wandered around a little more, and came to a big building, some
important building of the campus. We went in, and there were two couches in
the hallway. The other guy said, "I'm sleeping here!" and collapsed onto the
couch.
I didn't want to get into trouble, so I found a janitor down in the
basement and asked him whether I could sleep on the couch, and he said
"Sure."
The next morning I woke up, found a place to eat breakfast, and started
rushing around as fast as I could to find out when my first class was going
to be. I ran into the physics department: "What time is my first class? Did
I miss it?"
The guy said, "You have nothing to worry about. Classes don't start for
eight days."
That was a shock to me! The first thing I said was, "Well, why did you
tell me to be here a week ahead?"
"I thought you'd like to come and get acquainted, find a place to stay
and settle down before you begin your classes."
I was back to civilization, and I didn't know what it was!
Professor Gibbs sent me to the Student Union to find a place to stay.
It's a big place, with lots of students milling around. I go up to a big
desk that says HOUSING and I say, "I'm new, and I'm looking for a room."
The guy says, "Buddy, the housing situation in Ithaca is tough. In
fact, it's so tough that, believe it or not, a professor had to sleep on a
couch in this lobby last night!"
I look around, and it's the same lobby! I turn to him and I say, "Well,
I'm that professor, and the professor doesn't want to do it again!"
My early days at Cornell as a new professor were interesting and
sometimes amusing. A few days after I got there, Professor Gibbs came into
my office and explained to me that ordinarily we don't accept students this
late in the term, but in a few cases, when the applicant is very, very good,
we can accept him. He handed me an application and asked me to look it over.
He comes back: "Well, what do you think?"
"I think he's first rate, and I think we ought to accept him. I think
we're lucky to get him here."
"Yes, but did you look at his picture?"
"What possible difference could that make?" I exclaimed.
"Absolutely none, sir! Glad to hear you say that. I wanted to see what
kind of a man we had for our new professor." Gibbs liked the way I came
right back at him without thinking to myself, "He's the head of the
department, and I'm new here, so I'd better be careful what I say." I
haven't got the speed to think like that; my first reaction is immediate,
and I say the first thing that comes into my mind.
Then another guy came into my office. He wanted to talk to me about
philosophy, and I can't really quite remember what he said, but he wanted me
to join some kind of a club of professors. The club was some sort of
anti-Semitic club that thought the Nazis weren't so bad. He tried to explain
to me how there were too many Jews doing this and that -- some crazy thing.
So I waited until he got all finished, and said to him, "You know, you made
a big mistake: I was brought up in a Jewish family." He went out, and that
was the beginning of my loss of respect for some of the professors in the
humanities, and other areas, at Cornell University.
I was starting over, after my wife's death, and I wanted to meet some
girls. In those days there was a lot of social dancing. So there were a lot
of dances at Cornell, mixers to get people together, especially for the
freshmen and others returning to school.
I remember the first dance that I went to. I hadn't been dancing for
three or four years while I was at Los Alamos; I hadn't even been in
society. So I went to this dance and danced as best I could, which I thought
was reasonably all right. You can usually tell somebody's dancing with you
and they feel pretty good about it.
As we danced I would talk with the girl a little bit; she would ask me
some questions about myself, and I would ask some about her. But when I
wanted to dance with a girl I had danced with before, I had to look for her.
"Would you like to dance again?"
"No, I'm sorry; I need some air." Or, "Well, I have to go to the
ladies' room" -- this and that excuse, from two or three girls in a row!
What was the matter with me? Was my dancing lousy? Was my personality lousy?
I danced with another girl, and again came the usual questions: "Are
you a student, or a graduate student?" (There were a lot of students who
looked old then because they had been in the army.)
"No, I'm a professor."
"Oh? A professor of what?"
"Theoretical physics."
"I suppose you worked on the atomic bomb."
"Yes, I was at Los Alamos during the war."
She said, "You're a damn liar!" -- and walked off. That relieved me a
great deal. It explained everything. I had been telling all the girls the
simple-minded, stupid truth, and I never knew what the trouble was. It was
perfectly obvious that I was being shunned by one girl after another when I
did everything perfectly nice and natural and was polite, and answered the
questions. Everything would look very pleasant, and then thwoop -- it
wouldn't work. I didn't understand it until this woman fortunately called me
a damn liar.
So then I tried to avoid all the questions, and it had the opposite
effect:
"Are you a freshman?"
"Well, no."
"Are you a graduate student?"
"No."
"What are you?"
"I don't want to say."
"Why won't you tell us what you are?"
"I don't want to..." -- and they'd keep talking to me! I ended up with
two girls over at my house and one of them told me that I really shouldn't
feel uncomfortable about being a freshman; there were plenty of guys my age
who were starting out in college, and it was really all right. They were
sophomores, and were being quite motherly, the two of them. They worked very
hard on my psychology, but I didn't want the situation to get so distorted
and so misunderstood, so I let them know I was a professor. They were very
upset that I had fooled them. I had a lot of trouble being a young professor
at Cornell.
Anyway, I began to teach the course in mathematical methods in physics,
and I think I also taught another course -- electricity and magnetism,
perhaps. I also intended to do research. Before the war, while I was getting
my degree, I had many ideas: I had invented new methods of doing quantum
mechanics with path integrals, and I had a lot of stuff I wanted to do.
At Cornell, I'd work on preparing my courses, and I'd go over to the
library a lot and read through the Arabian Nights and ogle the girls that
would go by. But when it came time to do some research, I couldn't get to
work. I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn't do research!
This went on for what I felt was a few years, but when I go back and
calculate the timing, it couldn't have been that long. Perhaps nowadays I
wouldn't think it was such a long time, but then, it seemed to go on for a
very long time. I simply couldn't get started on any problem: I remember
writing one or two sentences about some problem in gamma rays and then I
couldn't go any further. I was convinced that from the war and everything
else (the death of my wife) I had simply burned myself out.
I now understand it much better. First of all, a young man doesn't
realize how much time it takes to prepare good lectures, for the first time,
especially -- and to give the lectures, and to make up exam problems, and to
check that they're sensible ones. I was giving good courses, the kind of
courses where I put a lot of thought into each lecture. But I didn't realize
that that's a lot of work! So here I was, "burned out," reading the Arabian
Nights and feeling depressed about myself.
During this period I would get offers from different places --
universities and industry -- with salaries higher than my own. And each time
I got something like that I would get a little more depressed. I would say
to myself, "Look, they're giving me these wonderful offers, but they don't
realize that I'm burned out! Of course I can't accept them. They expect me
to accomplish something, and I can't accomplish anything! I have no
ideas..."
Finally there came in the mail an invitation from the Institute for
Advanced Study: Einstein... von Neumann... Wyl... all these great minds!
They write to me, and invite me to be a professor there! And not just a
regular professor. Somehow they knew my feelings about the Institute: how
it's too theoretical; how there's not enough real activity and challenge. So
they write, "We appreciate that you have a considerable interest in
experiments and in teaching, so we have made arrangements to create a
special type of professorship, if you wish: half professor at Princeton
University, and half at the Institute."
Institute for Advanced Study! Special exception! A position better than
Einstein, even! It was ideal; it was perfect; it was absurd!
It was absurd. The other offers had made me feel worse, up to a point.
They were expecting me to accomplish something. But this offer was so
ridiculous, so impossible for me ever to live up to, so ridiculously out of
proportion. The other ones were just mistakes; this was an absurdity! I
laughed at it while I was shaving, thinking about it.
And then I thought to myself, "You know, what they think of you is so
fantastic, it's impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to
live up to it!"
It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what
other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be
like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.
It wasn't a failure on my part that the Institute for Advanced Study
expected me to be that good; it was impossible. It was clearly a mistake --
and the moment I appreciated the possibility that they might be wrong, I
realized that it was also true of all the other places, including my own
university. I am what I am, and if they expected me to be good and they're
offering me some money for it, it's their hard luck.
Then, within the day, by some strange miracle -- perhaps he overheard
me talking about it, or maybe he just understood me -- Bob Wilson, who was
head of the laboratory there at Cornell, called me in to see him. He said,
in a serious tone, "Feynman, you're teaching your classes well; you're doing
a good job, and we're very satisfied. Any other expectations we might have
are a matter of luck. When we hire a professor, we're taking all the risks.
If it comes out good, all right. If it doesn't, too bad. But you shouldn't
worry about what you're doing or not doing." He said it much better than
that, and it released me from the feeling of guilt.
Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I
used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I
used to do whatever I felt like doing -- it didn't have to do with whether
it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was
interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I'd
see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could
figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I
didn't have to do it; it wasn't important for the future of science;
somebody else had already done it. That didn't make any difference: I'd
invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never
accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching
classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for
pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without
worrying about any importance whatsoever.
Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around,
throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble,
and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was
pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the
wobbling.
I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the
rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion
rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate -- two to one. It came out of a
complicated equation! Then I thought, "Is there some way I can see in a more
fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it's two to
one?"
I don't remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the
motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to
make it come out two to one.
I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, "Hey, Hans! I noticed
something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it's
two to one is..." and I showed him the accelerations.
He says, "Feynman, that's pretty interesting, but what's the importance
of it? Why are you doing it?"
"Hah!" I say. "There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for
the fun of it." His reaction didn't discourage me; I had made up my mind I
was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.
I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how
electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac Equation
in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it
(it was a very short time) I was "playing" -- working, really -- with the
same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I
went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned,
wonderful things.
It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like
uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to
resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there
was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came
from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
--------
When I was at Cornell I was asked to give a series of lectures once a
week at an aeronautics laboratory in Buffalo. Cornell had made an
arrangement with the laboratory which included evening lectures in physics
to be given by somebody from the university. There was some guy already
doing it, but there were complaints, so the physics department came to me. I
was a young professor at the time and I couldn't say no very easily, so I
agreed to do it.
To get to Buffalo they had me go on a little airline which consisted of
one airplane. It was called Robinson Airlines (it later became Mohawk
Airlines) and I remember the first time I flew to Buffalo, Mr. Robinson was
the pilot. He knocked the ice off the wings and we flew away.
All in all, I didn't enjoy the idea of going to Buffalo every Thursday
night. The university was paying me $35 in addition to my expenses. I was a
Depression kid, and I figured I'd save the $35, which was a sizable amount
of money in those days.
Suddenly I got an idea: I realized that the purpose of the $35 was to
make the trip to Buffalo more attractive, and the way to do that is to spend
the money. So I decided to spend the $35 to entertain myself each time I
went to Buffalo, and see if I could make the trip worthwhile.
I didn't have much experience with the rest of the world. Not knowing
how to get started, I asked the taxi driver who picked me up at the airport
to guide me through the ins and outs of entertaining myself in Buffalo. He
was very helpful, and I still remember his name -- Marcuso, who drove car
number 169. I would always ask for him when I came into the airport on
Thursday nights.
As I was going to give my first lecture I asked Marcuso, "Where's an
interesting bar where lots of things are going on?" I thought that things
went on in bars.
"The Alibi Room," he said. "It's a lively place where you can meet lots
of people. I'll take you there after your lecture." After the lecture
Marcuso picked me up and drove me to the Alibi Room. On the way, I say,
"Listen, I'm gonna have to ask for some kind of drink. What's the name of a
good whiskey?"
"Ask for Black and White, water on the side," he counseled. The Alibi
Room was an elegant place with lots of people and lots of activity. The
women were dressed in furs, everybody was friendly, and the phones were
ringing all the time. I walked up to the bar and ordered my Black and White,
water on the side. The bartender was very friendly, quickly found a
beautiful woman to sit next to me, and introduced her. I bought her drinks.
I liked the place and decided to come back the following week.
Every Thursday night I'd come to Buffalo and be driven in car number
169 to my lecture and then to the Alibi Room. I'd walk into the bar and
order my Black and White, water on the side. After a few weeks of this it
got to the point where as soon as I would come in, before I reached the bar,
there would be a Black and White, water on the side, waiting for me. "Your
regular, sir," was the bartender's greeting.
I'd take the whole shot glass down at once, to show I was a tough guy,
like I had seen in the movies, and then I'd sit around for about twenty
seconds before I drank the water. After a while I didn't even need the
water.
The bartender always saw to it that the empty chair next to mine was
quickly filled by a beautiful woman, and everything would start off all
right, but just before the bar closed, they all had to go off somewhere. I
thought it was possibly because I was getting pretty drunk by that time.
One time, as the Alibi Room was closing, the girl I was buying drinks
for that night suggested we go to another place where she knew a lot of
people. It was on the second floor of some other building which gave no hint
that there was a bar upstairs. All the bars in Buffalo had to close at two
o'clock, and all the people in the bars would get sucked into this big hall
on the second floor, and keep right on going -- illegally, of course.
I tried to figure out a way that I could stay in bars and watch what
was going on without getting drunk. One night I noticed a guy who had been
there a lot go up to the bar and order a glass of milk. Everybody knew what
his problem was: he had an ulcer, the poor fella. That gave me an idea.
The next time I come into the Alibi Room the bartender says, "The
usual, sir?"
"No. Coke. Just plain Coke," I say, with a disappointed look on my
face.
The other guys gather around and sympathize: "Yeah, I was on the wagon
three weeks ago," one says. "It's really tough, Dick, it's really tough,"
says another.
They all honored me. I was "on the wagon" now, and had the guts to
enter that bar, with all its "temptations," and just order Coke -- because,
of course, I had to see my friends. And I maintained that for a month! I was
a real tough bastard.
One time I was in the men's room of the bar and there was a guy at the
urinal. He was kind of drunk, and said to me in a mean-sounding voice, "I
don't like your face. I think I'll push it in."
I was scared green. I replied in an equally mean voice, "Get out of my
way, or I'll pee right through ya!"
He said something else, and I figured it was getting pretty close to a
fight now. I had never been in a fight. I didn't know what to do, exactly,
and I was afraid of getting hurt. I did think of one thing: I moved away
from the wall, because I figured if I got hit, I'd get hit from the back,
too. Then I felt a sort of funny crunching in my eye -- it didn't hurt much
-- and the next thing I know, I'm slamming the son of a gun right back,
automatically. It was remarkable for me to discover that I didn't have to
think; the "machinery" knew what to do.
"OK. That's one for one," I said. "Ya wanna keep on goin?"
The other guy backed off and left. We would have killed each other if
the other guy was as dumb as I was.
I went to wash up, my hands are shaking, blood is leaking out of my
gums -- I've got a weak place in my gums -- and my eye hurt. After I calmed
down I went back into the bar and swaggered up to the bartender: "Black and
White, water on the side," I said. I figured it would calm my nerves.
I didn't realize it, but the guy I socked in the men's room was over in
another part of the bar, talking with three other guys. Soon these three
guys -- big, tough guys -- came over to where I was sitting and leaned over
me. They looked down threateningly, and said, "What's the idea of pickin' a
fight with our friend?"
Well I'm so dumb I don't realize I'm being intimidated; all I know is
right and wrong. I simply whip around and snap at them, "Why don't ya find
out who started what first, before ya start makin' trouble?"
The big guys were so taken aback by the fact that their intimidation
didn't work that they backed away and left.
After a while one of the guys came back and said to me, "You're right,
Curly's always doin' that. He's always gettin' into fights and askin' us to
straighten it out."
"You're damn tootin' I'm right!" I said, and the guy sat down next to
me.
Curly and the other two fellas came over and sat down on the other side
of me, two seats away. Curly said something about my eye not looking too
good, and I said his didn't look to be in the best of shape either.
I continue talking tough, because I figure that's the way a real man is
supposed to act in a bar.
The situation's getting tighter and tighter, and people in the bar are
worrying about what's going to happen. The bartender says, "No fighting in
here, boys! Calm down!"
Curly hisses, "That's OK; we'll get 'im when he goes out."
Then a genius comes by. Every field has its first-rate experts. This
fella comes over to me and says, "Hey, Dan! I didn't know you were in town!
It's good to see you!"
Then he says to Curly, "Say, Paul! I'd like you to meet a good friend
of mine, Dan, here. I think you two guys would like each other. Why don't
you shake?"
We shake hands. Curly says, "Uh, pleased to meet you."
Then the genius leans over to me and very quietly whispers, "Now get
out of here fast!"
"But they said they would..."
"Just go!" he says.
I got my coat and went out quickly. I walked along near the walls of
the buildings, in case they went looking for me. Nobody came out, and I went
to my hotel. It happened to be the night of the last lecture, so I never
went back to the Alibi Room, at least for a few years.
(I did go back to the Alibi Room about ten years later, and it was all
different. It wasn't nice and polished like it was before; it was sleazy and
had seedy-looking people in it. I talked to the bartender, who was a
different man, and told him about the old days. "Oh, yes!" he said. "This
was the bar where all the bookmakers and their girls used to hang out." I
understood then why there were so many friendly and elegant-looking people
there, and why the phones were ringing all the time.)
The next morning, when I got up and looked in the mirror, I discovered
that a black eye takes a few hours to develop fully. When I got back to
Ithaca that day, I went to deliver some stuff over to the dean's office. A
professor of philosophy saw my black eye and exclaimed, "Oh, Mr. Feynman!
Don't tell me you got that walking into a door?"
"Not at all," I said. "I got it in a fight in the men's room of a bar
in Buffalo."
"Ha, ha, ha!" he laughed.
Then there was the problem of giving the lecture to my regular class. I
walked into the lecture hall with my head down, studying my notes. When I
was ready to start, I lifted my head and looked straight at them, and said
what I always said before I began my lecture -- but this time, in a tougher
tone of voice: "Any questions?"
--------
When I was at Cornell I would often come back home to Far Rockaway to
visit. One time when I happened to be home, the telephone rings: it's LONG
DISTANCE, from California. In those days, a long distance call meant it was
something very important, especially a long distance call from this
marvelous place, California, a million miles away.
The guy on the other end says, "Is this Professor Feynman, of Cornell
University?"
"That's right."
"This is Mr. So-and-so from the Such-and-such Aircraft Company." It was
one of the big airplane companies in California, but unfortunately I can't
remember which one. The guy continues: "We're planning to start a laboratory
on nuclear-propelled rocket airplanes. It will have an annual budget of
so-and-so-many million dollars..." Big numbers.
I said, "Just a moment, sir; I don't know why you're telling me all
this."
"Just let me speak to you," he says; "just let me explain everything.
Please let me do it my way." So he goes on a little more, and says how many
people are going to be in the laboratory, so-and-so-many people at this
level, and so-and-so-many Ph.D.'s at that level...
"Excuse me, sir," I say, "but I think you have the wrong fella."
"Am I talking to Richard Feynman, Richard P. Feynman?"
"Yes, but you're..."
"Would you please let me present what I have to say, sir, and then
we'll discuss it."
"All right!" I sit down and sort of close my eyes to listen to all this
stuff, all these details about this big project, and I still haven't the
slightest idea why he's giving me all this information.
Finally, when he's all finished, he says, "I'm telling you about our
plans because we want to know if you would like to be the director of the
laboratory."
"Have you really got the right fella?" I say. "I'm a professor of
theoretical physics. I'm not a rocket engineer, or an airplane engineer, or
anything like that."
"We're sure we have the right fellow."
"Where did you get my name then? Why did you decide to call me?"
"Sir, your name is on the patent for nuclear-powered, rocket-propelled
airplanes."
"Oh," I said, and I realized why my name was on the patent, and I'll
have to tell you the story. I told the man, "I'm sorry, but I would like to
continue as a professor at Cornell University."
What had happened was, during the war at Los Alamos, there was a very
nice fella in charge of the patent office for the government, named Captain
Smith. Smith sent around a notice to everybody that said something like, "We
in the patent office would like to patent every idea you have for the United
States government, for which you are working now. Any idea you have on
nuclear energy or its application that you may think everybody knows about,
everybody doesn't know about: Just come to my office and tell me the idea."
I see Smith at lunch, and as we're walking back to the technical area,
I say to him, "That note you sent around: That's kind of crazy to have us
come in and tell you every idea."
We discussed it back and forth -- by this time we're in his office --
and I say, "There are so many ideas about nuclear energy that are so
perfectly obvious, that I'd be here all day telling you stuff."
"LIKE WHAT?"
"Nothin' to it!" I say. "Example: nuclear reactor... under water...
water goes in... steam goes out the other side... Pshshshsht -- it's a
submarine. Or: nuclear reactor... air comes rushing in the front... heated
up by nuclear reaction... out the back it goes... Boom! Through the air --
it's an airplane. Or: nuclear reactor... you have hydrogen go through the
thing... Zoom! -- it's a rocket. Or: nuclear reactor... only instead of
using ordinary uranium, you use enriched uranium, with beryllium oxide at
high temperature to make it more efficient... It's an electrical power
plant. There's a million ideas!" I said, as I went out the door. Nothing
happened.
About three months later, Smith calls me in the office and says,
"Feynman, the submarine has already been taken. But the other three are
yours." So when the guys at the airplane company in California are planning
their laboratory, and try to find out who's an expert in rocket-propelled
whatnots, there's nothing to it: They look at who's got the patent on it!
Anyway, Smith told me to sign some papers for the three ideas I was giving
to the government to patent. Now, it's some dopey legal thing, but when you
give the patent to the government, the document you sign is not a legal
document unless there's some exchange, so the paper I signed said, "For the
sum of one dollar, I, Richard P. Feynman, give this idea to the
government..."
I sign the paper.
"Where's my dollar?"
"That's just a formality," he says. "We haven't got any funds set up to
give a dollar."
"You've got it all set up that I'm signing for the dollar," I say. "I
want my dollar!"
"This is silly," Smith protests.
"No, it's not," I say. "It's a legal document. You made me sign it, and
I'm an honest man. There's no fooling around about it."
"All right, all right!" he says, exasperated. "I'll give you a dollar,
from my pocket!"
"OK."
I take the dollar, and I realize what I'm going to do. I go down to the
grocery store, and I buy a dollar's worth -- which was pretty good, then --
of cookies and goodies, those chocolate goodies with marshmallow inside, a
whole lot of stuff.
I come back to the theoretical laboratory, and I give them out: "I got
a prize, everybody! Have a cookie! I got a prize! A dollar for my patent! I
got a dollar for my patent!"
Everybody who had one of those patents -- a lot of people had been
sending them in -- everybody comes down to Captain Smith: they want their
dollar!
He starts shelling them out of his pocket, but soon realizes that it's
going to be a hemorrhage! He went crazy trying to set up a fund where he
could get the dollars these guys were insisting on. I don't know how he
settled up.
--------
When I was first at Cornell I corresponded with a girl I had met in New
Mexico while I was working on the bomb. I got to thinking, when she
mentioned some other fella she knew, that I had better go out there quickly
at the end of the school year and try to save the situation. But when I got
out there, I found it was too late, so I ended up in a motel in Albuquerque
with a free summer and nothing to do.
The Casa Grande Motel was on Route 66, the main highway through town.
About three places further down the road there was a little nightclub that
had entertainment. Since I had nothing to do, and since I enjoyed watching
and meeting people in bars, I very often went to this nightclub.
When I first went there I was talking with some guy at the bar, and we
noticed a whole table full of nice young ladies -- TWA hostesses, I think
they were --who were having some sort of birthday party. The other guy said,
"Come on, let's get up our nerve and ask them to dance."
So we asked two of them to dance, and afterwards they invited us to sit
with the other girls at the table. After a few drinks, the waiter came
around: "Anybody want anything?"
I liked to imitate being drunk, so although I was completely sober, I
turned to the girl I'd been dancing with and asked her in a drunken voice,
"YaWANanything?"
"What can we have?" she asks.
"Annnnnnnnnnnnything you want -- ANYTHING!"
"All right! We'll have champagne!" she says happily.
So I say in a loud voice that everybody in the bar can hear, "OK!
Ch-ch-champagne for evvverybody!"
Then I hear my friend talking to my girl, saying what a dirty trick it
is to "take all that dough from him because he's drunk," and I'm beginning
to think maybe I made a mistake.
Well, nicely enough, the waiter comes over to me, leans down, and says
in a low voice, "Sir, that's sixteen dollars a bottle."
I decide to drop the idea of champagne for everybody, so I say in an
even louder voice than before, "NEVER MIND!"
I was therefore quite surprised when, a few moments later, the waiter
came back to the table with all his fancy stuff -- a white towel over his
arm, a tray full of glasses, an ice bucket full of ice, and a bottle of
champagne. He thought I meant, "Never mind the price," when I meant, "Never
mind the champagne!"
The waiter served champagne to everybody, I paid out the sixteen
dollars, and my friend was mad at my girl because he thought she had got me
to pay all this dough. But as far as I was concerned, that was the end of it
-- though it turned out later to be the beginning of a new adventure.
I went to that nightclub quite often and as the weeks went by, the
entertainment changed. The performers were on a circuit that went through
Amarillo and a lot of other places in Texas, and God knows where else. There
was also a permanent singer who was at the nightclub, whose name was Tamara.
Every time a new group of performers came to the club, Tamara would
introduce me to one of the girls from the group. The girl would come and sit
down with me at my table, I would buy her a drink, and we'd talk. Of course
I would have liked to do more than just talk, but there was always something
the matter at the last minute. So I could never understand why Tamara always
went to the trouble of introducing me to all these nice girls, and then,
even though things would start out all right, I would always end up buying
drinks, spending the evening talking, but that was it. My friend, who didn't
have the advantage of Tamara's introductions, wasn't getting anywhere either
-- we were both clunks.
After a few weeks of different shows and different girls, a new show
came, and as usual Tamara introduced me to a girl from the group, and we
went through the usual thing -- I'm buying her drinks, we're talking, and
she's being very nice. She went and did her show, and afterwards she came
back to me at my table, and I felt pretty good. People would look around and
think, "What's he got that makes this girl come to him?"
But then, at some stage near the close of the evening, she said
something that by this time I had heard many times before: "I'd like to have
you come over to my room tonight, but we're having a party, so perhaps
tomorrow night..." -- and I knew what this "perhaps tomorrow night" meant:
NOTHING.
Well, I noticed throughout the evening that this girl -- her name was
Gloria -- talked quite often with the master of ceremonies, during the show,
and on her way to and from the ladies' room. So one time, when she was in
the ladies' room and the master of ceremonies happened to be walking near my
table, I impulsively took a guess and said to him, "Your wife is a very nice
woman."
He said, "Yes, thank you," and we started to talk a little. He figured
she had told me. And when Gloria returned, she figured he had told me. So
they both talked to me a little bit, and invited me to go over to their
place that night after the bar closed.
At two o'clock in the morning I went over to their motel with them.
There wasn't any party, of course, and we talked a long time. They showed me
a photo album with pictures of Gloria when her husband first met her in
Iowa, a cornfed, rather fattish-looking woman; then other pictures of her as
she reduced, and now she looked really nifty! He had taught her all kinds of
stuff, but he couldn't read or write, which was especially interesting
because he had the job, as master of ceremonies, of reading the names of the
acts and the performers who were in the amateur contest, and I hadn't even
noticed that he couldn't read what he was "reading"! (The next night I saw
what they did. While she was bringing a person on or off the stage, she
glanced at the slip of paper in his hand and whispered the names of the next
performers and the title of the act to him as she went by.)
They were a very interesting, friendly couple, and we had many
interesting conversations. I recalled how we had met, and I asked them why
Tamara was always introducing the new girls to me.
Gloria replied, "When Tamara was about to introduce me to you, she
said, 'Now I'm going to introduce you to the real spender around here!' "
I had to think a moment before I realized that the sixteen-dollar
bottle of champagne bought with such a vigorous and misunderstood "never
mind!" turned out to be a good investment. I apparently had the reputation
of being some kind of eccentric who always came in not dressed up, not in a
neat suit, but always ready to spend lots of money on the girls.
Eventually I told them that I was struck by something: "I'm fairly
intelligent," I said, "but probably only about physics. But in that bar
there are lots of intelligent guys -- oil guys, mineral guys, important
businessmen, and so forth -- and all the time they're buying the girls
drinks, and they get nothin' for it!" (By this time I had decided that
nobody else was getting anything out of all those drinks either.) "How is it
possible," I asked, "that an 'intelligent' guy can be such a goddamn fool
when he gets into a bar?"
The master said, "This I know all about. I know exactly how it all
works. I will give you lessons, so that hereafter you can get something from
a girl in a bar like this. But before I give you the lessons, I must
demonstrate that I really know what I'm talking about. So to do that, Gloria
will get a man to buy you a champagne cocktail."
I say, "OK," though I'm thinking, "How the hell are they gonna do it?"
The master continued: "Now you must do exactly as we tell you. Tomorrow
night you should sit some distance from Gloria in the bar, and when she
gives you a sign, all you have to do is walk by."
"Yes," says Gloria. "It'll be easy."
The next night I go to the bar and sit in the corner, where I can keep
my eye on Gloria from a distance. After a while, sure enough, there's some
guy sitting with her, and after a little while longer the guy's happy and
Gloria gives me a wink. I get up and nonchalantly saunter by. Just as I'm
passing, Gloria turns around and says in a real friendly and bright voice,
"Oh, hi, Dick! When did you get back into town? Where have you been?"
At this moment the guy turns around to see who this "Dick" is, and I
can see in his eyes something I understand completely, since I have been in
that position so often myself.
First look: "Oh-oh, competition coming up. He's gonna take her away
from me after I bought her a drink! What's gonna happen?"
Next look: "No, it's just a casual friend. They seem to know each other
from some time back." I could see all this. I could read it on his face. I
knew exactly what he was going through.
Gloria turns to him and says, "Jim, I'd like you to meet an old friend
of mine, Dick Feynman."
Next look: "I know what I'll do; I'll be kind to this guy so that
she'll like me more."
Jim turns to me and says, "Hi, Dick. How about a drink?"
"Fine!" I say.
"What'll ya have?"
"Whatever she's having."
"Bartender, another champagne cocktail, please."
So it was easy; there was nothing to it. That night after the bar
closed I went again over to the master and Gloria's motel. They were
laughing and smiling, happy with how it worked out. "All right," I said,
"I'm absolutely convinced that you two know exactly what you're talking
about. Now, what about the lessons?"
"OK," he says. "The whole principle is this: The guy wants to be a
gentleman. He doesn't want to be thought of as impolite, crude, or
especially a cheapskate. As long as the girl knows the guy's motives so
well, it's easy to steer him in the direction she wants him to go.
"Therefore," he continued, "under no circumstances be a gentleman! You
must disrespect the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don't buy a
girl anything -- not even a package of cigarettes -- until you've asked her
if she'll sleep with you, and you're convinced that she will, and that she's
not lying."
"Uh... you mean... you don't... uh... you just ask them?"
"OK," he says, "I know this is your first lesson, and it may be hard
for you to be so blunt. So you might buy her one thing -- just one little
something -- before you ask. But on the other hand, it will only make it
more difficult."
Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea.
All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the
attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren't worth
anything, and all they're in there for is to get you to buy them a drink,
and they're not going to give you a goddamn thing; I'm not going to be a
gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was
automatic.
Then that night I was ready to try it out. I go into the bar as usual,
and right away my friend says, "Hey, Dick! Wait'll you see the girl I got
tonight! She had to go change her clothes, but she's coming right back."
"Yeah, yeah," I say, unimpressed, and I sit at another table to watch
the show. My friend's girl comes in just as the show starts, and I'm
thinking, "I don't give a damn how pretty she is; all she's doing is getting
him to buy her drinks, and she's going to give him nothing!"
After the first act my friend says, "Hey, Dick! I want you to meet Ann.
Ann, this is a good friend of mine, Dick Feynman."
I say "Hi" and keep looking at the show.
A few moments later Ann says to me, "Why don't you come and sit at the
table here with us?"
I think to myself, "Typical bitch: he's buying her drinks, and she's
inviting somebody else to the table." I say, "I can see fine from here."
A little while later a lieutenant from the military base nearby comes
in, dressed in a nice uniform. It isn't long, before we notice that Ann is
sitting over on the other side of the bar with the lieutenant!
Later that evening I'm sitting at the bar, Ann is dancing with the
lieutenant, and when the lieutenant's back is toward me and she's facing me,
she smiles very pleasantly to me. I think again, "Some bitch! Now she's
doing this trick on the lieutenant even!"
Then I get a good idea: I don't look at her until the lieutenant can
also see me, and then I smile back at her, so the lieutenant will know
what's going on. So her trick didn't work for long.
A few minutes later she's not with the lieutenant any more, but asking
the bartender for her coat and handbag, saying in a loud, obvious voice,
"I'd like to go for a walk. Does anybody want to go for a walk with me?"
I think to myself, "You can keep saying no and pushing them off, but
you can't do it permanently, or you won't get anywhere. There comes a time
when you have to go along." So I say coolly, "I'll walk with you." So we go
out. We walk down the street a few blocks and see a cafe, and she says,
"I've got an idea -- let's get some coffee and sandwiches, and go over to my
place and eat them."
The idea sounds pretty good, so we go into the cafe and she orders
three coffees and three sandwiches and I pay for them.
As we're going out of the cafe, I think to myself, "Something's wrong:
too many sandwiches!"
On the way to her motel she says, "You know, I won't have time to eat
these sandwiches with you, because a lieutenant is coming over..."
I think to myself, "See, I flunked. The master gave me a lesson on what
to do, and I flunked. I bought her $1.10 worth of sandwiches, and hadn't
asked her anything, and now I know I'm gonna get nothing! I have to recover,
if only for the pride of my teacher."
I stop suddenly and I say to her, "You... are worse than a WHORE!"
"Whaddya mean?"
'"You got me to buy these sandwiches, and what am I going to get for
it? Nothing!"
"Well, you cheapskate!" she says. "If that's the way you feel, I'll pay
you back for the sandwiches!"
I called her bluff: "Pay me back, then."
She was astonished. She reached into her pocketbook, took out the
little bit of money that she had and gave it to me. I took my sandwich and
coffee and went off.
After I was through eating, I went back to the bar to report to the
master. I explained everything, and told him I was sorry that I flunked, but
I tried to recover.
He said very calmly, "It's OK, Dick; it's all right. Since you ended up
not buying her anything, she's gonna sleep with you tonight."
"What?"
"That's right," he said confidently; "she's gonna sleep with you. I
know that."
"But she isn't even here! She's at her place with the lieu --"
"It's all right."
Two o'clock comes around, the bar closes, and Ann hasn't appeared. I
ask the master and his wife if I can come over to their place again. They
say sure.
Just as we're coming out of the bar, here comes Ann, running across
Route 66 toward me. She puts her arm in mine, and says, "Come on, let's go
over to my place."
The master was right. So the lesson was terrific!
When I was back at Cornell in the fall, I was dancing with the sister
of a grad student, who was visiting from Virginia. She was very nice, and
suddenly I got this idea: "Let's go to a bar and have a drink," I said.
On the way to the bar I was working up nerve to try the master's lesson
on an ordinary girl. After all, you don't feel so bad disrespecting a bar
girl who's trying to get you to buy her drinks -- but a nice, ordinary,
Southern girl?
We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, "Listen, before I
buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?"
"Yes."
So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective
the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn't enjoy doing it
that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently
from how I was brought up.
--------
One day at Princeton I was sitting in the lounge and overheard some
mathematicians talking about the series for ex, which is 1 + x + x2/2! +
x3/3! Each term you get by multiplying the preceding term by x and dividing
by the next number. For example, to get the next term after x4/4! you
multiply that term by x and divide by 5. It's very simple.
When I was a kid I was excited by series, and had played with this
thing. I had computed e using that series, and had seen how quickly the new
terms became very small.
I mumbled something about how it was easy to calculate e to any power
using that series (you just substitute the power for x).
"Oh yeah?" they said. "Well, then what's e to the 3.3?" said some joker
-- I think it was Tukey.
I say, "That's easy. It's 27.11."
Tukey knows it isn't so easy to compute all that in your head. "Hey!
How'd you do that?"
Another guy says, "You know Feynman, he's just faking it. It's not
really right."
They go to get a table, and while they're doing that, I put on a few
more figures: "27.1126," I say.
They find it in the table. "It's right! But how'd you do it!"
"I just summed the series."
"Nobody can sum the series that fast. You must just happen to know that
one. How about e to the 3?"
"Look," I say. "It's hard work! Only one a day!"
"Hah! It's a fake!" they say, happily.
"All right," I say, "It's 20.085."
They look in the book as I put a few more figures on. They're all
excited now, because I got another one right.
Here are these great mathematicians of the day, puzzled at how I can
compute e to any power! One of them says, "He just can't be substituting and
summing -- it's too hard. There's some trick. You couldn't do just any old
number like e to the 1.4."
I say, "It's hard work, but for you, OK. It's 4.05."
As they're looking it up, I put on a few more digits and say, "And
that's the last one for the day!" and walk out.
What happened was this: I happened to know three numbers -- the
logarithm of 10 to the base e (needed to convert numbers from base 10 to
base e), which is 2.3026 (so I knew that e to the 2.3 is very close to 10),
and because of radioactivity (mean-life and half-life), I knew the log of 2
to the base e, which is .69315 (so I also knew that e to the .7 is nearly
equal to 2). I also knew e (to the 1), which is 2.71828.
The first number they gave me was e to the 3.3, which is e to the 2.3
-- ten-times e, or 27.18. While they were sweating about how I was doing it,
I was correcting for the extra .0026 -- 2.3026 is a little high.
I knew I couldn't do another one; that was sheer luck. But then the guy
said e to the 3: that's e to the 2.3 times e to the .7, or ten times two. So
I knew it was 20. something, and while they were worrying how I did it, I
adjusted for the .693.
Now I was sure I couldn't do another one, because the last one was
again by sheer luck. But the guy said e to the 1.4, which is e to the .7
times itself. So all I had to do is fix up 4 a little bit!
They never did figure out how I did it.
When I was at Los Alamos I found out that Hans Bethe was absolutely
topnotch at calculating. For example, one time we were putting some numbers
into a formula, and got to 48 squared. I reach for the Marchant calculator,
and he says, "That's 2300." I begin to push the buttons, and he says, "If
you want it exactly, it's 2304."
The machine says 2304. "Gee! That's pretty remarkable!" I say.
"Don't you know how to square numbers near 50?" he says. "You square 50
-- that's 2500 -- and subtract 100 times the difference of your number from
50 (in this case it's 2), so you have 2300. If you want the correction,
square the difference and add it on. That makes 2304."
A few minutes later we need to take the cube root of 2 1/2. Now to take
cube roots on the Marchant you had to use a table for the first
approximation. I open the drawer to get the table -- it takes a little
longer this time -- and he says, "It's about 1.35."
I try it out on the Marchant and it's right. "How did you do that one?"
I ask. "Do you have a secret for taking cube roots of numbers?"
"Oh," he says, "the log of 2 1/2 is so-and-so. Now one-third of that
log is between the logs of 1.3, which is this, and 1.4, which is that, so I
interpolated."
So I found out something: first, he knows the log tables; second, the
amount of arithmetic he did to make the interpolation alone would have taken
me longer to do than reach for the table and punch the buttons on the
calculator. I was very impressed.
After that, I tried to do those things. I memorized a few logs, and
began to notice things. For instance, if somebody says, "What is 28
squared?" you notice that the square root of 2 is 1.4, and 28 is 20 times
1.4, so the square of 28 must be around 400 times 2, or 800.
If somebody comes along and wants to divide 1 by 1.73, you can tell
them immediately that it's .577, because you notice that 1.73 is nearly the
square root of 3, so 1/1.73 must be one-third of the square root of 3. And
if it's 1/1.73, that's equal to the inverse of 7/4, and you've memorized the
repeating decimals for sevenths: .571428...
I had a lot of fun trying to do arithmetic fast, by tricks, with Hans.
It was very rare that I'd see something he didn't see and beat him to the
answer, and he'd laugh his hearty laugh when I'd get one. He was nearly
always able to get the answer to any problem within a percent. It was easy
for him -- every number was near something he knew.
One day I was feeling my oats. It was lunch time in the technical area,
and I don't know how I got the idea, but I announced, "I can work out in
sixty seconds the answer to any problem that anybody can state in ten
seconds, to 10 percent!"
People started giving me problems they thought were difficult, such as
integrating a function like 1/(1 + x4), which hardly changed over the range
they gave me. The hardest one somebody gave me was the binomial coefficient
of x10 in (1 + x)20; I got that just in time.
They were all giving me problems and I was feeling great, when Paul
Olum walked by in the hall. Paul had worked with me for a while at Princeton
before coming out to Los Alamos, and he was always cleverer than I was. For
instance, one day I was absent-mindedly playing with one of those measuring
tapes that snap back into your hand when you push a button. The tape would
always slap over and hit my hand, and it hurt a little bit. "Geez!" I
exclaimed. "What a dope I am. I keep playing with this thing, and it hurts
me every time."
He said, "You don't hold it right," and took the damn thing, pulled out
the tape, pushed the button, and it came right back. No hurt.
"Wow! How do you do that?" I exclaimed.
"Figure it out!"
For the next two weeks I'm walking all around Princeton, snapping this
tape back until my hand is absolutely raw. Finally I can't take it any
longer. "Paul! I give up! How the hell do you hold it so it doesn't hurt?"
"Who says it doesn't hurt? It hurts me too!"
I felt so stupid. He had gotten me to go around and hurt my hand for
two weeks!
So Paul is walking past the lunch place and these guys are all excited.
"Hey, Paul!" they call out. "Feynman's terrific! We give him a problem that
can be stated in ten seconds, and in a minute he gets the answer to 10
percent. Why don't you give him one?"
Without hardly stopping, he says, "The tangent of 10 to the 100th."
I was sunk: you have to divide by pi to 100 decimal places! It was
hopeless.
One time I boasted, "I can do by other methods any integral anybody
else needs contour integration to do."
So Paul puts up this tremendous damn integral he had obtained by
starting out with a complex function that he knew the answer to, taking out
the real part of it and leaving only the complex part. He had unwrapped it
so it was only possible by contour integration! He was always deflating me
like that. He was a very smart fellow.
The first time I was in Brazil I was eating a noon meal at I don't know
what time -- I was always in the restaurants at the wrong time -- and I was
the only customer in the place. I was eating rice with steak (which I
loved), and there were about four waiters standing around.
A Japanese man came into the restaurant. I had seen him before,
wandering around; he was trying to sell abacuses.
He started to talk to the waiters, and challenged them: He said he
could add numbers faster than any of them could do.
The waiters didn't want to lose face, so they said, "Yeah, yeah. Why
don't you go over and challenge the customer over there?"
The man came over. I protested, "But I don't speak Portuguese well!"
The waiters laughed. "The numbers are easy," they said.
They brought me a pencil and paper.
The man asked a waiter to call out some numbers to add. He beat me
hollow, because while I was writing the numbers down, he was already adding
them as he went along.
I suggested that the waiter write down two identical lists of numbers
and hand them to us at the same time. It didn't make much difference. He
still beat me by quite a bit.
However, the man got a little bit excited: he wanted to prove himself
some more. "Multipliqao!" he said.
Somebody wrote down a problem. He beat me again, but not by much,
because I'm pretty good at products.
The man then made a mistake: he proposed we go on to division. What he
didn't realize was, the harder the problem, the better chance I had.
We both did a long division problem. It was a tie.
This bothered the hell out of the Japanese man, because he was
apparently very well trained on the abacus, and here he was almost beaten by
this customer in a restaurant.
"Raios cubicos!" he says, with a vengeance. Cube roots! He wants to do
cube roots by arithmetic! It's hard to find a more difficult fundamental
problem in arithmetic. It must have been his topnotch exercise in
abacus-land.
He writes a number on some paper -- any old number -- and I still
remember it: 1729.03. He starts working on it, mumbling and grumbling:
"Mmmmmmagmmmmbrrr" -- he's working like a demon! He's poring away, doing
this cube root.
Meanwhile I'm just sitting there.
One of the waiters says, "What are you doing?"
I point to my head. "Thinking!" I say. I write down 12 on the paper.
After a little while I've got 12.002.
The man with the abacus wipes the sweat off his forehead: "Twelve!" he
says.
"Oh, no!" I say. "More digits! More digits!" I know that in taking a
cube root by arithmetic, each new digit is even more work than the one
before. It's a hard job.
He buries himself again, grunting, "Rrrrgrrrrmmmmmm..." while I add on
two more digits. He finally lifts his head to say, "12.0!"
The waiters are all excited and happy. They tell the man, "Look! He
does it only by thinking, and you need an abacus! He's got more digits!"
He was completely washed out, and left, humiliated. The waiters
congratulated each other.
How did the customer beat the abacus? The number was 1729.03. I
happened to know that a cubic foot contains 1728 cubic inches, so the answer
is a tiny bit more than 12. The excess, 1.03, is only one part in nearly
2000, and I had learned in calculus that for small fractions, the cube
root's excess is one-third of the number's excess. So all I had to do is
find the fraction 1/1728, and multiply by 4 (divide by 3 and multiply by
12). So I was able to pull out a whole lot of digits that way.
A few weeks later the man came into the cocktail lounge of the hotel I
was staying at. He recognized me and came over. "Tell me," he said, "how
were you able to do that cube-root problem so fast?"
I started to explain that it was an approximate method, and had to do
with the percentage of error. "Suppose you had given me 28. Now, the cube
root of 27 is 3..."
He picks up his abacus: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz -- "Oh yes," he says.
I realized something: he doesn't know numbers. With the abacus, you
don't have to memorize a lot of arithmetic combinations; all you have to do
is learn how to push the little beads up and down. You don't have to
memorize 9 + 7 = 16; you just know that when you add 9 you push a ten's bead
up and pull a one's bead down. So we're slower at basic arithmetic, but we
know numbers.
Furthermore, the whole idea of an approximate method was beyond him,
even though a cube root often cannot be computed exactly by any method. So I
never could teach him how I did cube roots or explain how lucky I was that
he happened to choose 1729.03.
--------
One time I picked up a hitchhiker who told me how interesting South
America was, and that I ought to go there. I complained that the language is
different, but he said just go ahead and learn it -- it's no big problem. So
I thought, that's a good idea: I'll go to South America.
Cornell had some foreign language classes which followed a method used
during the war, in which small groups of about ten students and one native
speaker speak only the foreign language -- nothing else. Since I was a
rather young-looking professor there at Cornell, I decided to take the class
as if I were a regular student. And since I didn't know yet where I was
going to end up in South America, I decided to take Spanish, because the
great majority of the countries there speak Spanish.
So when it was time to register for the class, we were standing
outside, ready to go into the classroom, when this pneumatic blonde came
along. You know how once in a while you get this feeling, WOW? She looked
terrific. I said to myself, "Maybe she's going to be in the Spanish class --
that'll be great!" But no, she walked into the Portuguese class. So I
figured, What the hell -- I might as well learn Portuguese.
I started walking right after her when this Anglo-Saxon attitude that I
have said, "No, that's not a good reason to decide which language to speak."
So I went back and signed up for the Spanish class, to my utter regret.
Some time later I was at a Physics Society meeting in New York, and I
found myself sitting next to Jaime Tiomno, from Brazil, and he asked, "What
are you going to do next summer?"
"I'm thinking of visiting South America."
"Oh! Why don't you come to Brazil? I'll get a position for you at the
Center for Physical Research."
So now I had to convert all that Spanish into Portuguese!
I found a Portuguese graduate student at Cornell, and twice a week he
gave me lessons, so I was able to alter what I had learned.
On the plane to Brazil I started out sitting next to a guy from
Colombia who spoke only Spanish: so I wouldn't talk to him because I didn't
want to get confused again. But sitting in front of me were two guys who
were talking Portuguese. I had never heard real Portuguese; I had only had
this teacher who had talked very slowly and clearly. So here are these two
guys talking a blue streak, brrrrrrr-a-ta brrrrrrr-a-ta, and I can't even
hear the word for "I," or the word for "the," or anything.
Finally, when we made a refueling stop in Trinidad, I went up to the
two fellas and said very slowly in Portuguese, or what I thought was
Portuguese, "Excuse me... can you understand... what I am saying to you
now?"
"Pues nao, porque nao?" -- "Sure, why not?" they replied.
So I explained as best I could that I had been learning Portuguese for
some months now, but I had never heard it spoken in conversation, and I was
listening to them on the airplane, but couldn't understand a word they were
saying.
"Oh," they said with a laugh, "Nao e Portugues! E Ladao! Judeo!" What
they were speaking was to Portuguese as Yiddish is to German, so you can
imagine a guy who's been studying German sitting behind two guys talking
Yiddish, trying to figure out what's the matter. It's obviously German, but
it doesn't work. He must not have learned German very well.
When we got back on the plane, they pointed out another man who did
speak Portuguese, so I sat next to him. He had been studying neurosurgery in
Maryland, so it was very easy to talk with him -- as long as it was about
cirugia neural, o cerebreu, and other such "complicated" things. The long
words are actually quite easy to translate into Portuguese because the only
difference is their endings: "-tion" in English is "-c,ao" in Portuguese;
"-ly" is "-mente," and so on. But when he looked out the window and said
something simple, I was lost: I couldn't decipher "the sky is blue."
I got off the plane in Recife (the Brazilian government was going to
pay the part from Recife to Rio) and was met by the father-in-law of Cesar
Lattes, who was the director of the Center for Physical Research in Rio, his
wife, and another man. As the men were off getting my luggage, the lady
started talking to me in Portuguese: "You speak Portuguese? How nice! How
was it that you learned Portuguese?"
I replied slowly, with great effort. "First, I started to learn
Spanish... then I discovered I was going to Brazil..." Now I wanted to say,
"So, I learned Portuguese," but I couldn't think of the word for "so." I
knew how to make BIG words, though, so I finished the sentence like this:
"CONSEQUENTEMENTE, apprendi Portugues!"
When the two men came back with the baggage, she said, "Oh, he speaks
Portuguese! And with such wonderful words: CONSEQUENTEMENTE!"
Then an announcement came over the loudspeaker. The flight to Rio was
canceled, and there wouldn't be another one till next Tuesday -- and I had
to be in Rio on Monday, at the latest.
I got all upset. "Maybe there's a cargo plane. I'll travel in a cargo
plane," I said.
"Professor!" they said, "It's really quite nice here in Recife. We'll
show you around. Why don't you relax -- you're in Brazil."
That evening I went for a walk in town, and came upon a small crowd of
people standing around a great big rectangular hole in the road -- it had
been dug for sewer pipes, or something -- and there, sitting exactly in the
hole, was a car. It was marvelous: it fitted absolutely perfectly, with its
roof level with the road. The workmen hadn't bothered to put up any signs at
the end of the day, and the guy had simply driven into it. I noticed a
difference: When we'd dig a hole, there'd be all kinds of detour signs and
flashing lights to protect us. There, they dig the hole, and when they're
finished for the day, they just leave.
Anyway, Recife was a nice town, and I did wait until next Tuesday to
fly to Rio.
When I got to Rio I met Cesar Lattes. The national TV network wanted to
make some pictures of our meeting, so they started filming, but without any
sound. The cameramen said, "Act as if you're talking. Say something --
anything."
So Lattes asked me, "Have you found a sleeping dictionary yet?"
That night, Brazilian TV audiences saw the director of the Center for
Physical Research welcome the Visiting Professor from the United States, but
little did they know that the subject of their conversation was finding a
girl to spend the night with!
When I got to the center, we had to decide when I would give my
lectures -- in the morning, or afternoon.
Lattes said, "The students prefer the afternoon."
"So let's have them in the afternoon."
"But the beach is nice in the afternoon, so why don't you give the
lectures in the morning, so you can enjoy the beach in the afternoon."
"But you said the students prefer to have them in the afternoon."
"Don't worry about that. Do what's most convenient for you! Enjoy the
beach in the afternoon."
So I learned how to look at life in a way that's different from the way
it is where I come from. First, they weren't in the same hurry that I was.
And second, if it's better for you, never mind! So I gave the lectures in
the morning and enjoyed the beach in the afternoon. And had I learned that
lesson earlier, I would have learned Portuguese in the first place, instead
of Spanish.
I thought at first that I would give my lectures in English, but I
noticed something: When the students were explaining something to me in
Portuguese, I couldn't understand it very well, even though I knew a certain
amount of Portuguese. It was not exactly clear to me whether they had said
"increase," or "decrease," or "not increase," or "not decrease," or
"decrease slowly." But when they struggled with English, they'd say "ahp" or
"doon," and I knew which way it was, even though the pronunciation was lousy
and the grammar was all screwed up. So I realized that if I was going to
talk to them and try to teach them, it would be better for me to talk in
Portuguese, poor as it was. It would be easier for them to understand.
During that first time in Brazil, which lasted six weeks, I was invited
to give a talk at the Brazilian Academy of Sciences about some work in
quantum electrodynamics that I had just done. I thought I would give the
talk in Portuguese, and two students at the center said they would help me
with it. I began by writing out my talk in absolutely lousy Portuguese. I
wrote it myself, because if they had written it, there would be too many
words I didn't know and couldn't pronounce correctly. So I wrote it, and
they fixed up all the grammar, fixed up the words and made it nice, but it
was still at the level that I could read easily and know more or less what I
was saying. They practiced with me to get the pronunciations absolutely
right: the "de" should be in between "deh" and "day" -- it had to be just
so.
I got to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences meeting, and the first
speaker, a chemist, got up and gave his talk -- in English. Was he trying to
be polite, or what? I couldn't understand what he was saying because his
pronunciation was so bad, but maybe everybody else had the same accent so
they could understand him; I don't know. Then the next guy gets up, and
gives his talk in English!
When it was my turn, I got up and said, "I'm sorry; I hadn't realized
that the official language of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences was English,
and therefore I did not prepare my talk in English. So please excuse me, but
I'm going to have to give it in Portuguese."
So I read the thing, and everybody was very pleased with it.
The next guy to get up said, "Following the example of my colleague
from the United States, I also will give my talk in Portuguese." So, for all
I know, I changed the tradition of what language is used in the Brazilian
Academy of Sciences.
Some years later, I met a man from Brazil who quoted to me the exact
sentences I had used at the beginning of my talk to the Academy. So
apparently it made quite an impression on them.
But the language was always difficult for me, and I kept working on it
all the time, reading the newspaper, and so on. I kept on giving my lectures
in Portuguese -- what I call "Feynman's Portuguese," which I knew couldn't
be the same as real Portuguese, because I could understand what I was
saying, while I couldn't understand what the people in the street were
saying.
Because I liked it so much that first time in Brazil, I went again a
year later, this time for ten months. This time I lectured at the University
of Rio, which was supposed to pay me, but they never did, so the center kept
giving me the money I was supposed to get from the university.
I finally ended up staying in a hotel right on the beach at Copacabana,
called the Miramar. For a while I had a room on the thirteenth floor, where
I could look out the window at the ocean and watch the girls on the beach.
It turned out that this hotel was the one that the airline pilots and
the stewardesses from Pan American Airlines stayed at when they would "lay
over" -- a term that always bothered me a little bit. Their rooms were
always on the fourth floor, and late at night there would often be a certain
amount of sheepish sneaking up and down in the elevator.
One time I went away for a few weeks on a trip, and when I came back
the manager told me he had to book my room to somebody else, since it was
the last available empty room, and that he had moved my stuff to a new room.
It was a room right over the kitchen, that people usually didn't stay
in very long. The manager must have figured that I was the only guy who
could see the advantages of that room sufficiently clearly that I would
tolerate the smells and not complain. I didn't complain: It was on the
fourth floor, near the stewardesses. It saved a lot of problems.
The people from the airlines were somewhat bored with their lives,
strangely enough, and at night they would often go to bars to drink. I liked
them all, and in order to be sociable, I would go with them to the bar to
have a few drinks, several nights a week.
One day, about 3:30 in the afternoon, I was walking along the sidewalk
opposite the beach at Copacabana past a bar. I suddenly got this treMENdous,
strong feeling: "That's just what I want; that'll fit just right. I'd just
love to have a drink right now!"
I started to walk into the bar, and I suddenly thought to myself, "Wait
a minute! It's the middle of the afternoon. There's nobody here. There's no
social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that
you have to have a drink?" -- and I got scared.
I never drank ever again, since then. I suppose I really wasn't in any
danger, because I found it very easy to stop. But that strong feeling that I
didn't understand frightened me. You see, I get such fun out of thinking
that I don't want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such
a big kick. It's the same reason that, later on, I was reluctant to try
experiments with LSD in spite of my curiosity about hallucinations.
Near the end of that year in Brazil I took one of the air hostesses --
a very lovely girl with braids -- to the museum. As we went through the
Egyptian section, I found myself telling her things like, "The wings on the
sarcophagus mean such-and-such, and in these vases they used to put the
entrails, and around the corner there oughta be a so-and-so..." and I
thought to myself, "You know where you learned all that stuff? From Mary
Lou" -- and I got lonely for her.
I met Mary Lou at Cornell and later, when I came to Pasadena, I found
that she had come to Westwood, nearby. I liked her for a while, but we used
to argue a bit; finally we decided it was hopeless, and we separated. But
after a year of taking out these air hostesses and not really getting
anywhere, I was frustrated. So when I was telling this girl all these
things, I thought Mary Lou really was quite wonderful, and we shouldn't have
had all those arguments.
I wrote a letter to her and proposed. Somebody who's wise could have
told me that was dangerous: When you're away and you've got nothing but
paper, and you're feeling lonely, you remember all the good things and you
can't remember the reasons you had the arguments. And it didn't work out.
The arguments started again right away, and the marriage lasted for only two
years.
There was a man at the U.S. Embassy who knew I liked samba music. I
think I told him that when I had been in Brazil the first time, I had heard
a samba band practicing in the street, and I wanted to learn more about
Brazilian music.
He said a small group, called a regional, practiced at his apartment
every week, and I could come over and listen to them play.
There were three or four people -- one was the janitor from the
apartment house -- and they played rather quiet music up in his apartment;
they had no other place to play. One guy had a tambourine that they called a
pandeiro, and another guy had a small guitar. I kept hearing the beat of a
drum somewhere, but there was no drum! Finally I figured out that it was the
tambourine, which the guy was playing in a complicated way, twisting his
wrist and hitting the skin with his thumb. I found that interesting, and
learned how to play the pandeiro, more or less.
Then the season for Carnaval began to come around. That's the season
when new music is presented. They don't put out new music and records all
the time; they put them all out during Carnaval time, and it's very
exciting.
It turned out that the janitor was the composer for a small samba
"school" -- not a school in the sense of education, but in the sense of fish
-- from Copacabana Beach, called Farqantes de Copacabana, which means
"Fakers from Copacabana," which was just right for me, and he invited me to
be in it.
Now this samba school was a thing where guys from the favelas -- the
poor sections of the city -- would come down, and meet behind a construction
lot where some apartment houses were being built, and practice the new music
for the Carnaval.
I chose to play a thing called a "frigideira," which is a toy frying
pan made of metal, about six inches in diameter, with a little metal stick
to beat it with. It's an accompanying instrument which makes a tinkly, rapid
noise that goes with the main samba music and rhythm and fills it out. So I
tried to play this thing and everything was going all right. We were
practicing, the music was roaring along and we were going like sixty, when
all of a sudden the head of the batteria section, a great big black man,
yelled out, "STOP! Hold it, hold it -- wait a minute!" And everybody
stopped. "Something's wrong with the frigideiras!" he boomed out. "O
Americana, outra vez!" ("The American again!")
So I felt uncomfortable. I practiced all the time. I'd walk along the
beach holding two sticks that I had picked up, getting the twisty motion of
the wrists, practicing, practicing, practicing. I kept working on it, but I
always felt inferior, that I was some kind of trouble, and wasn't really up
to it.
Well, it was getting closer to Carnaval time, and one evening there was
a conversation between the leader of the band and another guy, and then the
leader started coming around, picking people out: "You!" he said to a
trumpeter. "You!" he said to a singer. "You!" -- and he pointed to me. I
figured we were finished. He said, "Go out in front!"
We went out to the front of the construction site -- the five or six of
us -- and there was an old Cadillac convertible, with its top down. "Get
in!" the leader said.
There wasn't enough room for us all, so some of us had to sit up on the
back. I said to the guy next to me, "What's he doing -- is he putting us
out?"
"Nao se, nao se." ("I don't know.")
We drove off way up high on a road which ended near the edge of a cliff
overlooking the sea. The car stopped and the leader said, "Get out!" -- and
they walked us right up to the edge of the cliff!
And sure enough, he said, "Now line up! You first, you next, you next!
Start playing! Now march!"
We would have marched off the edge of the cliff -- except for a steep
trail that went down. So our little group goes down the trail -- the
trumpet, the singer, the guitar, the pandeiro, and the frigideira -- to an
outdoor party in the woods. We weren't picked out because the leader wanted
to get rid of us; he was sending us to this private party that wanted some
samba music! And afterwards he collected money to pay for some costumes for
our band.
After that I felt a little better, because I realized, that when he
picked the frigideira player, he picked me!
Another thing happened to increase my confidence. Some time later, a
guy came from another samba school, in Leblon, a beach further on. He wanted
to join our school.
The boss said, "Where're you from?"
"Leblon."
"What do you play?"
"Frigideira."
"OK. Let me hear you play the frigideira."
So this guy picked up his frigideira and his metal stick and...
"brrra-dup-dup; chick-a-chick." Gee whiz! It was wonderful!
The boss said to him, "You go over there and stand next to O Americana,
and you'll learn how to play the frigideira!"
My theory is that it's like a person who speaks French who comes to
America. At first they're making all kinds of mistakes, and you can hardly
understand them. Then they keep on practicing until they speak rather well,
and you find there's a delightful twist to their way of speaking -- their
accent is rather nice, and you love to listen to it. So I must have had some
sort of accent playing the frigideira, because I couldn't compete with those
guys who had been playing it all their lives; it must have been some kind of
dumb accent. But whatever it was, I became a rather successful frigideira
player.
One day, shortly before Carnaval time, the leader of the samba school
said, "OK, we're going to practice marching in the street."
We all went out from the construction site to the street, and it was
full of traffic. The streets of Copacabana were always a big mess. Believe
it or not, there was a trolley line in which the trolley cars went one way,
and the automobiles went the other way. Here it was rush hour in Copacabana,
and we were going to march down the middle of Avenida Atlantica.
I said to myself, "Jesus! The boss didn't get a license, he didn't OK
it with the police, he didn't do anything. He's decided we're just going to
go out."
So we started to go out into the street, and everybody, all around, was
excited. Some volunteers from a group of bystanders took a rope and formed a
big square around our band, so the pedestrians wouldn't walk through our
lines. People started to lean out of the windows. Everybody wanted to hear
the new samba music. It was very exciting!
As soon as we started to march, I saw a policeman, way down at the
other end of the road. He looked, saw what was happening, and started
diverting traffic! Everything was informal. Nobody made any arrangements,
but it worked fine. The people were holding the ropes around us, the
policeman was diverting the traffic, the pedestrians were crowded and the
traffic was jammed, but we were going along great! We walked down the
street, around the corners, and all over the damn Copacabana, at random!
Finally we ended up in a little square in front of the apartment where
the boss's mother lived. We stood there in this place, playing, and the
guy's mother, and aunt, and so on, came down. They had aprons on; they had
been working in the kitchen, and you could see their excitement -- they were
almost crying. It was really nice to do that human stuff. And all the people
leaning out of the windows -- that was terrific! And I remembered the time I
had been in Brazil before, and had seen one of these samba bands -- how I
loved the music and nearly went crazy over it -- and now I was in it!
By the way, when we were marching around the streets of Copacabana that
day, I saw in a group on the sidewalk two young ladies from the embassy.
Next week I got a note from the embassy saying, "It's a great thing you are
doing, yak, yak, yak..." as if my purpose was to improve relations between
the United States and Brazil! So it was a "great" thing I was doing.
Well, in order to go to these rehearsals, I didn't want to go dressed
in my regular clothes that I wore to the university. The people in the band
were very poor, and had only old, tattered clothes. So I put on an old
undershirt, some old pants, and so forth, so I wouldn't look too peculiar.
But then I couldn't walk out of my luxury hotel on Avenida Atlantica in
Copacabana Beach through the lobby. So I always took the elevator down to
the bottom and went out through the basement.
A short time before Carnaval, there was going to be a special
competition between the samba schools of the beaches -- Copacabana, Ipanema,
and Leblon; there were three or four schools, and we were one. We were going
to march in costume down Avenida Atlantica. I felt a little uncomfortable
about marching in one of those fancy Carnaval costumes, since I wasn't a
Brazilian. But we were supposed to be dressed as Greeks, so I figured I'm as
good a Greek as they are.
On the day of the competition, I was eating at the hotel restaurant,
and the head waiter, who had often seen me tapping on the table when there
was samba music playing, came over to me and said, "Mr. Feynman, this
evening there's going to be something you will love! It's tipico Brasileiro
-- typical Brazilian: There's going to be a march of the samba schools right
in front of the hotel! And the music is so good -- you must hear it."
I said, "Well, I'm kind of busy tonight. I don't know if I can make
it."
"Oh! But you'd love it so much! You must not miss it! It's tipico
Brasileiro!"
He was very insistent, and as I kept telling him I didn't think I'd be
there to see it, he became disappointed.
That evening I put on my old clothes and went down through the
basement, as usual. We put on the costumes at the construction lot and began
marching down Avenida Atlantica, a hundred Brazilian Greeks in paper
costumes, and I was in the back, playing away on the frigideira.
Big crowds were along both sides of the Avenida; everybody was leaning
out of the windows, and we were coming up to the Miramar Hotel, where I was
staying. People were standing on the tables and chairs, and there were
crowds and crowds of people. We were playing along, going like sixty, as our
band started to pass in front of the hotel. Suddenly I saw one of the
waiters shoot up in the air, pointing with his arm, and through all this
noise I can hear him scream, "O PROFESSOR!" So the head waiter found out why
I wasn't able to be there that evening to see the competition -- I was in
it!
The next day I saw a lady I knew from meeting her on the beach all the
time, who had an apartment overlooking the Avenida. She had some friends
over to watch the parade of the samba schools, and when we went by, one of
her friends exclaimed, "Listen to that guy play the frigideira -- he is
good!" I had succeeded. I got a kick out of succeeding at something I wasn't
supposed to be able to do.
When the time came for Carnaval, not very many people from our school
showed up. There were some special costumes that were made just for the
occasion, but not enough people. Maybe they had the attitude that we
couldn't win against the really big samba schools from the city; I don't
know. I thought we were working day after day, practicing and marching for
the Carnaval, but when Carnaval came, a lot of the band didn't show up, and
we didn't compete very well. Even as we were marching around in the street,
some of the band wandered off. Funny result! I never did understand it very
well, but maybe the main excitement and fun was trying to win the contest of
the beaches, where most people felt their level was. And we did win, by the
way.
During that ten-month stay in Brazil I got interested in the energy
levels of the lighter nuclei. I worked out all the theory for it in my hotel
room, but I wanted to check how the data from the experiments looked. This
was new stuff that was being worked out up at the Kellogg Laboratory by the
experts at Caltech, so I made contact with them -- the timing was all
arranged -- by ham radio. I found an amateur radio operator in Brazil, and
about once a week I'd go over to his house. He'd make contact with the ham
radio operator in Pasadena, and then, because there was something slightly
illegal about it, he'd give me some call letters and would say, "Now I'll
turn you over to WKWX, who's sitting next to me and would like to talk to
you."
So I'd say, "This is WKWX. Could you please tell me the spacing between
the certain levels in boron we talked about last week," and so on. I would
use the data from the experiments to adjust my constants and check whether I
was on the right track.
The first guy went on vacation, but he gave me another amateur radio
operator to go to. This second guy was blind and operated his station. They
were both very nice, and the contact I had with Caltech by ham radio was
very effective and useful to me.
As for the physics itself, I worked out quite a good deal, and it was
sensible. It was worked out and verified by other people later. I decided,
though, that I had so many parameters that I had to adjust -- too much
"phenomenological adjustment of constants" to make everything fit -- that I
couldn't be sure it was very useful. I wanted a rather deeper understanding
of the nuclei, and I was never quite convinced it was very significant, so I
never did anything with it.
In regard to education in Brazil, I had a very interesting experience.
I was teaching a group of students who would ultimately become teachers,
since at that time there were not many opportunities in Brazil for a highly
trained person in science. These students had already had many courses, and
this was to be their most advanced course in electricity and magnetism --
Maxwell's equations, and so on.
The university was located in various office buildings throughout the
city, and the course I taught met in a building which overlooked the bay.
I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which
the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the
question -- the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell
-- they couldn't answer it at all! For instance, one time I was talking
about polarized light, and I gave them all some strips of polaroid.
Polaroid passes only light whose electric vector is in a certain
direction, so I explained how you could tell which way the light is
polarized from whether the polaroid is dark or light.
We first took two strips of polaroid and rotated them until they let
the most light through. From doing that we could tell that the two strips
were now admitting light polarized in the same direction -- what passed
through one piece of polaroid could also pass through the other. But then I
asked them how one could tell the absolute direction of polarization, for a
single piece of polaroid.
They hadn't any idea.
I knew this took a certain amount of ingenuity, so I gave them a hint:
"Look at the light reflected from the bay outside."
Nobody said anything.
Then I said, "Have you ever heard of Brewster's Angle?"
"Yes, sir! Brewster's Angle is the angle at which light reflected from
a medium with an index of refraction is completely polarized."
"And which way is the light polarized when it's reflected?"
"The light is polarized perpendicular to the plane of reflection, sir."
Even now, I have to think about it; they knew it cold! They even knew the
tangent of the angle equals the index!
I said, "Well?"
Still nothing. They had just told me that light reflected from a medium
with an index, such as the bay outside, was polarized; they had even told me
which way it was polarized.
I said, "Look at the bay outside, through the polaroid. Now turn the
polaroid."
"Ooh, it's polarized!" they said.
After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students
had memorized everything, but they didn't know what anything meant. When
they heard "light that is reflected from a medium with an index," they
didn't know that it meant a material such as water. They didn't know that
the "direction of the light" is the direction in which you see something
when you're looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet
nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, "What is
Brewster's Angle?" I'm going into the computer with the right keywords. But
if I say, "Look at the water," nothing happens -- they don't have anything
under "Look at the water"!
Later I attended a lecture at the engineering school. The lecture went
like this, translated into English: "Two bodies... are considered
equivalent... if equal torques... will produce... equal acceleration. Two
bodies, are considered equivalent, if equal torques, will produce equal
acceleration." The students were all sitting there taking dictation, and
when the professor repeated the sentence, they checked it to make sure they
wrote it down all right. Then they wrote down the next sentence, and on and
on. I was the only one who knew the professor was talking about objects with
the same moment of inertia, and it was hard to figure out.
I didn't see how they were going to learn anything from that. Here he
was talking about moments of inertia, but there was no discussion about how
hard it is to push a door open when you put heavy weights on the outside,
compared to when you put them near the hinge -- nothing!
After the lecture, I talked to a student: "You take all those notes --
what do you do with them?"
"Oh, we study them," he says. "We'll have an exam."
"What will the exam be like?"
"Very easy. I can tell you now one of the questions." He looks at his
notebook and says, " 'When are two bodies equivalent?' And the answer is,
'Two bodies are considered equivalent if equal torques will produce equal
acceleration.' " So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and "learn"
all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had
memorized.
Then I went to an entrance exam for students coming into the
engineering school. It was an oral exam, and I was allowed to listen to it.
One of the students was absolutely super: He answered everything nifty! The
examiners asked him what diamagnetism was, and he answered it perfectly.
Then they asked, "When light comes at an angle through a sheet of material
with a certain thickness, and a certain index N, what happens to the light?"
"It comes out parallel to itself, sir -- displaced."
"And how much is it displaced?"
"I don't know, sir, but I can figure it out." So he figured it out. He
was very good. But I had, by this time, my suspicions.
After the exam I went up to this bright young man, and explained to him
that I was from the United States, and that I wanted to ask him some
questions that would not affect the result of his examination in any way.
The first question I ask is, "Can you give me some example of a diamagnetic
substance?"
"No."
Then I asked, "If this book was made of glass, and I was looking at
something on the table through it, what would happen to the image if I
tilted the glass?"
"It would be deflected, sir, by twice the angle that you've turned the
book."
I said, "You haven't got it mixed up with a mirror, have you?"
"No, sir!"
He had just told me in the examination that the light would be
displaced, parallel to itself, and therefore the image would move over to
one side, but would not be turned by any angle. He had even figured out how
much it would be displaced, but he didn't realize that a piece of glass is a
material with an index, and that his calculation had applied to my question.
I taught a course at the engineering school on mathematical methods in
physics, in which I tried to show how to solve problems by trial and error.
It's something that people don't usually learn, so I began with some simple
examples of arithmetic to illustrate the method. I was surprised that only
about eight out of the eighty or so students turned in the first assignment.
So I gave a strong lecture about having to actually try it, not just sit
back and watch me do it.
After the lecture some students came up to me in a little delegation,
and told me that I didn't understand the backgrounds that they have, that
they can study without doing the problems, that they have already learned
arithmetic, and that this stuff was beneath them.
So I kept going with the class, and no matter how complicated or
obviously advanced the work was becoming, they were never handing a damn
thing in. Of course I realized what it was: They couldn't do it!
One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions.
Finally, a student explained it to me: "If I ask you a question during the
lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, 'What are you wasting our
time for in the class? We're trying to learn something. And you're stopping
him by asking a question'."
It was a kind of one-upmanship, where nobody knows what's going on, and
they'd put the other one down as if they did know. They all fake that they
know, and if one student admits for a moment that something is confusing by
asking a question, the others take a high-handed attitude, acting as if it's
not confusing at all, telling him that he's wasting their time.
I explained how useful it was to work together, to discuss the
questions, to talk it over, but they wouldn't do that either, because they
would be losing face if they had to ask someone else. It was pitiful! All
the work they did, intelligent people, but they got themselves into this
funny state of mind, this strange kind of self-propagating "education" which
is meaningless, utterly meaningless!
At the end of the academic year, the students asked me to give a talk
about my experiences of teaching in Brazil. At the talk there would be not
only students, but professors and government officials, so I made them
promise that I could say whatever I wanted. They said, "Sure. Of course.
It's a free country."
So I came in, carrying the elementary physics textbook that they used
in the first year of college. They thought this book was especially good
because it had different kinds of typeface -- bold black for the most
important things to remember, lighter for less important things, and so on.
Right away somebody said, "You're not going to say anything bad about
the textbook, are you? The man who wrote it is here, and everybody thinks
it's a good textbook."
"You promised I could say whatever I wanted."
The lecture hall was full. I started out by defining science as an
understanding of the behavior of nature. Then I asked, "What is a good
reason for teaching science? Of course, no country can consider itself
civilized unless... yak, yak, yak." They were all sitting there nodding,
because I know that's the way they think.
Then I say, "That, of course, is absurd, because why should we feel we
have to keep up with another country? We have to do it for a good reason, a
sensible reason; not just because other countries do." Then I talked about
the utility of science, and its contribution to the improvement of the human
condition, and all that -- I really teased them a little bit.
Then I say, "The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that
no science is being taught in Brazil!"
I can see them stir, thinking, "What? No science? This is absolutely
crazy! We have all these classes."
So I tell them that one of the first things to strike me when I came to
Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics
books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much
earlier than kids do in the United States, that it's amazing you don't find
many physicists in Brazil -- why is that? So many kids are working so hard,
and nothing comes of it.
Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek
language, who knows that in his own country there aren't many children
studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to
find everybody studying Greek -- even the smaller kids in the elementary
schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his
degree in Greek, and asks him, "What were Socrates' ideas on the
relationship between Truth and Beauty?" -- and the student can't answer.
Then he asks the student, "What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third
Symposium?" the student lights up and goes, "Brrrrrrrrr-up" -- he tells you
everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.
But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the
relationship between Truth and Beauty!
What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country
learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and
then sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates
said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To
the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them
into words the students can understand.
I said, "That's how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids
'science' here in Brazil." (Big blast, right?)
Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using. "There
are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one
place where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it
says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and
so on. The numbers have 'errors' in them -- that is, if you look at them,
you think you're looking at experimental results, because the numbers are a
little above, or a little below, the theoretical values. The book even talks
about having to correct the experimental errors -- very fine. The trouble
is, when you calculate the value of the acceleration constant from these
values, you get the right answer. But a ball rolling down an inclined plane,
if it is actually done, has an inertia to get it to turn, and will, if you
do the experiment, produce five-sevenths of the right answer, because of the
extra energy needed to go into the rotation of the ball. Therefore this
single example of experimental 'results' is obtained from a fake experiment.
Nobody had rolled such a ball, or they would never have gotten those
results!
"I have discovered something else," I continued. "By flipping the pages
at random, and putting my finger in and reading the sentences on that page,
I can show you what's the matter -- how it's not science, but memorizing, in
every circumstance. Therefore I am brave enough to flip through the pages
now, in front of this audience, to put my finger in, to read, and to show
you."
So I did it. Brrrrrrrup -- I stuck my finger in, and I started to read:
"Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the light emitted when crystals are
crushed..."
I said, "And there, have you got science? No! You have only told what a
word means in terms of other words. You haven't told anything about nature
-- what crystals produce light when you crush them, why they produce light.
Did you see any student go home and try it? He can't.
"But if, instead, you were to write, 'When you take a lump of sugar and
crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some
other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called
"triboluminescence." ' Then someone will go home and try it. Then there's an
experience of nature." I used that example to show them, but it didn't make
any difference where I would have put my finger in the book; it was like
that everywhere.
Finally, I said that I couldn't see how anyone could be educated by
this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to
pass exams, but nobody knows anything. "However," I said, "I must be wrong.
There were two Students in my class who did very well, and one of the
physicists I know was educated entirely in Brazil. Thus, it must be possible
for some people to work their way through the system, bad as it is."
Well, after I gave the talk, the head of the science education
department got up and said, "Mr. Feynman has told us some things that are
very hard for us to hear, but it appears to be that he really loves science,
and is sincere in his criticism. Therefore, I think we should listen to him.
I came here knowing we have some sickness in our system of education; what I
have learned is that we have a cancer!" -- and he sat down.
That gave other people the freedom to speak out, and there was a big
excitement. Everybody was getting up and making suggestions. The students
got some committee together to mimeograph the lectures in advance, and they
got other committees organized to do this and that.
Then something happened which was totally unexpected for me. One of the
students got up and said, "I'm one of the two students whom Mr. Feynman
referred to at the end of his talk. I was not educated in Brazil; I was
educated in Germany, and I've just come to Brazil this year."
The other student who had done well in class had a similar thing to
say. And the professor I had mentioned got up and said, "I was educated here
in Brazil during the war, when, fortunately, all of the professors had left
the university, so I learned everything by reading alone. Therefore I was
not really educated under the Brazilian system."
I didn't expect that. I knew the system was bad, but 100 percent -- it
was terrible!
Since I had gone to Brazil under a program sponsored by the United
States Government, I was asked by the State Department to write a report
about my experiences in Brazil, so I wrote out the essentials of the speech
I had just given. I found out later through the grapevine that the reaction
of somebody in the State Department was, "That shows you how dangerous it is
to send somebody to Brazil who is so naive. Foolish fellow; he can only
cause trouble. He didn't understand the problems." Quite the contrary! I
think this person in the State Department was naive to think that because he
saw a university with a list of courses and descriptions, that's what it
was.
--------
Man of a Thousand Tongues
When I was in Brazil I had struggled to learn the local language, and
decided to give my physics lectures in Portuguese. Soon after I came to
Caltech, I was invited to a party hosted by Professor Bacher. Before I
arrived at the party, Bacher told the guests, "This guy Feynman thinks he's
smart because he learned a little Portuguese, so let's fix him good: Mrs.
Smith, here (she's completely Caucasian), grew up in China. Let's have her
greet Feynman in Chinese."
I walk into the party innocently, and Bacher introduces me to all these
people: "Mr. Feynman, this is Mr. So-and-so."
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Feynman."
"And this is Mr. Such-and-such."
"My pleasure, Mr. Feynman."
"And this is Mrs. Smith."
"Ai, choong, ngong jia!" she says, bowing.
This is such a surprise to me that I figure the only thing to do is to
reply in the same spirit. I bow politely to her, and with complete
confidence I say, "Ah ching, jong jien!"
"Oh, my God!" she exclaims, losing her own composure. "I knew this
would happen -- I speak Mandarin and he speaks Cantonese!"
--------
I used to cross the United States in my automobile every summer, trying
to make it to the Pacific Ocean. But, for various reasons, I would always
get stuck somewhere -- usually in Las Vegas.
I remember the first time, particularly, I liked it very much. Then, as
now, Las Vegas made its money on the people who gamble, so the whole problem
for the hotels was to get people to come there to gamble. So they had shows
and dinners which were very inexpensive -- almost free. You didn't have to
make any reservations for anything: you could walk in, sit down at one of
the many empty tables, and enjoy the show. It was just wonderful for a man
who didn't gamble, because I was enjoying all the advantages -- the rooms
were inexpensive, the meals were next to nothing, the shows were good, and I
liked the girls.
One day I was lying around the pool at my motel, and some guy came up
and started to talk to me. I can't remember how he got started, but his idea
was that I presumably worked for a living, and it was really quite silly to
do that. "Look how easy it is for me," he said. "I just hang around the pool
all the time and enjoy life in Las Vegas."
"How the hell do you do that without working?"
"Simple: I bet on the horses."
"I don't know anything about horses, but I don't see how you can make a
living betting on the horses," I said, skeptically.
"Of course you can," he said. "That's how I live! I'll tell you what:
I'll teach you how to do it. We'll go down and I'll guarantee that you'll
win a hundred dollars."
"How can you do that?"
"I'll bet you a hundred dollars that you'll win," he said. "So if you
win it doesn't cost you anything, and if you lose, you get a hundred
dollars!"
So I think, "Gee! That's right! If I win a hundred dollars on the
horses and I have to pay him, I don't lose anything; it's just an exercise
-- it's just proof that his system works. And if he fails, I win a hundred
dollars. It's quite wonderful!"
He takes me down to some betting place where they have a list of horses
and racetracks all over the country. He introduces me to other people who
say, "Geez, he's great! I won a hunerd dollas!"
I gradually realize that I have to put up some of my own money for the
bets, and I begin to get a little nervous. "How much money do I have to
bet?" I ask. "Oh, three or four hundred dollars." I haven't got that much.
Besides, it begins to worry me: Suppose I lose all the bets?
So then he says, "I'll tell you what: My advice will cost you only
fifty dollars, and only if it works. If it doesn't work, I'll give you the
hundred dollars you would have won anyway." I figure, "Wow! Now I win both
ways -- either fifty or a hundred dollars! How the heck can he do that?"
Then I realize that if you have a reasonably even game -- forget the little
losses from the take for the moment in order to understand it -- the chance
that you'll win a hundred dollars versus losing your four hundred dollars is
four to one. So out of five times that he tries this on somebody, four times
they're going to win a hundred dollars, he gets two hundred (and he points
out to them how smart he is); the fifth time he has to pay a hundred
dollars. So he receives two hundred, on the average, when he's paying out
one hundred! So I finally understood how he could do that.
This process went on for a few days. He would invent some scheme that
sounded like a terrific deal at first, but after I thought about it for a
while I'd slowly figure out how it worked. Finally, in some sort of
desperation he says, "All right, I'll tell you what: You pay me fifty
dollars for the advice, and if you lose, I'll pay you back all your money."
Now I can't lose on that! So I say, "All right, you've got a deal!"
"Fine," he says. "But unfortunately, I have to go to San Francisco this
weekend, so you just mail me the results, and if you lose your four hundred
dollars, I'll send you the money."
The first schemes were designed to make him money by honest arithmetic.
Now, he's going to be out of town. The only way he's going to make money on
this scheme is not to send it -- to be a real cheat.
So I never accepted any of his offers. But it was very entertaining to
see how he operated.
The other thing that was fun in Las Vegas was meeting show girls. I
guess they were supposed to hang around the bar between shows to attract
customers. I met several of them that way, and talked to them, and found
them to be nice people. People who say, "Show girls, eh?" have already made
up their mind what they are! But in any group, if you look at it, there's
all kinds of variety. For example, there was the daughter of a dean of an
Eastern university. She had a talent for dancing and liked to dance; she had
the summer off and dancing jobs were hard to find, so she worked as a chorus
girl in Las Vegas. Most of the show girls were very nice, friendly people.
They were all beautiful, and I just love beautiful girls. In fact, show
girls were my real reason for liking Las Vegas so much.
At first I was a little bit afraid: the girls were so beautiful, they
had such a reputation, and so forth. I would try to meet them, and I'd choke
a little bit when I talked. It was difficult at first, but gradually it got
easier, and finally I had enough confidence that I wasn't afraid of anybody.
I had a way of having adventures which is hard to explain: it's like
fishing, where you put a line out and then you have to have patience. When I
would tell someone about some of my adventures, they might say, "Oh, come on
-- let's do that!" So we would go to a bar to see if something will happen,
and they would lose patience after twenty minutes or so. You have to spend a
couple of days before something happens, on average. I spent a lot of time
talking to show girls. One would introduce me to another, and after a while,
something interesting would often happen.
I remember one girl who liked to drink Gibsons. She danced at the
Flamingo Hotel, and I got to know her rather well. When I'd come into town,
I'd order a Gibson put at her table before she sat down, to announce my
arrival.
One time I went over and sat next to her and she said, "I'm with a man
tonight -- a high-roller from Texas." (I had already heard about this guy.
Whenever he'd play at the craps table, everybody would gather around to see
him gamble.) He came back to the table where we were sitting, and my show
girl friend introduced me to him.
The first thing he said to me was, "You know somethin'? I lost sixty
thousand dollars here last night."
I knew what to do: I turned to him, completely unimpressed, and I said,
"Is that supposed to be smart, or stupid?"
We were eating breakfast in the dining room. He said, "Here, let me
sign your check. They don't charge me for all these things because I gamble
so much here."
"I've got enough money that I don't need to worry about who pays for my
breakfast, thank you." I kept putting him down each time he tried to impress
me.
He tried everything: how rich he was, how much oil he had in Texas, and
nothing worked, because I knew the formula!
We ended up having quite a bit of fun together.
One time when we were sitting at the bar he said to me, "You see those
girls at the table over there? They're whores from Los Angeles."
They looked very nice; they had a certain amount of class.
He said, "Tell you what I'll do: I'll introduce them to you, and then
I'll pay for the one you want."
I didn't feel like meeting the girls, and I knew he was saying that to
impress me, so I began to tell him no. But then I thought, "This is
something! This guy is trying so hard to impress me, he's willing to buy
this for me. If I'm ever going to tell the story..." So I said to him,
"Well, OK, introduce me."
We went over to their table and he introduced me to the girls and then
went off for a moment. A waitress came around and asked us what we wanted to
drink. I ordered some water, and the girl next to me said, "Is it all right
if I have a champagne?"
"You can have whatever you want," I replied, coolly, " 'cause you're
payin' for it."
"What's the matter with you?" she said. "Cheapskate, or something?"
"That's right."
"You're certainly not a gentleman!" she said indignantly.
"You figured me out immediately!" I replied. I had learned in New
Mexico many years before not to be a gentleman.
Pretty soon they were offering to buy me drinks -- the tables were
turned completely! (By the way, the Texas oilman never came back.)
After a while, one of the girls said, "Let's go over to the El Rancho.
Maybe things are livelier over there." We got in their car. It was a nice
car, and they were nice people. On the way, they asked me my name.
"Dick Feynman."
"Where are you from, Dick? What do you do?"
"I'm from Pasadena; I work at Caltech."
One of the girls said, "Oh, isn't that the place where that scientist
Pauling comes from?"
I had been in Las Vegas many times, over and over, and there was nobody
who ever knew anything about science. I had talked to businessmen of all
kinds, and to them, a scientist was a nobody. "Yeah!" I said, astonished.
"And there's a fella named Gellan, or something like that -- a
physicist." I couldn't believe it. I was riding in a car full of prostitutes
and they know all this stuff!
"Yeah! His name is Gell-Mann! How did you happen to know that?"
"Your pictures were in Time magazine." It's true, they had pictures
often U.S. scientists in Time magazine, for some reason. I was in it, and so
were Pauling and Gell-Mann.
"How did you remember the names?" I asked.
"Well, we were looking through the pictures, and we picked out the
youngest and the handsomest!" (Gell-Mann is younger than I am.)
We got to the El Rancho Hotel and the girls continued this game of
acting towards me like everybody normally acts towards them: "Would you like
to gamble?" they asked. I gambled a little bit with their money and we all
had a good time.
After a while they said, "Look, we see a live one, so we'll have to
leave you now," and they went back to work.
One time I was sitting at a bar and I noticed two girls with an older
man. Finally he walked away, and they came over and sat next to me: the
prettier and more active one next to me, and her duller friend, named Pam,
on the other side.
Things started going along very nicely right away. She was very
friendly. Soon she was leaning against me, and I put my arm around her. Two
men came in and sat at a table nearby. Then, before the waitress came, they
walked out.
"Did you see those men?" my new-found friend said.
"Yeah."
"They're friends of my husband."
"Oh? What is this?"
"You see, I just married John Big" -- she mentioned a very famous name
-- "and we've had a little argument. We're on our honeymoon, and John is
always gambling. He doesn't pay any attention to me, so I go off and enjoy
myself, but he keeps sending spies around to check on what I'm doing."
She asked me to take her to her motel room, so we went in my car. On
the way I asked her, "Well, what about John?"
She said, "Don't worry. Just look around for a big red car with two
antennas. If you don't see it, he's not around."
The next night I took the "Gibson girl" and a friend of hers to the
late show at the Silver Slipper, which had a show later than all the hotels.
The girls who worked in the other shows liked to go there, and the master of
ceremonies announced the arrival of the various dancers as they came in. So
in I went with these two lovely dancers on my arm, and he said, "And here
comes Miss So-and-so and Miss So-and-so from the Flamingo!" Everybody looked
around to see who was coming in. I felt great!
We sat down at a table near the bar, and after a little while there was
a bit of a flurry-waiters moving tables around, security guards, with guns,
coming in. They were making room for a celebrity. JOHN BIG was coming in!
He came over to the bar, right next to our table, and right away two
guys wanted to dance with the girls I brought. They went off to dance, and I
was sitting alone at the table when John came over and sat down at my table.
"How are yah?" he said. "Whattya doin' in Vegas?"
I was sure he'd found out about me and his wife. "Just foolin'
around..." (I've gotta act tough, right?)
"How long ya been here?"
"Four or five nights."
"I know ya," he said. "Didn't I see you in Florida?"
"Well, I really don't know..."
He tried this place and that place, and I didn't know what he was
getting at. "I know," he said; "It was in El Morocco." (El Morocco was a big
nightclub in New York, where a lot of big operators go -- like professors of
theoretical physics, right?)
"That must have been it," I said. I was wondering when he was going to
get to it. Finally he leaned over to me and said, "Hey, will you introduce
me to those girls you're with when they come back from dancing?"
That's all he wanted; he didn't know me from a hole in the wall! So I
introduced him, but my show girl friends said they were tired and wanted to
go home.
The next afternoon, I saw John Big at the Flamingo, standing at the
bar, talking to the bartender about cameras and taking pictures. He must be
an amateur photographer: He's got all these bulbs and cameras, but he says
the dumbest things about them. I decided he wasn't an amateur photographer
after all; he was just a rich guy who bought himself some cameras.
I figured by that time that he didn't know I had been fooling around
with his wife; he only wanted to talk to me because of the girls I had. So I
thought I would play a game. I'd invent a part for myself: John Big's
assistant.
"Hi, John," I said. "Let's take some pictures. I'll carry your
flashbulbs."
I put the flashbulbs in my pocket, and we started off taking pictures.
I'd hand him flashbulbs and give him advice here and there; he likes that
stuff.
We went over to the Last Frontier to gamble, and he started to win. The
hotels don't like a high roller to leave, but I could see he wanted to go.
The problem was how to do it gracefully.
"John, we have to leave now," I said in a serious voice.
"But I'm winning."
"Yes, but we have made an appointment this afternoon."
"OK, get my car."
"Certainly, Mr. Big!" He handed me the keys and told me what it looked
like (I didn't let on that I knew).
I went out to the parking lot, and sure enough, there was this big,
fat, wonderful car with the two antennas. I climbed into it and turned the
key -- and it wouldn't start. It had an automatic transmission; they had
just come out and I didn't know anything about them. After a bit I
accidentally shifted it into PARK and it started. I drove it very carefully,
like a million-dollar car, to the hotel entrance, where I got out and went
inside to the table where he was still gambling, and said, "Your car is
ready, sir!"
"I have to quit," he announced, and we left. He had me drive the car.
"I want to go to the El Rancho," he said. "Do you know any girls there?"
I knew one girl there rather well, so I said "Yeah." By this time I
felt confident enough that the only reason he was going along with this game
I had invented was that he wanted to meet some girls, so I brought up a
delicate subject: "I met your wife the other night..."
"My wife? My wife's not here in Las Vegas." I told him about the girl I
met in the bar. "Oh! I know who you mean; I met that girl and her friend in
Los Angeles and brought them to Las Vegas. The first thing they did was use
my phone for an hour to talk to their friends in Texas. I got mad and threw
'em out! So she's been going around telling everybody that she's my wife,
eh?" So that was cleared up.
We went into the El Rancho, and the show was going to start in about
fifteen minutes. The place was packed; there wasn't a seat in the house.
John went over to the majordomo and said, "I want a table."
"Yes, sir, Mr. Big! It will be ready in a few minutes." John tipped him
and went off to gamble. Meanwhile I went around to the back, where the girls
were getting ready for the show, and asked for my friend. She came out and I
explained to her that John Big was with me, and he'd like some company after
the show.
"Certainly, Dick," she said. "I'll bring some friends and we'll see you
after the show."
I went around to the front to find John. He was still gambling. "Just
go in without me," he said. "I'll be there in a minute."
There were two tables, at the very front, right at the edge of the
stage. Every other table in the place was packed. I sat down by myself. The
show started before John came in, and the show girls came out. They could
see me at the table, all by myself. Before, they thought I was some
small-time professor; now they see I'm a BIG OPERATOR.
Finally John came in, and soon afterwards some people sat down at the
table next to us -- John's "wife" and her friend Pam, with two men!
I leaned over to John: "She's at the other table."
"Yeah."
She saw I was taking care of John, so she leaned over to me from the
other table and asked, "Could I talk to John?"
I didn't say a word. John didn't say anything either.
I waited a little while, then I leaned over to John: "She wants to talk
to you."
Then he waited a little bit. "All right," he said.
I waited a little more, and then I leaned over to her: "John will speak
to you now."
She came over to our table. She started working on "Johnnie," sitting
very close to him. Things were beginning to get straightened out a little
bit, I could tell.
I love to be mischievous, so every time they got things straightened
out a little bit, I reminded John of something: "The telephone, John..."
"Yeah!" he said. "What's the idea, spending an hour on the telephone?"
She said it was Pam who did the calling.
Things improved a little bit more, so I pointed out that it was her
idea to bring Pam.
"Yeah!" he said. (I was having a great time playing this game; it went
on for quite a while.)
When the show was over, the girls from the El Rancho came over to our
table and we talked to them until they had to go back for the next show.
Then John said, "I know a nice little bar not too far away from here. Let's
go over there."
I drove him over to the bar and we went in. "See that woman over
there?" he said. "She's a really good lawyer. Come on, I'll introduce you to
her."
John introduced us and excused himself to go to the restroom. He never
came back. I think he wanted to get back with his "wife" and I was beginning
to interfere.
I said, "Hi" to the woman and ordered a drink for myself (still playing
this game of not being impressed and not being a gentleman).
"You know," she said to me, "I'm one of the better lawyers here in Las
Vegas."
"Oh, no, you're not," I replied coolly. "You might be a lawyer during
the day, but you know what you are right now? You're just a barfly in a
small bar in Vegas."
She liked me, and we went to a few places dancing. She danced very
well, and I love to dance, so we had a great time together.
Then, all of a sudden in the middle of a dance, my back began to hurt.
It was some kind of big pain, and it started suddenly. I know now what it
was: I had been up for three days and nights having these crazy adventures,
and I was completely exhausted.
She said she would take me home. As soon as I got into her bed I went
BONGO! I was out.
The next morning I woke up in this beautiful bed. The sun was shining,
and there was no sign of her. Instead, there was a maid. "Sir," she said,
"are you awake? I'm ready with breakfast."
"Well, uh..."
"I'll bring it to you. What would you like?" and she went through a
whole menu of breakfasts.
I ordered breakfast and had it in bed -- in the bed of a woman I didn't
know; I didn't know who she was or where she came from!
I asked the maid a few questions, and she didn't know anything about
this mysterious woman either: She had just been hired, and it was her first
day on the job. She thought I was the man of the house, and found it curious
that I was asking her questions. I got dressed, finally, and left. I never
saw the mysterious woman again.
The first time I was in Las Vegas I sat down and figured out the odds
for everything, and I discovered that the odds for the crap table were
something like .493. If I bet a dollar, it would only cost me 1.4 cents. So
I thought to myself, "Why am I so reluctant to bet? It hardly costs
anything!"
So I started betting, and right away I lost five dollars in succession
-- one, two, three, four, five. I was supposed to be out only seven cents;
instead, I was five dollars behind! I've never gambled since then (with my
own money, that is). I'm very lucky that I started off losing.
One time I was eating lunch with one of the show girls. It was a quiet
time in the afternoon; there was not the usual big bustle, and she said,
"See that man over there, walking across the lawn? That's Nick the Greek.
He's a professional gambler."
Now I knew damn well what all the odds were in Las Vegas, so I said,
"How can he be a professional gambler?"
"I'll call him over."
Nick came over and she introduced us. "Marilyn tells me that you're a
professional gambler."
"That's correct."
"Well, I'd like to know how it's possible to make your living gambling,
because at the table, the odds are .493."
"You're right," he said, "and I'll explain it to you. I don't bet on
the table, or things like that. I only bet when the odds are in my favor."
"Huh? When are the odds ever in your favor?" I asked incredulously.
"It's really quite easy," he said. "I'm standing around a table, when
some guy says, 'It's comin' out nine! It's gotta be a nine!' The guy's
excited; he thinks it's going to be a nine, and he wants to bet. Now I know
the odds for all the numbers inside out, so I say to him, 'I'll bet you four
to three it's not a nine,' and I win in the long run. I don't bet on the
table; instead, I bet with people around the table who have prejudices --
superstitious ideas about lucky numbers."
Nick continued: "Now that I've got a reputation, it's even easier,
because people will bet with me even when they know the odds aren't very
good, just to have the chance of telling the story, if they win, of how they
beat Nick the Greek. So I really do make a living gambling, and it's
wonderful!"
So Nick the Greek was really an educated character. He was a very nice
and engaging man. I thanked him for the explanation; now I understood it. I
have to understand the world, you see.
--------
Cornell had all kinds of departments that I didn't have much interest
in. (That doesn't mean there was anything wrong with them; it's just that I
didn't happen to have much interest in them.) There was domestic science,
philosophy (the guys from this department were particularly inane), and
there were the cultural things -- music and so on. There were quite a few
people I did enjoy talking to, of course. In the math department there was
Professor Kac and Professor Feller; in chemistry, Professor Calvin; and a
great guy in the zoology department, Dr. Griffin, who found out that bats
navigate by making echoes. But it was hard to find enough of these guys to
talk to, and there was all this other stuff which I thought was low-level
baloney. And Ithaca was a small town.
The weather wasn't really very good. One day I was driving in the car,
and there came one of those quick snow flurries that you don't expect, so
you're not ready for it, and you figure, "Oh, it isn't going to amount to
much; I'll keep on going."
But then the snow gets deep enough that the car begins to skid a little
bit, so you have to put the chains on. You get out of the car, put the
chains out on the snow, and it's cold, and you're beginning to shiver. Then
you roll the car back onto the chains, and you have this problem -- or we
had it in those days; I don't know what there is now -- that there's a hook
on the inside that you have to hook first. And because the chains have to go
on pretty tight, it's hard to get the hook to hook. Then you have to push
this clamp down with your fingers, which by this time are nearly frozen. And
because you're on the outside of the tire, and the hook is on the inside,
and your hands are cold, it's very difficult to control. It keeps slipping,
and it's cold, and the snow's coming down, and you're trying to push this
clamp, and your hand's hurting, and the damn thing's not going down -- well,
I remember that that was the moment when I decided that this is insane;
there must be a part of the world that doesn't have this problem.
I remembered the couple of times I had visited Caltech, at the
invitation of Professor Bacher, who had previously been at Cornell. He was
very smart when I visited. He knew me inside out, so he said, "Feynman, I
have this extra car, which I'm gonna lend you. Now here's how you go to
Hollywood and the Sunset Strip. Enjoy yourself."
So I drove his car every night down to the Sunset Strip -- to the
nightclubs and the bars and the action. It was the kind of stuff I liked
from Las Vegas -- pretty girls, big operators, and so on. So Bacher knew how
to get me interested in Caltech.
You know the story about the donkey who is standing exactly in the
middle of two piles of hay, and doesn't go to either one, because it's
balanced? Well, that's nothing. Cornell and Caltech started making me
offers, and as soon as I would move, figuring that Caltech was really
better, they would up their offer at Cornell; and when I thought I'd stay at
Cornell, they'd up something at Caltech. So you can imagine this donkey
between the two piles of hay, with the extra complication that as soon as he
moves toward one, the other one gets higher. That makes it very difficult!
The argument that finally convinced me was my sabbatical leave. I
wanted to go to Brazil again, this time for ten months, and I had just
earned my sabbatical leave from Cornell. I didn't want to lose that, so now
that I had invented a reason to come to a decision, I wrote Bacher and told
him what I had decided.
Caltech wrote back: "We'll hire you immediately, and we'll give you
your first year as a sabbatical year." That's the way they were acting: no
matter what I decided to do, they'd screw it up. So my first year at Caltech
was really spent in Brazil. I came to Caltech to teach on my second year.
That's how it happened.
Now that I have been at Caltech since 1951, I've been very happy here.
It's exactly the thing for a one-sided guy like me. There are all these
people who are close to the top, who are very interested in what they are
doing, and who I can talk to. So I've been very comfortable.
But one day, when I hadn't been at Caltech very long, we had a bad
attack of smog. It was worse then than it is now -- at least your eyes
smarted much more. I was standing on a corner, and my eyes were watering,
and I thought to myself, "This is crazy! This is absolutely INSANE! It was
all right back at Cornell. I'm getting out of here."
So I called up Cornell, and asked them if they thought it was possible
for me to come back. They said, "Sure! We'll set it up and call you back
tomorrow."
The next day, I had the greatest luck in making a decision. God must
have set it up to help me decide. I was walking to my office, and a guy came
running up to me and said, "Hey, Feynman! Did you hear what happened? Baade
found that there are two different populations of stars! All the
measurements we had been making of the distances to the galaxies had been
based on Cephid variables of one type, but there's another type, so the
universe is twice, or three, or even four times as old as we thought!"
I knew the problem. In those days, the earth appeared to be older than
the universe. The earth was four and a half billion, and the universe was
only a couple, or three billion years old. It was a great puzzle. And this
discovery resolved all that: The universe was now demonstrably older than
was previously thought. And I got this information right away -- the guy
came running up to me to tell me all this.
I didn't even make it across the campus to get to my office, when
another guy came up -- Matt Meselson, a biologist who had minored in
physics. (I had been on his committee for his Ph.D.) He had built the first
of what they call a density gradient centrifuge -- it could measure the
density of molecules. He said, "Look at the results of the experiment I've
been doing!"
He had proved that when a bacterium makes a new one, there's a whole
molecule, intact, which is passed from one bacterium to another -- a
molecule we now know as DNA. You see, we always think of everything
dividing, dividing. So we think everything in the bacterium divides and
gives half of it to the new bacterium. But that's impossible: Somewhere, the
smallest molecule that contains genetic information can't divide in half; it
has to make a copy of itself, and send one copy to the new bacterium, and
keep one copy for the old one. And he had proved it in this way: He first
grew the bacteria in heavy nitrogen, and later grew them all in ordinary
nitrogen. As he went along, he weighed the molecules in his density gradient
centrifuge.
The first generation of new bacteria had all of their chromosome
molecules at a weight exactly in between the weight of molecules made with
heavy, and molecules made with ordinary, nitrogen -- a result that could
occur if everything divided, including the chromosome molecules.
But in succeeding generations, when one might expect that the weight of
the chromosome molecules would be one-fourth, one-eighth, and one-sixteenth
of the difference between the heavy and ordinary molecules, the weights of
the molecules fell into only two groups. One group was the same weight as
the first new generation (halfway between the heavier and the lighter
molecules), and the other group was lighter -- the weight of molecules made
in ordinary nitrogen. The percentage of heavier molecules was cut in half in
each succeeding generation, but not their weights. That was tremendously
exciting, and very important -- it was a fundamental discovery. And I
realized, as I finally got to my office, that this is where I've got to be.
Where people from all different fields of science would tell me stuff, and
it was all exciting. It was exactly what I wanted, really.
So when Cornell called a little later, and said they were setting
everything up, and it was nearly ready, I said, "I'm sorry, I've changed my
mind again." But I decided then never to decide again. Nothing -- absolutely
nothing -- would ever change my mind again.
When you're young, you have all these things to worry about -- should
you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but
then something else comes up. It's much easier to just plain decide. Never
mind -- nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a
student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of
dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always
be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again -- I had the
solution to that problem. Anyway, I decided it would always be Caltech.
One time someone tried to change my mind about Caltech. Fermi had just
died a short time before, and the faculty at Chicago were looking for
someone to take his place. Two people from Chicago came out and asked to
visit me at my home -- I didn't know what it was about. They began telling
me all the good reasons why I ought to go to Chicago: I could do this, I
could do that, they had lots of great people there, I had the opportunity to
do all kinds of wonderful things. I didn't ask them how much they would pay,
and they kept hinting that they would tell me if I asked. Finally, they
asked me if I wanted to know the salary. "Oh, no!" I said. "I've already
decided to stay at Caltech. My wife Mary Lou is in the other room, and if
she hears how much the salary is, we'll get into an argument. Besides, I've
decided not to decide any more; I'm staying at Caltech for good." So I
didn't let them tell me the salary they were offering.
About a month later I was at a meeting, and Leona Marshall came over
and said, "It's funny you didn't accept our offer at Chicago. We were so
disappointed, and we couldn't understand how you could turn down such a
terrific offer."
"It was easy," I said, "because I never let them tell me what the offer
was."
A week later I got a letter from her. I opened it, and the first
sentence said, "The salary they were offering was--," a tremendous amount of
money, three or four times what I was making. Staggering! Her letter
continued, "I told you the salary before you could read any further. Maybe
now you want to reconsider, because they've told me the position is still
open, and we'd very much like to have you."
So I wrote them back a letter that said, "After reading the salary,
I've decided that I must refuse. The reason I have to refuse a salary like
that is I would be able to do what I've always wanted to do -- get a
wonderful mistress, put her up in an apartment, buy her nice things... With
the salary you have offered, I could actually do that, and I know what would
happen to me. I'd worry about her, what she's doing; I'd get into arguments
when I come home, and so on. All this bother would make me uncomfortable and
unhappy. I wouldn't be able to do physics well, and it would be a big mess!
What I've always wanted to do would be bad for me, so I've decided that I
can't accept your offer."
--------
The World of One Physicist
--------
Would You Solve the Dirac Equation?
Near the end of the year I was in Brazil I received a letter from
Professor Wheeler which said that there was going to be an international
meeting of theoretical physicists in Japan, and might I like to go? Japan
had some famous physicists before the war -- Professor Yukawa, with a Nobel
prize, Tomonaga, and Nishina -- but this was the first sign of Japan coming
back to life after the war, and we all thought we ought to go and help them
along.
Wheeler enclosed an army phrasebook and wrote that it would be nice if
we would all learn a little Japanese. I found a Japanese woman in Brazil to
help me with the pronunciation, I practiced lifting little pieces of paper
with chopsticks, and I read a lot about Japan. At that time, Japan was very
mysterious to me, and I thought it would be interesting to go to such a
strange and wonderful country, so I worked very hard.
When we got there, we were met at the airport and taken to a hotel in
Tokyo designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was an imitation of a European
hotel, right down to the little guy dressed in an outfit like the Philip
Morris guy. We weren't in Japan; we might as well have been in Europe or
America! The guy who showed us to our rooms stalled around, pulling the
shades up and down, waiting for a tip. Everything was just like America.
Our hosts had everything organized. That first night we were served
dinner up at the top of the hotel by a woman dressed Japanese, but the menus
were in English. I had gone to a lot of trouble to learn a few phrases in
Japanese, so near the end of the meal, I said to the waitress, "Kohi-o motte
kite kudasai." She bowed and walked away.
My friend Marshak did a double take: "What? What?"
"I talk Japanese," I said,
"Oh, you faker! You're always kidding around, Feynman."
"What are you talkin' about?" I said, in a serious tone.
"OK," he said. "What did you ask?"
"I asked her to bring us coffee."
Marshak didn't believe me. "I'll make a bet with you," he said. "If she
brings us coffee..."
The waitress appeared with our coffee, and Marshak lost his bet.
It turned out I was the only guy who had learned some Japanese -- even
Wheeler, who had told everybody they ought to learn Japanese, hadn't learned
any -- and I couldn't stand it any more. I had read about the Japanese-style
hotels, which were supposed to be very different from the hotel we were
staying in.
The next morning I called the Japanese guy who was organizing
everything up to my room. "I would like to stay in a Japanese-style hotel."
"I am afraid that it is impossible, Professor Feynman."
I had read that the Japanese are very polite, but very obstinate: You
have to keep working on them. So I decided to be as obstinate as they, and
equally polite. It was a battle of minds: It took thirty minutes, back and
forth.
"Why do you want to go to a Japanese-style hotel?"
"Because in this hotel, I don't feel like I'm in Japan."
"Japanese-style hotels are no good. You have to sleep on the floor."
"That's what I want; I want to see how it is."
"And there are no chairs -- you sit on the floor at the table."
"It's OK. That will be delightful. That's what I'm looking for."
Finally he owns up to what the situation is: "If you're in another
hotel, the bus will have to make an extra stop on its way to the meeting."
"No, no!" I say. "In the morning, I'll come to this hotel, and get on
the bus here."
"Well, then, OK. That's fine." That's all there was to it -- except it
took half an hour to get to the real problem.
He's walking over to the telephone to make a call to the other hotel
when suddenly he stops; everything is blocked up again. It takes another
fifteen minutes to discover that this time it's the mail. If there are any
messages from the meeting, they already have it arranged where to deliver
them.
"It's OK," I say. "When I come in the morning to get the bus, I'll look
for any messages for me here at this hotel."
"All right. That's fine." He gets on the telephone and at last we're on
our way to the Japanese-style hotel.
As soon as I got there, I knew it was worth it: It was so lovely! There
was a place at the front where you take your shoes off, then a girl dressed
in the traditional outfit -- the obi -- with sandals comes shuffling out,
and takes your stuff; you follow her down a hallway which has mats on the
floor, past sliding doors made of paper, and she's going cht-cht-cht-cht
with little steps. It was all very wonderful!
We went into my room and the guy who arranged everything got all the
way down, prostrated, and touched his nose to the floor; she got down and
touched her nose to the floor. I felt very awkward. Should I touch my nose
to the floor, too?
They said greetings to each other, he accepted the room for me, and
went out. It was a really wonderful room. There were all the regular,
standard things that you know of now, but it was all new to me. There was a
little alcove with a painting in it, a vase with pussywillows nicely
arranged, a table along the floor with a cushion nearby, and at the end of
the room were two sliding doors which opened onto a garden.
The lady who was supposed to take care of me was a middle-aged woman.
She helped me undress and gave me a yukata, a simple blue and white robe, to
wear at the hotel.
I pushed open the doors and admired the lovely garden, and sat down at
the table to do a little work.
I wasn't there more than fifteen or twenty minutes when something
caught my eye. I looked up, out towards the garden, and I saw, sitting at
the entrance to the door, draped in the corner, a very beautiful young
Japanese woman, in a most lovely outfit.
I had read a lot about the customs of Japan, and I had an idea of why
she was sent to my room. I thought, "This might be very interesting!"
She knew a little English. "Would you rike to see the garden?" she
asked.
I put on the shoes that went with the yukata I was wearing, and we went
out into the garden. She took my arm and showed me everything.
It turned out that because she knew a little English, the hotel manager
thought I would like her to show me the garden -- that's all it was. I was a
bit disappointed, of course, but this was a meeting of cultures, and I knew
it was easy to get the wrong idea.
Sometime later the woman who took care of my room came in and said
something -- in Japanese -- about a bath. I knew that Japanese baths were
interesting and was eager to try it, so I said, "Hai."
I had read that Japanese baths are very complicated. They use a lot of
water that's heated from the outside, and you aren't supposed to get soap
into the bathwater and spoil it for the next guy.
I got up and walked into the lavatory section, where the sink was, and
I could hear some guy in the next section with the door closed, taking a
bath. Suddenly the door slides open: the man taking the bath looks to see
who is intruding. "Professor!" he says to me in English. "That's a very bad
error to go into the lavatory when someone else has the bath!" It was
Professor Yukawa!
He told me that the woman had no doubt asked do I want a bath, and if
so, she would get it ready for me and tell me when the bathroom was free.
But of all the people in the world to make that serious social error with, I
was lucky it was Professor Yukawa!
That Japanese-style hotel was delightful, especially when people came
to see me there. The other guys would come in to my room and we'd sit on the
floor and start to talk. We wouldn't be there more than five minutes when
the woman who took care of my room would come in with a tray of candies and
tea. It was as if you were a host in your own home, and the hotel staff was
helping you to entertain your guests. Here, when you have guests at your
hotel room, nobody cares; you have to call up for service, and so on.
Eating meals at the hotel was also different. The girl who brings in
the food stays with you while you eat, so you're not alone. I couldn't have
too good a conversation with her, but it was all right. And the food is
wonderful. For instance, the soup comes in a bowl that's covered. You lift
the cover and there's a beautiful picture: little pieces of onion floating
in the soup just so; it's gorgeous. How the food looks on the plate is very
important.
I had decided that I was going to live Japanese as much as I could.
That meant eating fish. I never liked fish when I was growing up, but I
found out in Japan that it was a childish thing: I ate a lot of fish, and
enjoyed it. (When I went back to the United States the first thing I did was
go to a fish place. It was horrible -- just like it was before. I couldn't
stand it. I later discovered the answer: The fish has to be very, very fresh
-- if it isn't, it gets a certain taste that bothers me.)
One time when I was eating at the Japanese-style hotel I was served a
round, hard thing, about the size of an egg yolk, in a cup of some yellow
liquid. So far I had eaten everything in Japan, but this thing frightened
me: it was all convoluted, like a brain looks. When I asked the girl what it
was, she replied "kuri." That didn't help much. I figured it was probably an
octopus egg, or something. I ate it, with some trepidation, because I wanted
to be as much in Japan as possible. (I also remembered the word "kuri" as if
my life depended on it -- I haven't forgotten it in thirty years:)
The next day I asked a Japanese guy at the conference what this
convoluted thing was. I told him I had found it very difficult to eat. What
the hell was "kuri"?
"It means 'chestnut,' " he replied.
Some of the Japanese I had learned had quite an effect. One time, when
the bus was taking a long time to get started, some guy says, "Hey, Feynman!
You know Japanese; tell 'em to get going!"
I said, "Hayaku! Hayaku! Ikimasho! Ikimasho!" -- which means, "Let's
go! Let's go! Hurry! Hurry!"
I realized my Japanese was out of control. I had learned these phrases
from a military phrase book, and they must have been very rude, because
everyone at the hotel began to scurry like mice, saying, "Yes, sir! Yes
sir!" and the bus left right away.
The meeting in Japan was in two parts: one was in Tokyo, and the other
was in Kyoto. In the bus on the way to Kyoto I told my friend Abraham Pais
about the Japanese-style hotel, and he wanted to try it. We stayed at the
Hotel Miyako, which had both American-style and Japanese-style rooms, and
Pais shared a Japanese-style room with me.
The next morning the young woman taking care of our room fixes the
bath, which was right in our room. Sometime later she returns with a tray to
deliver breakfast. I'm partly dressed. She turns to me and says, politely,
"Ohayo, gozai masu," which means, "Good morning."
Pais is just coming out of the bath, sopping wet and completely nude.
She turns to him and with equal composure says, "Ohayo, gozai masu," and
puts the tray down for us.
Pais looks at me and says, "God, are we uncivilized!" We realized that
in America if the maid was delivering breakfast and the guy's standing
there, stark naked, there would be little screams and a big fuss. But in
Japan they were completely used to it, and we felt that they were much more
advanced and civilized about those things than we were.
I had been working at that time on the theory of liquid helium, and had
figured out how the laws of quantum dynamics explain the strange phenomena
of super-fluidity. I was very proud of this achievement, and was going to
give a talk about my work at the Kyoto meeting.
The night before I gave my talk there was a dinner, and the man who sat
down next to me was none other than Professor Onsager, a topnotch expert in
solid-state physics and the problems of liquid helium. He was one of these
guys who doesn't say very much, but any time he said anything, it was
significant.
"Well, Feynman," he said in a gruff voice, "I hear you think you have
understood liquid helium."
"Well, yes..."
"Hoompf." And that's all he said to me during the whole dinner! So that
wasn't much encouragement.
The next day I gave my talk and explained all about liquid helium. At
the end, I complained that there was still something I hadn't been able to
figure out: that is, whether the transition between one phase and the other
phase of liquid helium was first-order (like when a solid melts or a liquid
boils -- the temperature is constant) or second-order (like you see
sometimes in magnetism, in which the temperature keeps changing).
Then Professor Onsager got up and said in a dour voice, "Well,
Professor Feynman is new in our field, and I think he needs to be educated.
There's something he ought to know, and we should tell him."
I thought, "Geesus! What did I do wrong?"
Onsager said, "We should tell Feynman that nobody has ever figured out
the order of any transition correctly from first principles... so the fact
that his theory does not allow him to work out the order correctly does not
mean that he hasn't understood all the other aspects of liquid helium
satisfactorily." It turned out to be a compliment, but from the way he
started out, I thought I was really going to get it!
It wasn't more than a day later when I was in my room and the telephone
rang. It was Time magazine. The guy on the line said, "We're very interested
in your work. Do you have a copy of it you could send us?"
I had never been in Time and was very excited. I was proud of my work,
which had been received well at the meeting, so I said, "Sure!"
"Fine. Please send it to our Tokyo bureau." The guy gave me the
address. I was feeling great.
I repeated the address, and the guy said, "That's right. Thank you very
much, Mr. Pais."
"Oh, no!" I said, startled. "I'm not Pais; it's Pais you want? Excuse
me. I'll tell him that you want to speak to him when he comes back."
A few hours later Pais came in: "Hey, Pais! Pais!" I said, in an
excited voice. "Time magazine called! They want you to send 'em a copy of
the paper you're giving."
"Aw!" he says. "Publicity is a whore!"
I was doubly taken aback.
I've since found out that Pais was right, but in those days, I thought
it would be wonderful to have my name in Time magazine.
That was the first time I was in Japan. I was eager to go back, and
said I would go to any university they wanted me to. So the Japanese
arranged a whole series of places to visit for a few days at a time.
By this time I was married to Mary Lou, and we were entertained
wherever we went. At one place they put on a whole ceremony with dancing,
usually performed only for larger groups of tourists, especially for us. At
another place we were met right at the boat by all the students. At another
place, the mayor met us.
One particular place we stayed was a little, modest place in the woods,
where the emperor would stay when he came by. It was a very lovely place,
surrounded by woods, just beautiful, the stream selected with care. It had a
certain calmness, a quiet elegance. That the emperor would go to such a
place to stay showed a greater sensitivity to nature, I think, than what we
were used to in the West.
At all these places everybody working in physics would tell me what
they were doing and I'd discuss it with them. They would tell me the general
problem they were working on, and would begin to write a bunch of equations.
"Wait a minute," I would say, "Is there a particular example of this
general problem?"
"Why yes; of course."
"Good. Give me one example." That was for me: I can't understand
anything in general unless I'm carrying along in my mind a specific example
and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I'm kind of slow
and I don't understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these "dumb"
questions: "Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an an ion this way, or that way?"
But later, when the guy's in the middle of a bunch of equations, he'll
say something and I'll say, "Wait a minute! There's an error! That can't be
right!"
The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he
finds the mistake and wonders, "How the hell did this guy, who hardly
understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these
equations?"
He thinks I'm following the steps mathematically, but that's not what
I'm doing. I have the specific, physical example of what he's trying to
analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the
thing. So when the equation says it should behave so-and-so, and I know
that's the wrong way around, I jump up and say, "Wait! There's a mistake!"
So in Japan I couldn't understand or discuss anybody's work unless they
could give me a physical example, and most of them couldn't find one. Of
those who could, it was often a weak example, one which could be solved by a
much simpler method of analysis.
Since I was perpetually asking not for mathematical equations, but for
physical circumstances of what they were trying to work out, my visit was
summarized in a mimeographed paper circulated among the scientists (it was a
modest but effective system of communication they had cooked up after the
war) with the title, "Feynman's Bombardments, and Our Reactions."
After visiting a number of universities I spent some months at the
Yukawa Institute in Kyoto. I really enjoyed working there. Everything was so
nice: You'd come to work, take your shoes off, and someone would come and
serve you tea in the morning when you felt like it. It was very pleasant.
While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked
much harder at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis and
do things. I took lessons from a Japanese man every day for an hour.
One day he was teaching me the word for "see."
"All right," he said. "You want to say, 'May I see your garden?' What
do you say?"
I made up a sentence with the word that I had just learned.
"No, no!" he said. "When you say to someone, 'Would you like to see my
garden? you use the first 'see.' But when you want to see someone else's
garden, you must use another 'see,' which is more polite."
"Would you like to glance at my lousy garden?" is essentially what
you're saying in the first case, but when you want to look at the other
fella's garden, you have to say something like, "May I observe your gorgeous
garden?" So there's two different words you have to use.
Then he gave me another one: "You go to a temple, and you want to look
at the gardens..."
I made up a sentence, this time with the polite "see."
"No, no!" he said. "In the temple, the gardens are much more elegant.
So you have to say something that would be equivalent to 'May I hang my eyes
on your most exquisite gardens?'
Three or four different words for one idea, because when I'm doing it,
it's miserable; when you're doing it, it's elegant.
I was learning Japanese mainly for technical things, so I decided to
check if this same problem existed among the scientists.
At the institute the next day, I said to the guys in the office, "How
would I say in Japanese, 'I solve the Dirac Equation'?"
They said such-and-so.
"OK. Now I want to say, 'Would you solve the Dirac Equation?' -- how do
I say that?"
"Well, you have to use a different word for 'solve,' " they say.
"Why?" I protested. "When I solve it, I do the same damn thing as when
you solve it!"
"Well, yes, but it's a different word -- it's more polite."
I gave up. I decided that wasn't the language for me, and stopped
learning Japanese.
--------
The problem was to find the right laws of beta decay. There appeared to
be two particles, which were called a tau and a theta. They seemed to have
almost exactly the same mass, but one disintegrated into two pions, and the
other into three pions. Not only did they seem to have the same mass, but
they also had the same lifetime, which is a funny coincidence. So everybody
was concerned about this.
At a meeting I went to, it was reported that when these two particles
were produced in a cyclotron at different angles and different energies,
they were always produced in the same proportions -- so many taus compared
to so many thetas.
Now; one possibility, of course, was that it was the same particle,
which sometimes decayed into two pions, and sometimes into three pions. But
nobody would allow that, because there is a law called the parity rule,
which is based on the assumption that all the laws of physics are
mirror-image-symmetrical, and says that a thing that can go into two pions
can't also go into three pions.
At that particular time I was not really quite up to things: I was
always a little behind. Everybody seemed to be smart, and I didn't feel I
was keeping up. Anyway, I was sharing a room with a guy named Martin Block,
an experimenter. And one evening he said to me, "Why are you guys so
insistent on this parity rule? Maybe the tau and theta are the same
particle. What would be the consequences if the parity rule were wrong?"
I thought a minute and said, "It would mean that nature's laws are
different for the right hand and the left hand, that there's a way to define
the right hand by physical phenomena. I don't know that that's so terrible,
though there must be some bad consequences of that, but I don't know. Why
don't you ask the experts tomorrow?"
He said, "No, they won't listen to me. You ask."
So the next day, at the meeting, when we were discussing the tau-theta
puzzle, Oppenheimer said, "We need to hear some new, wilder ideas about this
problem."
So I got up and said, "I'm asking this question for Martin Block: What
would be the consequences if the parity rule was wrong?"
Murray Gell-Mann often teased me about this, saying I didn't have the
nerve to ask the question for myself. But that's not the reason. I thought
it might very well be an important idea.
Lee, of Lee and Yang, answered something complicated, and as usual I
didn't understand very well. At the end of the meeting, Block asked me what
he said, and I said I didn't know, but as far as I could tell, it was still
open -- there was still a possibility. I didn't think it was likely, but I
thought it was possible.
Norm Ramsey asked me if I thought he should do an experiment looking
for parity law violation, and I replied, "The best way to explain it is,
I'll bet you only fifty to one you don't find anything."
He said, "That's good enough for me." But he never did the experiment.
Anyway, the discovery of parity law violation was made, experimentally,
by Wu, and this opened up a whole bunch of new possibilities for beta decay
theory. It also unleashed a whole host of experiments immediately after
that. Some showed electrons coming out of the nuclei spun to the left, and
some to the right, and there were all kinds of experiments, all kinds of
interesting discoveries about parity. But the data were so confusing that
nobody could put things together.
At one point there was a meeting in Rochester -- the yearly Rochester
Conference. I was still always behind, and Lee was giving his paper on the
violation of parity. He and Yang had come to the conclusion that parity was
violated, and now he was giving the theory for it.
During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I
brought the paper home and said to her, "I can't understand these things
that Lee and Yang are saying. It's all so complicated."
"No," she' said, "what you mean is not that you can't understand it,
but that you didn't invent it. You didn't figure it out your own way, from
hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you're a student again, and
take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations.
Then you'll understand it very easily."
I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to
be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it, thinking it was
too difficult.
It reminded me of something I had done a long time ago with left and
right unsymmetrical equations. Now it became kind of clear, when I looked at
Lee's formulas, that the solution to it all was much simpler: Everything
comes out coupled to the left. For the electron and the muon, my predictions
were the same as Lee's, except I changed some signs around. I didn't realize
it at the time, but Lee had taken only the simplest example of muon
coupling, and hadn't proved that all muons would be full to the right,
whereas according to my theory, all muons would have to be full
automatically. Therefore, I had, in fact, a prediction on top of what he
had. I had different signs, but I didn't realize that I also had this
quantity right.
I predicted a few things that nobody had experiments for yet, but when
it came to the neutron and proton, I couldn't make it fit well with what was
then known about neutron and proton coupling: it was kind of messy.
The next day, when I went back to the meeting, a very kind man named
Ken Case, who was going to give a paper on something, gave me five minutes
of his allotted time to present my idea. I said I was convinced that
everything was coupled to the left, and that the signs for the electron and
muon are reversed, but I was struggling with the neutron. Later the
experimenters asked me some questions about my predictions, and then I went
to Brazil for the summer.
When I came back to the United States, I wanted to know what the
situation was with beta decay. I went to Professor Wu's laboratory at
Columbia, and she wasn't there, spinning to the left in the beta decay, came
out on the right in some cases. Nothing fit anything. When I got back to
Caltech, I asked some of the experimenters what the situation was with beta
decay. I remember three guys, Hans Jensen, Aaldert Wapstra, and Felix Boehm,
sitting me down on a little stool, and starting to tell me all these facts:
experimental results from other parts of the country, and their own
experimental results. Since I knew those guys, and how careful they were, I
paid more attention to their results than to the others. Their results,
alone, were not so inconsistent; it was all the others plus theirs.
Finally they get all this stuff into me, and they say, "The situation
is so mixed up that even some of the things they've established for years
are being questioned -- such as the beta decay of the neutron is S and T.
It's so messed up. Murray says it might even be V and A."
I jump up from the stool and say, "Then I understand EVVVVVERYTHING!"
They thought I was joking. But the thing that I had trouble with at the
Rochester meeting -- the neutron and proton disintegration: everything fit
but that, and if it was V and A instead of S and T, that would fit too.
Therefore I had the whole theory!
That night I calculated all kinds of things with this theory. The first
thing I calculated was the rate of disintegration of the muon and the
neutron. They should be connected together, if this theory was right, by a
certain relationship, and it was right to 9 percent. That's pretty close, 9
percent. It should have been more perfect than that, but it was close
enough.
I went on and checked some other things, which fit, and new things fit,
new things fit, and I was very excited. It was the first time, and the only
time, in my career that I knew a law of nature that nobody else knew. (Of
course it wasn't true, but finding out later that at least Murray Gell-Mann
-- and also Sudarshan and Marshak -- had worked out the same theory didn't
spoil my fun.)
The other things I had done before were to take somebody else's theory
and improve the method of calculating, or take an equation, such as the
Schrödinger Equation, to explain a phenomenon, such as helium. We know the
equation, and we know the phenomenon, but how does it work?
I thought about Dirac, who had his equation for a while -- a new
equation which told how an electron behaved -- and I had this new equation
for beta decay, which wasn't as vital as the Dirac Equation, but it was
good. It's the only time I ever discovered a new law.
I called up my sister in New York to thank her for getting me to sit
down and work through that paper by Lee and Yang at the Rochester
Conference. After feeling uncomfortable and behind, now I was in; I had made
a discovery, just from what she suggested. I was able to enter physics
again, so to speak, and I wanted to thank her for that. I told her that
everything fit, except for the 9 percent.
I was very excited, and kept on calculating, and things that fit kept
on tumbling out: they fit automatically, without a strain. I had begun to
forget about the 9 percent by now, because everything else was coming out
right.
I worked very hard into the night, sitting at a small table in the
kitchen next to a window. It was getting later and later -- about 2:00 or
3:00 A.M. I'm working hard, getting all these calculations packed solid with
things that fit, and I'm thinking, and concentrating, and it's dark, and
it's quiet... when suddenly there's a TAC-TAC-TAC-TAC -- loud, on the
window. I look, and there's this white face, right at the window, only
inches away, and I scream with shock and surprise!
It was a lady I knew who was angry at me because I had come back from
vacation and didn't immediately call her up to tell her I was back. I let
her in, and tried to explain that I was just now very busy, that I had just
discovered something, and it was very important. I said, "Please go out and
let me finish it."
She said, "No, I don't want to bother you. I'll just sit here in the
living room."
I said, "Well, all right, but it's very difficult." She didn't exactly
sit in the living room. The best way to say it is she sort of squatted in a
corner, holding her hands together, not wanting to "bother" me. Of course
her purpose was to bother the hell out of me! And she succeeded -- I
couldn't ignore her. I got very angry and upset, and I couldn't stand it. I
had to do this calculating; I was making a big discovery and was terribly
excited, and somehow, it was more important to me than this lady -- at least
at that moment. I don't remember how I finally got her out of there, but it
was very difficult.
After working some more, it got to be very late at night, and I was
hungry. I walked up the main street to a little restaurant five or ten
blocks away, as I had often done before, late at night.
On early occasions I was often stopped by the police, because I would
be walking along, thinking, and then I'd stop -- sometimes an idea comes
that's difficult enough that you can't keep walking; you have to make sure
of something. So I'd stop, and sometimes I'd hold my hands out in the air,
saying to myself, "The distance between these is that way, and then this
would turn over this way..."
I'd be moving my hands, standing in the street, when the police would
come: "What is your name? Where do you live? What are you doing?"
"Oh! I was thinking. I'm sorry; I live here, and go often to the
restaurant..." After a bit they knew who it was, and they didn't stop me any
more.
So I went to the restaurant, and while I'm eating I'm so excited that I
tell a lady that I just made a discovery. She starts in: She's the wife of a
fireman, or forester, or something. She's very lonely -- all this stuff that
I'm not interested in. So that happens.
The next morning when I got to work I went to Wapstra, Boehm, and
Jensen, and told them, "I've got it all worked out. Everything fits."
Christy, who was there, too, said, "What beta-decay constant did you
use?"
"The one from So-and-So's book."
"But that's been found out to be wrong. Recent measurements have shown
it's off by 7 percent."
Then I remember the 9 percent. It was like a prediction for me: I went
home and got this theory that says the neutron decay should be off by 9
percent, and they tell me the next morning that, as a matter of fact, it's 7
percent changed. But is it changed from 9 to 16, which is bad, or from 9 to
2, which is good?
Just then my sister calls from New York: "How about the 9 percent --
what's happened?"
"I've just discovered that there's new data: 7 percent..."
"Which way?"
"I'm trying to find out. I'll call you back."
I was so excited that I couldn't think. It's like when you're rushing
for an airplane, and you don't know whether you're late or not, and you just
can't make it, when somebody says, "It's daylight saving time!" Yes, but
which way? You can't think in the excitement.
So Christy went into one room, and I went into another room, each of us
to be quiet, so we could think it through: This moves this way, and that
moves that way -- it wasn't very difficult, really; it's just exciting.
Christy came out, and I came out, and we both agreed: It's 2 percent,
which is well within experimental error. After all, if they just changed the
constant by 7 percent, the 2 percent could have been an error. I called my
sister back: "Two percent." The theory was right.
(Actually, it was wrong: it was off, really, by 1 percent, for a reason
we hadn't appreciated, which was only understood later by Nicola Cabibbo. So
that 2 percent was not all experimental.)
Murray Gell-Mann compared and combined our ideas and wrote a paper on
the theory. The theory was rather neat; it was relatively simple, and it fit
a lot of stuff. But as I told you, there was an awful lot of chaotic data.
And in some cases, we even went so far as to state that the experiments were
in error.
A good example of this was an experiment by Valentine Telegdi, in which
he measured the number of electrons that go out in each direction when a
neutron disintegrates. Our theory had predicted that the number should be
the same in all directions, whereas Telegdi found that 11 percent more came
out in one direction than the others. Telegdi was an excellent experimenter,
and very careful. And once, when he was giving a talk somewhere, he referred
to our theory and said, "The trouble with theorists is, they never pay
attention to the experiments!"
Telegdi also sent us a letter, which wasn't exactly scathing, but
nevertheless showed he was convinced that our theory was wrong. At the end
he wrote, "The F-G (Feynman-Gell-Mann) theory of beta decay is no F-G."
Murray says, "What should we do about this? You know, Telegdi's pretty
good."
I say, "We just wait."
Two days later there's another letter from Telegdi. He's a complete
convert. He found out from our theory that he had disregarded the
possibility that the proton recoiling from the neutron is not the same in
all directions. He had assumed it was the same. By putting in corrections
that our theory predicted instead of the ones he had been using, the results
straightened out and were in complete agreement.
I knew that Telegdi was excellent, and it would be hard to go upstream
against him. But I was convinced by that time that something must be wrong
with his experiment, and that he would find it -- he's much better at
finding it than we would be. That's why I said we shouldn't try to figure it
out but just wait.
I went to Professor Bacher and told him about our success, and he said,
"Yes, you come out and say that the neutron-proton coupling is V instead of
T. Everybody used to think it was T. Where is the fundamental experiment
that says it's T? Why don't you look at the early experiments and find out
what was wrong with them?"
I went out and found the original article on the experiment that said
the neutron-proton coupling is T, and I was shocked by something. I
remembered reading that article once before (back in the days when I read
every article in the Physical Review -- it was small enough). And I
remembered, when I saw this article again, looking at that curve and
thinking, "That doesn't prove anything!"
You see, it depended on one or two points at the very edge of the range
of the data, and there's a principle that a point on the edge of the range
of the data -- the last point -- isn't very good, because if it was, they'd
have another point further along. And I had realized that the whole idea
that neutron-proton coupling is T was based on the last point, which wasn't
very good, and therefore it's not proved. I remember noticing that!
And when I became interested in beta decay, directly, I read all these
reports by the "beta-decay experts," which said it's T. I never looked at
the original data; I only read those reports, like a dope. Had I been a good
physicist, when I thought of the original idea back at the Rochester
Conference I would have immediately looked up "how strong do we know it's
T?" -- that would have been the sensible thing to do. I would have
recognized right away that I had already noticed it wasn't satisfactorily
proved.
Since then I never pay any attention to anything by "experts." I
calculate everything myself. When people said the quark theory was pretty
good, I got two Ph.D.s, Finn Ravndal and Mark Kislinger, to go through the
whole works with me, just so I could check that the thing was really giving
results that fit fairly well, and that it was a significantly good theory.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. Of
course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn
what not to do, and that's the end of you.
--------
One time a science teacher from the local city college came around and
asked me if I'd give a talk there. He offered me fifty dollars, but I told
him I wasn't worried about the money. "That's the city college, right?"
"Yes."
I thought about how much paperwork I usually had to get involved with
when I deal with the government, so I laughed and said, "I'll be glad to
give the talk. There's only one condition on the whole thing" -- I pulled a
number out of a hat and continued -- "that I don't have to sign my name more
than thirteen times, and that includes the check!"
The guy laughs too. "Thirteen times! No problem."
So then it starts. First I have to sign something that says I'm loyal
to the government, or else I can't talk in the city college. And I have to
sign it double, OK? Then I have to sign some kind of release to the city --
I can't remember what. Pretty soon the numbers are beginning to climb up.
I have to sign that I was suitably employed as a professor -- to
ensure, of course, since it's a city thing, that no jerk at the other end
was hiring his wife or a friend to come and not even give the lecture. There
were all kinds of things to ensure, and the signatures kept mounting.
Well, the guy who started out laughing got pretty nervous, but we just
made it. I signed exactly twelve times. There was one more left for the
check, so I went ahead and gave the talk.
A few days later the guy came around to give me the check, and he was
really sweating. He couldn't give me the money unless I signed a form saying
I really gave the talk.
I said, "If I sign the form, I can't sign the check. But you were
there. You heard the talk; why don't you sign it?"
"Look," he said, "Isn't this whole thing rather silly?"
"No. It was an arrangement we made in the beginning. We didn't think it
was really going to get to thirteen, but we agreed on it, and I think we
should stick to it to the end."
He said, "I've been working very hard, calling all around. I've been
trying everything, and they tell me it's impossible. You simply can't get
your money unless you sign the form."
"It's OK," I said. "I've only signed twelve times, and I gave the talk.
I don't need the money."
"But I hate to do this to you."
"It's all right. We made a deal; don't worry."
The next day he called me up. "They can't not give you the money!
They've already earmarked the money and they've got it set aside, so they
have to give it to you!"
"OK, if they have to give me the money, let them give me the money."
"But you have to sign the form."
"I won't sign the form!"
They were stuck. There was no miscellaneous pot which was for money
that this man deserves but won't sign for.
Finally, it got straightened out. It took a long time, and it was very
complicated -- but I used the thirteenth signature to cash my check.
--------
I don't know why, but I'm always very careless, when I go on a trip,
about the address or telephone number or anything of the people who invited
me. I figure I'll be met, or somebody else will know where we're going;
it'll get straightened out somehow.
One time, in 1957, I went to a gravity conference at the University of
North Carolina. I was supposed to be an expert in a different field who
looks at gravity.
I landed at the airport a day late for the conference (I couldn't make
it the first day), and I went out to where the taxis were. I said to the
dispatcher, "I'd like to go to the University of North Carolina."
"Which do you mean," he said, "the State University of North Carolina
at Raleigh, or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill?"
Needless to say, I hadn't the slightest idea. "Where are they?" I
asked, figuring that one must be near the other.
"One's north of here, and the other is south of here, about the same
distance."
I had nothing with me that showed which one it was, and there was
nobody else going to the conference a day late like I was.
That gave me an idea. "Listen," I said to the dispatcher. "The main
meeting began yesterday, so there were a whole lot of guys going to the
meeting who must have come through here yesterday. Let me describe them to
you: They would have their heads kind of in the air, and they would be
talking to each other, not paying attention to where they were going, saying
things to each other, like 'G-mu-nu. G-mu-nu.' "
His face lit up. "Ah, yes," he said. "You mean Chapel Hill!" He called
the next taxi waiting in line. "Take this man to the university at Chapel
Hill."
"Thank you," I said, and I went to the conference.
--------
Once I was at a party playing bongos, and I got going pretty well. One
of the guys was particularly inspired by the drumming. He went into the
bathroom, took off his shirt, smeared shaving cream in funny designs all
over his chest, and came out dancing wildly, with cherries hanging from his
ears. Naturally, this crazy nut and I became good friends right away. His
name is Jerry Zorthian; he's an artist.
We often had long discussions about art and science. I'd say things
like, "Artists are lost: they don't have any subject! They used to have the
religious subjects, but they lost their religion and now they haven't got
anything. They don't understand the technical world they live in; they don't
know anything about the beauty of the real world -- the scientific world --
so they don't have anything in their hearts to paint."
Jerry would reply that artists don't need to have a physical subject;
there are many emotions that can be expressed through art. Besides, art can
be abstract. Furthermore, scientists destroy the beauty of nature when they
pick it apart and turn it into mathematical equations.
One time I was over at Jerry's for his birthday, and one of these dopey
arguments lasted until 3:00 a.m. The next morning I called him up: "Listen,
Jerry," I said, "the reason we have these arguments that never get anywhere
is that you don't know a damn thing about science, and I don't know a damn
thing about art. So, on alternate Sundays, I'll give you a lesson in
science, and you give me a lesson in art."
"OK," he said. "I'll teach you how to draw."
"That will be impossible," I said, because when I was in high school,
the only thing I could draw was pyramids on deserts -- consisting mainly of
straight lines -- and from time to time I would attempt a palm tree and put
in a sun. I had absolutely no talent. I sat next to a guy who was equally
adept. When he was permitted to draw anything, it consisted of two flat,
elliptical blobs, like tires stacked on one another, with a stalk coming out
of the top, culminating in a green triangle. It was supposed to be a tree.
So I bet Jerry that he wouldn't be able to teach me to draw.
"Of course you'll have to work," he said.
I promised to work, but still bet that he couldn't teach me to draw. I
wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I
wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It's
difficult to describe because it's an emotion. It's analogous to the feeling
one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in
the whole universe: there's a generality aspect that you feel when you think
about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all
run "behind the scenes" by the same organization, the same physical laws.
It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works
inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity
of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful
it is. It's a feeling of awe -- of scientific awe -- which I felt could be
communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It
could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the
universe.
Jerry turned out to be a very good teacher. He told me first to go home
and draw anything. So I tried to draw a shoe; then I tried to draw a flower
in a pot. It was a mess!
The next time we met I showed him my attempts: "Oh, look!" he said.
"You see, around in back here, the line of the flower pot doesn't touch the
leaf." (I had meant the line to come up to the leaf.) "That's very good.
It's a way of showing depth. That's very clever of you."
"And the fact that you don't make all the lines the same thickness
(which I didn't mean to do) is good. A drawing with all the lines the same
thickness is dull." It continued like that: Everything that I thought was a
mistake, he used to teach me something in a positive way. He never said it
was wrong; he never put me down. So I kept on trying, and I gradually got a
little bit better, but I was never satisfied.
To get more practice I also signed up for a correspondence school
course, with International Correspondence Schools, and I must say they were
good. They started me off drawing pyramids and cylinders, shading them and
so on. We covered many areas: drawing, pastels, watercolors, and paints.
Near the end I petered out: I made an oil painting for them, but I never
sent it in. They kept sending me letters urging me to continue. They were
very good.
I practiced drawing all the time, and became very interested in it. If
I was at a meeting that wasn't getting anywhere -- like the one where Carl
Rogers came to Caltech to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a
psychology department -- I would draw the other people. I had a little pad
of paper I kept with me and I practiced drawing wherever I went. So, as
Jerry taught me, I worked very hard.
Jerry, on the other hand, didn't learn much physics. His mind wandered
too easily. I tried to teach him something about electricity and magnetism,
but as soon as I mentioned "electricity," he'd tell me about some motor he
had that didn't work, and how might he fix it. When I tried to show him how
an electromagnet works by making a little coil of wire and hanging a nail on
a piece of string, I put the voltage on, the nail swung into the coil, and
Jerry said, "Ooh! It's just like fucking!" So that was the end of that.
So now we have a new argument-whether he's a better teacher than I was,
or I'm a better student than he was.
I gave up the idea of trying to get an artist to appreciate the feeling
I had about nature so he could portray it. I would now have to double my
efforts in learning to draw so I could do it myself. It was a very ambitious
undertaking, and I kept the idea entirely to myself, because the odds were I
would never be able to do it.
Early on in the process of learning to draw, some lady I knew saw my
attempts and said, "You should go down to the Pasadena Art Museum. They have
drawing classes there, with models -- nude models."
"No," I said; "I can't draw well enough: I'd feel very embarrassed."
"You're good enough; you should see some of the others!"
So I worked up enough courage to go down there. In the first lesson
they told us about newsprint -- very large sheets of low-grade paper, the
size of a newspaper -- and the various kinds of pencils and charcoal to get.
For the second class a model came, and she started off with a ten-minute
pose.
I started to draw the model, and by the time I'd done one leg, the ten
minutes were up. I looked around and saw that everyone else had already
drawn a complete picture, with shading in the back -- the whole business.
I realized I was way out of my depth. But finally, at the end, the
model was going to pose for thirty minutes. I worked very hard, and with
great effort I was able to draw her whole outline. This time there was half
a hope. So this time I didn't cover up my drawing, as I had done with all
the previous ones.
We went around to look at what the others had done, and I discovered
what they could really do: they draw the model, with details and shadows,
the pocketbook that's on the bench she's sitting on, the platform,
everything! They've all gone zip, zip, zip, zip, zip with the charcoal, all
over, and I figure it's hopeless -- utterly hopeless.
I go back to cover up my drawing, which consists of a few lines crowded
into the upper left-hand corner of the newsprint -- I had, until then, only
been drawing on 8 1/2 x 11 paper -- but some others in the class are
standing nearby: "Oh, look at this one," one of them says. "Every line
counts!"
I didn't know what that meant, exactly, but I felt encouraged enough to
come to the next class. In the meantime, Jerry kept telling me that drawings
that are too full aren't any good. His job was to teach me not to worry
about the others, so he'd tell me they weren't so hot.
I noticed that the teacher didn't tell people much (the only thing he
told me was my picture was too small on the page). Instead, he tried to
inspire us to experiment with new approaches. I thought of how we teach
physics: We have so many techniques -- so many mathematical methods -- that
we never stop telling the students how to do things. On the other hand, the
drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very
heavy, the teacher can't say, "Your lines are too heavy," because some
artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines. The
teacher doesn't want to push you in some particular direction. So the
drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and
not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always
teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving
physical problems.
They were always telling me to "loosen up," to become more relaxed
about drawing. I figured that made no more sense than telling someone who's
just learning to drive to "loosen up" at the wheel. It isn't going to work.
Only after you know how to do it carefully can you begin to loosen up. So I
resisted this perennial loosen-up stuff.
One exercise they had invented for loosening us up was to draw without
looking at the paper. Don't take your eyes off the model; just look at her
and make the lines on the paper without looking at what you're doing.
One of the guys says, "I can't help it. I have to cheat. I bet
everybody's cheating!"
"I'm not cheating!" I say.
"Aw, baloney!" they say.
I finish the exercise and they come over to look at what I had drawn.
They found that, indeed, I was NOT cheating; at the very beginning my pencil
point had busted, and there was nothing but impressions on the paper.
When I finally got my pencil to work, I tried it again. I found that my
drawing had a kind of strength -- a funny, semi-Picasso-like strength --
which appealed to me. The reason I felt good about that drawing was, I knew
it was impossible to draw well that way, and therefore it didn't have to be
good -- and that's really what the loosening up was all about. I had thought
that "loosen up" meant "make sloppy drawings," but it really meant to relax
and not worry about how the drawing is going to come out.
I made a lot of progress in the class, and I was feeling pretty good.
Up until the last session, all the models we had were rather heavy and out
of shape; they were rather interesting to draw. But in the last class we had
a model who was a nifty blonde, perfectly proportioned. It was then that I
discovered that I still didn't know how to draw: I couldn't make anything
come out that looked anything like this beautiful girl! With the other
models, if you draw something a little too big or bit too small, it doesn't
make any difference because it's all out of shape anyway. But when you're
trying to draw something that's so well put together, you can't fool
yourself: It's got to be just right!
During one of the breaks I overheard a guy who could really draw asking
this model whether she posed privately. She said yes. "Good. But I don't
have a studio yet. I'll have to work that out first."
I figured I could learn a lot from this guy, and I'd never get another
chance to draw this nifty model unless I did something. "Excuse me," I said
to him, "I have a room downstairs in my house that could be used as a
studio."
They both agreed. I took a few of the guy's drawings to my friend
Jerry, but he was aghast. "Those aren't so good," he said. He tried to
explain why, but I never really understood.
Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking
at art. I had very little appreciation for things artistic, and only very
rarely, such as once when I was in a museum in Japan. I saw a painting done
on brown paper of bamboo, and what was beautiful about it to me was that it
was perfectly poised between being just some brush strokes and being bamboo
-- I could make it go back and forth.
The summer after the drawing class I was in Italy for a science
conference and I thought I'd like to see the Sistine Chapel. I got there
very early in the morning, bought my ticket before anybody else, and ran up
the stairs as soon as the place opened. I therefore had the unusual pleasure
of looking at the whole chapel for a moment, in silent awe, before anybody
else came in.
Soon the tourists came, and there were crowds of people milling around,
talking different languages, pointing at this and that. I'm walking around,
looking at the ceiling for a while. Then my eye came down a little bit and I
saw some big, framed pictures, and I thought, "Gee! I never knew about
these!"
Unfortunately I'd left my guidebook at the hotel, but I thought to
myself, "I know why these panels aren't famous; they aren't any good." But
then I looked at another one, and I said, "Wow! That's a good one." I looked
at the others. "That's good too, so is that one, but that one's lousy." I
had never heard of these panels, but I decided that they were all good
except for two.
I went into a place called the Sala de Raphael -- the Raphael Room --
and I noticed the same phenomenon. I thought to myself, "Raphael is
irregular. He doesn't always succeed. Sometimes he's very good. Sometimes
it's just junk."
When I got back to my hotel, I looked at the guidebook. In the part
about the Sistine Chapel: "Below the paintings by Michelangelo there are
fourteen panels by Botticelli, Perugino" -- all these great artists -- "and
two by So-and-so, which are of no significance." This was a terrific
excitement to me, that I also could tell the difference between a beautiful
work of art and one that's not, without being able to define it. As a
scientist you always think you know what you're doing, so you tend to
distrust the artist who says, "It's great," or "It's no good," and then is
not able to explain to you why, as Jerry did with those drawings I took him.
But here I was, sunk: I could do it too!
In the Raphael Room the secret turned out to be that only some of the
paintings were made by the great master; the rest were made by students. I
had liked the ones by Raphael. This was a big jab for my self-confidence in
my ability to appreciate art.
Anyway, the guy from the art class and the nifty model came over to my
house a number of times and I tried to draw her and learn from him. After
many attempts I finally drew what I felt was a really nice picture -- it was
a portrait of her head -- and I got very excited about this first success.
I had enough confidence to ask an old friend of mine named Steve
Demitriades if his beautiful wife would pose for me, and in return I would
give him the portrait. He laughed. "If she wants to waste her time posing
for you, it's all right with me, ha, ha, ha."
I worked very hard on her portrait, and when he saw it, he turned over
to my side completely: "It's just wonderful!" he exclaimed. "Can you get a
photographer to make copies of it? I want to send one to my mother in
Greece!" His mother had never seen the girl he married. That was very
exciting to me, to think that I had improved to the point where someone
wanted one of my drawings.
A similar thing happened at a small art exhibit that some guy at
Caltech had arranged, where I contributed two drawings and a painting. He
said, "We oughta put a price on the drawings."
I thought, "That's silly! I'm not trying to sell them."
"It makes the exhibition more interesting. If you don't mind parting
with them, just put a price on."
After the show the guy told me that a girl had bought one of my
drawings and wanted to speak to me to find out more about it.
The drawing was called "The Magnetic Field of the Sun." For this
particular drawing I had borrowed one of those beautiful pictures of the
solar prominences taken at the solar laboratory in Colorado. Because I
understood how the sun's magnetic field was holding up the flames and had,
by that time, developed some technique for drawing magnetic field lines (it
was similar to a girl's flowing hair), I wanted to draw something beautiful
that no artist would think to draw: the rather complicated and twisting
lines of the magnetic field, close together here and spreading out there.
I explained all this to her, and showed her the picture that gave me
the idea.
She told me this story: She and her husband had gone to the exhibit,
and they both liked the drawing very much. "Why don't we buy it?" she
suggested.
Her husband was the kind of a man who could never do anything right
away. "Let's think about it a while," he said.
She realized his birthday was a few months ahead, so she went back the
same day and bought it herself.
That night when he came home from work, he was depressed. She finally
got it out of him: He thought it would be nice to buy her that picture, but
when he went back to the exhibit, he was told that the picture had already
been sold. So she had it to surprise him on his birthday.
What I got out of that story was something still very new to me: I
understood at last what art is really for, at least in certain respects. It
gives somebody, individually, pleasure. You can make something that somebody
likes so much that they're depressed, or they're happy, on account of that
damn thing you made! In science, it's sort of general and large: You don't
know the individuals who have appreciated it directly.
I understood that to sell a drawing is not to make money, but to be
sure that it's in the home of someone who really wants it; someone who would
feel bad if they didn't have it. This was interesting.
So I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn't want people to buy
my drawings because the professor of physics isn't supposed to be able to
draw, isn't that wonderful, so I made up a false name. My friend Dudley
Wright suggested "Au Fait," which means "It is done" in French. I spelled it
O-f-e-y, which turned out to be a name the blacks used for "whitey." But
after all, I was whitey, so it was all right.
One of my models wanted me to make a drawing for her, but she didn't
have the money. (Models don't have money; if they did, they wouldn't be
modeling.) She offered to pose three times free if I would give her a
drawing.
"On the contrary," I said. "I'll give you three drawings if you'll pose
once for nothing."
She put one of the drawings I gave her on the wall in her small room,
and soon her boyfriend noticed it. He liked it so much that he wanted to
commission a portrait of her. He would pay me sixty dollars. (The money was
getting pretty good now.)
Then she got the idea to be my agent: She could earn a little extra
money by going around selling my drawings, saying, "There's a new artist in
Altadena..." It was fun to be in a different world! She arranged to have
some of my drawings put on display at Bullock's, Pasadena's most elegant
department store. She and the lady from the art section picked out some
drawings -- drawings of plants that I had made early on (that I didn't like)
-- and had them all framed. Then I got a signed document from Bullock's
saying that they had such-and-such drawings on consignment. Of course nobody
bought any of them, but otherwise I was a big success: I had my drawings on
sale at Bullock's! It was fun to have them there, just so I could say one
day that I had reached that pinnacle of success in the art world.
Most of my models I got through Jerry, but I also tried to get models
on my own. Whenever I met a young woman who looked as if she would be
interesting to draw, I would ask her to pose for me. It always ended up that
I would draw her face, because I didn't know exactly how to bring up the
subject of posing nude.
Once when I was over at Jerry's, I said to his wife Dabney, "I can
never get the girls to pose nude: I don't know how Jerry does it!"
"Well, did you ever ask them?"
"Oh! I never thought of that."
The next girl I met that I wanted to pose for me was a Caltech student.
I asked her if she would pose nude. "Certainly," she said, and there we
were! So it was easy. I guess there was so much in the back of my mind that
I thought it was somehow wrong to ask.
I've done a lot of drawing by now, and I've gotten so I like to draw
nudes best. For all I know it's not art, exactly; it's a mixture. Who knows
the percentages?
One model I met through Jerry had been a Playboy playmate. She was tall
and gorgeous. However, she thought she was too tall. Every girl in the
world, looking at her, would have been jealous. When she would come into a
room, she'd be half stooped over. I tried to teach her, when she was posing,
to please stand up, because she was so elegant and striking. I finally
talked her into that.
Then she had another worry: she's got "dents" near her groin. I had to
get out a book of anatomy to show her that it's the attachment of the
muscles to the ilium, and to explain to her that you can't see these dents
on everybody; to see them, everything must be just right, in perfect
proportion, like she was. I learned from her that every woman is worried
about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.
I wanted to draw a picture of this model in color, in pastels, just to
experiment. I thought I would first make a sketch in charcoal, which would
be later covered with the pastel. When I got through with this charcoal
drawing that I had made without worrying how it was going to look, I
realized that it was one of the best drawings I had ever made. I decided to
leave it, and forget about the pastels for that one. My "agent" looked at it
and wanted to take it around. "You can't sell that," I said, "it's on
newsprint."
"Oh, never mind," she said.
A few weeks later she came back with this picture in a beautiful wooden
frame with a red band and a gold edge. It's a funny thing which must make
artists, generally, unhappy -- how much improved a drawing gets when you put
a frame around it. My agent told me that a particular lady got all excited
about the drawing and they took it to a picture framer. He told them that
there were special techniques for mounting drawings on newsprint: Impregnate
it with plastic, do this, do that. So this lady goes to all that trouble
over this drawing I had made, and then has my agent bring it back to me. "I
think the artist would like to see how lovely it is, framed," she said.
I certainly did. There was another example of the direct pleasure
somebody got out of one of my pictures. So it was a real kick selling the
drawings.
There was a period when there were topless restaurants in town: You
could go there for lunch or dinner, and the girls would dance without a top,
and after a while without anything. One of these places, it turned out, was
only a mile and a half away from my house, so I went there very often. I'd
sit in one of the booths and work a little physics on the paper placemats
with the scalloped edges, and sometimes I'd draw one of the dancing girls or
one of the customers, just to practice.
My wife Gweneth, who is English, had a good attitude about my going to
this place. She said, "The Englishmen have clubs they go to." So it was
something like my club.
There were pictures hanging around the place, but I didn't like them
much. They were these fluorescent colors on black velvet -- kind of ugly --
a girl taking off her sweater, or something. Well, I had a rather nice
drawing I had made of my model Kathy, so I gave it to the owner of the
restaurant to put up on the wall, and he was delighted.
Giving him the drawing turned out to produce some useful results. The
owner became very friendly to me, and would give me free drinks all the
time. Now, every time I would come in to the restaurant a waitress would
come over with my free 7-Up. I'd watch the girls dance, do a little physics,
prepare a lecture, or draw a little bit. If I got a little tired, I'd watch
the entertainment for a while, and then do a little more work. The owner
knew I didn't want to be disturbed, so if a drunk man came over and started
to talk to me, right away a waitress would come and get the guy out of
there. If a girl came over, he would do nothing. We had a very good
relationship. His name was Gianonni.
The other effect of my drawing on display was that people would ask him
about it. One day a guy came over to me and said, "Gianonni tells me you
made that picture."
"Yeah."
"Good. I'd like to commission a drawing."
"All right; what would you like?"
"I want a picture of a nude toreador girl being charged by a bull with
a man's head."
"Well, uh, it would help me a little if I had some idea of what this
drawing is for."
"I want it for my business establishment."
"What kind of business establishment?"
"It's for a massage parlor: you know, private rooms, masseuses -- get
the idea?"
"Yeah, I get the idea." I didn't want to draw a nude toreador girl
being charged by a bull with a man's head, so I tried to talk him out of it.
"How do you think that looks to the customers, and how does it make the
girls feel? The men come in there and you get 'em all excited with this
picture. Is that the way you want 'em to treat the girls?"
He's not convinced.
"Suppose the cops come in and they see this picture, and you're
claiming it's a massage parlor."
"OK, OK," he says; "You're right. I've gotta change it. What I want is
a picture that, if the cops look at it, is perfectly OK for a massage
parlor, but if a customer looks at it, it gives him ideas."
"OK," I said. We arranged it for sixty dollars, and I began to work on
the drawing. First, I had to figure out how to do it. I thought and I
thought, and I often felt I would have been better off drawing the nude
toreador girl in the first place!
Finally I figured out how to do it: I would draw a slave girl in
imaginary Rome, massaging some important Roman -- a senator, perhaps. Since
she's a slave girl, she has a certain look on her face. She knows what's
going to happen next, and she's sort of resigned to it.
I worked very hard on this picture. I used Kathy as the model. Later, I
got another model for the man. I did lots of studies, and soon the cost for
the models was already eighty dollars. I didn't care about the money; I
liked the challenge of having to do a commission. Finally I ended up with a
picture of a muscular man lying on a table with the slave girl massaging
him: she's wearing a kind of toga that covers one breast-the other one was
nude-and I got the expression of resignation on her face just right.
I was just about ready to deliver my commissioned masterpiece to the
massage parlor when Gianonni told me that the guy had been arrested and was
in jail. So I asked the girls at the topless restaurant if they knew any
good massage parlors around Pasadena that would like to hang my drawing in
the lobby.
They gave me names and locations of places in and around Pasadena and
told me things like "When you go to the Such-and-such massage parlor, ask
for Frank -- he's a pretty good guy. If he's not there, don't go in." Or
"Don't talk to Eddie. Eddie would never understand the value of a drawing."
The next day I rolled up my picture, put it in the back of my station
wagon, and my wife Gweneth wished me good luck as I set out to visit the
brothels of Pasadena to sell my drawing.
Just before I went to the first place on my list, I thought to myself,
"You know, before I go anywhere else, I oughta check at the place he used to
have. Maybe it's still open, and perhaps the new manager wants my drawing."
I went over there and knocked on the door. It opened a little bit, and I saw
a girl's eye. "Do we know you?" she asked.
"No, you don't, but how would you like to have a drawing that would be
appropriate for your entrance hall?"
"I'm sorry," she said, "but we've already contracted an artist to make
a drawing for us, and he's working on it."
"I'm the artist," I said, "and your drawing is ready!"
It turns out that the guy, as he was going to jail, told his wife about
our arrangement. So I went in and showed them the drawing.
The guy's wife and his sister, who were now running the place, were not
entirely pleased with it; they wanted the girls to see it. I hung it up on
the wall, there in the lobby, and all the girls came out from the various
rooms in the back and started to make comments.
One girl said she didn't like the expression on the slave girl's face.
"She doesn't look happy," she said. "She should be smiling."
I said to her, "Tell me -- while you're massaging a guy, and he's not
lookin' at you, are you smiling?"
"Oh, no!" she said. "I feel exactly like she looks! But it's not right
to put it in the picture."
I left it with them, but after a week of worrying about it back and
forth, they decided they didn't want it. It turned out that the real reason
that they didn't want it was the one nude breast. I tried to explain that my
drawing was a tone-down of the original request, but they said they had
different ideas about it than the guy did. I thought the irony of people
running such an establishment being prissy about one nude breast was
amusing, and I took the drawing home.
My businessman friend Dudley Wright saw the drawing and I told him the
story about it. He said, "You oughta triple its price. With art, nobody is
really sure of its value, so people often think, 'If the price is higher, it
must be more valuable!'"
I said, "You're crazy!" but, just for fun, I bought a twenty-dollar
frame and mounted the drawing so it would be ready for the next customer.
Some guy from the weather forecasting business saw the drawing I had
given Gianonni and asked if I had others. I invited him and his wife to my
"studio" downstairs in my home, and they asked about the newly framed
drawing. "That one is two hundred dollars." (I had multiplied sixty by three
and added twenty for the frame.) The next day they came back and bought it.
So the massage parlor drawing ended up in the office of a weather
forecaster.
One day there was a police raid on Gianonni's, and some of the dancers
were arrested. Someone wanted to stop Gianonni from putting on topless
dancing shows, and Gianonni didn't want to stop. So there was a big court
case about it; it was in all the local papers.
Gianonni went around to all the customers and asked them if they would
testify in support of him. Everybody had an excuse: "I run a day camp, and
if the parents see that I'm going to this place, they won't send their kids
to my camp..." Or, "I'm in the such-and-such business, and if it's
publicized that I come down here, we'll lose customers."
I think to myself, "I'm the only free man in here. I haven't any
excuse! I like this place, and I'd like to see it continue, I don't see
anything wrong with topless dancing." So I said to Gianonni, "Yes, I'll be
glad to testify."
In court the big question was, is topless dancing acceptable to the
community -- do community standards allow it?
The lawyer from the defense tried to make me into an expert on
community standards. He asked me if I went into other bars.
"Yes."
"And how many times per week would you typically go to Gianonni's?"
"Five, six times a week." (That got into the papers: The Caltech
professor of physics goes to see topless dancing six times a week.)
"What sections of the community were represented at Gianonni's?"
"Nearly every section: there were guys from the real estate business, a
guy from the city governing board, workmen from the gas station, guys from
engineering firms, a professor of physics..."
"So would you say that topless entertainment is acceptable to the
community, given that so many sections of it are watching it and enjoying
it?"
"I need to know what you mean by 'acceptable to the community.' Nothing
is accepted by everybody, so what percentage of the community must accept
something in order for it to be 'acceptable to the community'?"
The lawyer suggests a figure. The other lawyer objects. The judge calls
a recess, and they all go into chambers for 15 minutes before they can
decide that "acceptable to the community" means accepted by 50% of the
community.
In spite of the fact that I made them be precise, I had no precise
numbers as evidence, so I said, "I believe that topless dancing is accepted
by more than 50% of the community, and is therefore acceptable to the
community."
Gianonni temporarily lost the case, and his, or another one very
similar to it, went ultimately to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, his
place stayed open, and I got still more free 7-Ups.
Around that time there were some attempts to develop an interest in art
at Caltech. Somebody contributed the money to convert an old plant sciences
building into some art studios. Equipment and supplies were bought and
provided for the students, and they hired an artist from South Africa to
coordinate and support the art activities around Caltech.
Various people came in to teach classes. I got Jerry Zorthian to teach
a drawing class, and some guy came in to teach lithography, which I tried to
learn.
The South African artist came over to my house one time to look at my
drawings. He said he thought it would be fun to have a one-man show. This
time I was cheating: If I hadn't been a professor at Caltech, they would
have never thought my pictures were worth it.
"Some of my better drawings have been sold, and I feel uncomfortable
calling the people," I said.
"You don't have to worry, Mr. Feynman," he reassured me. "You won't
have to call them up. We will make all the arrangements and operate the
exhibit officially and correctly."
I gave him a list of people who had bought my drawings, and they soon
received a telephone call from him: "We understand that you have an Ofey."
"Oh, yes!"
"We are planning to have an exhibition of Ofeys, and we're wondering if
you would consider lending it to us." Of course they were delighted.
The exhibition was held in the basement of the Athenaeum, the Caltech
faculty club. Everything was like the real thing: All the pictures had
titles, and those that had been taken on consignment from their owners had
due recognition: "Lent by Mr. Gianonni," for instance.
One drawing was a portrait of the beautiful blonde model from the art
class, which I had originally intended to be a study of shading: I put a
light at the level of her legs a bit to the side and pointed it upwards. As
she sat, I tried to draw the shadows as they were -- her nose cast its
shadow rather unnaturally across her face -- so they wouldn't look so bad. I
drew her torso as well, so you could also see her breasts and the shadows
they made. I stuck it in with the other drawings in the exhibit and called
it "Madame Curie Observing the Radiations from Radium." The message I
intended to convey was, nobody thinks of Madame Curie as a woman, as
feminine, with beautiful hair, bare breasts, and all that. They only think
of the radium part.
A prominent industrial designer named Henry Dreyfuss invited various
people to a reception at his home after the exhibition -- the woman who had
contributed money to support the arts, the president of Caltech and his
wife, and so on.
One of these art-lovers came over and started up a conversation with
me: "Tell me, Professor Feynman, do you draw from photographs or from
models?"
"I always draw directly from a posed model."
"Well, how did you get Madame Curie to pose for you?"
Around that time the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a similar
idea to the one I had, that artists are far away from an understanding of
science. My idea was that artists don't understand the underlying generality
and beauty of nature and her laws (and therefore cannot portray this in
their art). The museum's idea was that artists should know more about
technology: they should become more familiar with machines and other
applications of science.
The art museum organized a scheme in which they would get some of the
really good artists of the day to go to various companies which volunteered
some time and money to the project. The artists would visit these companies
and snoop around until they saw something interesting that they could use in
their work. The museum thought it might help if someone who knew something
about technology could be a sort of liaison with the artists from time to
time as they visited the companies. Since they knew I was fairly good at
explaining things to people and I wasn't a complete jackass when it came to
art (actually, I think they knew I was trying to learn to draw) -- at any
rate, they asked me if I would do that, and I agreed.
It was lots of fun visiting the companies with the artists. What
typically happened was, some guy would show us a tube that discharged sparks
in beautiful blue, twisting patterns. The artists would get all excited and
ask me how they could use it in an exhibit. What were the necessary
conditions to make it work?
The artists were very interesting people. Some of them were absolute
fakes: they would claim to be an artist, and everybody agreed they were an
artist, but when you'd sit and talk to them, they'd make no sense
whatsoever! One guy in particular, the biggest faker, always dressed funny;
he had a big black bowler hat. He would answer your questions in an
incomprehensible way, and when you'd try to find out more about what he said
by asking him about some of the words he used, off we'd be in another
direction! The only thing he contributed, ultimately, to the exhibit for art
and technology was a portrait of himself. Other artists I talked to would
say things that made no sense at first, but they would go to great lengths
to explain their ideas to me. One time I went somewhere, as a part of this
scheme, with Robert Irwin. It was a two-day trip, and after a great effort
of discussing back and forth, I finally understood what he was trying to
explain to me, and I thought it was quite interesting and wonderful.
Then there were the artists who had absolutely no idea about the real
world. They thought that scientists were some kind of grand magicians who
could make anything, and would say things like, "I want to make a picture in
three dimensions where the figure is suspended in space and it glows and
flickers." They made up the world they wanted, and had no idea what was
reasonable or unreasonable to make.
Finally there was an exhibit, and I was asked to be on a panel which
judged the works of art. Although there was some good stuff that was
inspired by the artists' visiting the companies, I thought that most of the
good works of art were things that were turned in at the last minute out of
desperation, and didn't really have anything to do with technology. All of
the other members of the panel disagreed, and I found myself in some
difficulty. I'm no good at criticizing art, and I shouldn't have been on the
panel in the first place.
There was a guy there at the county art museum named Maurice Tuchman
who really knew what he was talking about when it came to art. He knew that
I had had this one-man show at Caltech. He said, "You know, you're never
going to draw again."
"What? That's ridiculous! Why should I never..."
"Because you've had a one-man show, and you're only an amateur."
Although I did draw after that, I never worked as hard, with the same
energy and intensity, as I did before. I never sold a drawing after that,
either. He was a smart fella, and I learned a lot from him. I could have
learned a lot more, if I weren't so stubborn!
--------
In the early fifties I suffered temporarily from a disease of middle
age: I used to give philosophical talks about science -- how science
satisfies curiosity, how it gives you a new world view, how it gives man the
ability to do things, how it gives him power -- and the question is, in view
of the recent development of the atomic bomb, is it a good idea to give man
that much power? I also thought about the relation of science and religion,
and it was about this time when I was invited to a conference in New York
that was going to discuss "the ethics of equality."
There had already been a conference among the older people, somewhere
on Long Island, and this year they decided to have some younger people come
in and discuss the position papers they had worked out in the other
conference.
Before I got there, they sent around a list of "books you might find
interesting to read, and please send us any books you want others to read,
and we will store them in the library so that others may read them."
So here comes this wonderful list of books. I start down the first
page: I haven't read a single one of the books, and I feel very uneasy -- I
hardly belong. I look at the second page: I haven't read a single one. I
found out, after looking through the whole list, that I haven't read any of
the books. I must be an idiot, an illiterate! There were wonderful books
there, like Thomas Jefferson On Freedom, or something like that, and there
were a few authors I had read. There was a book by Heisenberg, one by
Schrödinger, and one by Einstein, but they were something like Einstein, My
Later Fears and Schrödinger, What Is Life -- different from what I had read.
So I had a feeling that I was out of my depth, and that I shouldn't be in
this. Maybe I could just sit quietly and listen.
I go to the first big introductory meeting, and a guy gets up and
explains that we have two problems to discuss. The first one is fogged up a
little bit -- something about ethics and equality, but I don't understand
what the problem exactly is. And the second one is, "We are going to
demonstrate by our efforts a way that we can have a dialogue among people of
different fields." There was an international lawyer, a historian, a Jesuit
priest, a rabbi, a scientist (me), and so on.
Well, right away my logical mind goes like this: The second problem I
don't have to pay any attention to, because if it works, it works; and if it
doesn't work, it doesn't work -- we don't have to prove that we can have a
dialogue, and discuss that we can have a dialogue, if we haven't got any
dialogue to talk about! So the primary problem is the first one, which I
didn't understand.
I was ready to put my hand up and say, "Would you please define the
problem better," but then I thought, "No, I'm the ignoramus; I'd better
listen. I don't want to start trouble right away."
The subgroup I was in was supposed to discuss the "ethics of equality
in education." In the meetings of our subgroup the Jesuit priest was always
talking about "the fragmentation of knowledge." He would say, "The real
problem in the ethics of equality in education is the fragmentation of
knowledge." This Jesuit was looking back into the thirteenth century when
the Catholic Church was in charge of all education, and the whole world was
simple. There was God, and everything came from God; it was all organized.
But today, it's not so easy to understand everything. So knowledge has
become fragmented. I felt that "the fragmentation of knowledge" had nothing
to do with "it," but "it" had never been defined, so there was no way for me
to prove that.
Finally I said, "What is the ethical problem associated with the
fragmentation of knowledge?" He would only answer me with great clouds of
fog, and I'd say, "I don't understand," and everybody else would say they
did understand, and they tried to explain it to me, but they couldn't
explain it to me!
So the others in the group told me to write down why I thought the
fragmentation of knowledge was not a problem of ethics. I went back to my
dormitory room and I wrote out carefully, as best I could, what I thought
the subject of "the ethics of equality in education" might be, and I gave
some examples of the kinds of problems I thought we might be talking about.
For instance, in education, you increase differences. If someone's good at
something, you try to develop his ability, which results in differences, or
inequalities. So if education increases inequality, is this ethical? Then,
after giving some more examples, I went on to say that while "the
fragmentation of knowledge" is a difficulty because the complexity of the
world makes it hard to learn things, in light of my definition of the realm
of the subject, I couldn't see how the fragmentation of knowledge had
anything to do with anything approximating what the ethics of equality in
education might more or less be.
The next day I brought my paper into the meeting, and the guy said,
"Yes, Mr. Feynman has brought up some very interesting questions we ought to
discuss, and we'll put them aside for some possible future discussion." They
completely missed the point. I was trying to define the problem, and then
show how "the fragmentation of knowledge" didn't have anything to do with
it. And the reason that nobody got anywhere in that conference was that they
hadn't clearly defined the subject of "the ethics of equality in education,"
and therefore no one knew exactly what they were supposed to talk about.
There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read --
something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing,
and my eyes were coming out: I couldn't make head nor tail of it! I figured
it was because I hadn't read any of the books on that list. I had this
uneasy feeling of "I'm not adequate," until finally I said to myself, "I'm
gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell
it means."
So I stopped -- at random -- and read the next sentence very carefully.
I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: "The
individual member of the social community often receives his information via
visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated.
You know what it means? "People read."
Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could
translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: "Sometimes
people read; sometimes people listen to the radio," and so on, but written
in such a fancy way that I couldn't understand it at first, and when I
finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.
There was only one thing that happened at that meeting that was
pleasant or amusing. At this conference, every word that every guy said at
the plenary session was so important that they had a stenotypist there,
typing every goddamn thing. Somewhere on the second day the stenotypist came
up to me and said, "What profession are you? Surely not a professor."
"I am a professor," I said.
"Of what?"
"Of physics -- science."
"Oh! That must be the reason," he said.
"Reason for what?"
He said, "You see, I'm a stenotypist, and I type everything that is
said here. Now, when the other fellas talk, I type what they say, but I
don't understand what they're saying. But every time you get up to ask a
question or to say something, I understand exactly what you mean -- what the
question is, and what you're saying -- so I thought you can't be a
professor!"
There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology
place, a very nice, very Jewish man, gave a speech. It was a good speech,
and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, when I'm
telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and
true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various
countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we
have atomic weapons, any war and we're doomed, so therefore the right way
out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences
from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we
should give up nearly everything to the other countries until we're all
even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial
feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses
on the way home.
The next day one of the guys in our group said, "I think that speech
last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the
summary of our conference."
I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is
based on a theory that there's only X amount of stuff in the world, that
somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and
therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn't take into
account the real reason for the differences between countries -- that is,
the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of
machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this
machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn't the stuff, but the
power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these
people were not in science; they didn't understand it. They didn't
understand technology; they didn't understand their time.
The conference made me so nervous that a girl I knew in New York had to
calm me down. "Look," she said, "you're shaking! You've gone absolutely
nuts! Just take it easy, and don't take it so seriously. Back away a minute
and look at what it is." So I thought about the conference, how crazy it
was, and it wasn't so bad. But if someone were to ask me to participate in
something like that again, I'd shy away from it like mad -- I mean zero! No!
Absolutely not! And I still get invitations for this kind of thing today.
When it came time to evaluate the conference at the end, the others
told how much they got out of it, how successful it was, and so on. When
they asked me, I said, "This conference was worse than a Rorschach test:
There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you
see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!"
Even worse, at the end of the conference they were going to have
another meeting, but this time the public would come, and the guy in charge
of our group has the nerve to say that since we've worked out so much, there
won't be any time for public discussion, so we'll just tell the public all
the things we've worked out. My eyes bugged out: I didn't think we had
worked out a damn thing!
Finally, when we were discussing the question of whether we had
developed a way of having a dialogue among people of different disciplines
-- our second basic "problem" -- I said that I noticed something
interesting. Each of us talked about what we thought the "ethics of
equality" was, from our own point of view, without paying any attention to
the other guy's point of view. For example, the historian proposed that the
way to understand ethical problems is to look historically at how they
evolved and how they developed; the international lawyer suggested that the
way to do it is to see how in fact people actually act in different
situations and make their arrangements; the Jesuit priest was always
referring to "the fragmentation of knowledge"; and I, as a scientist,
proposed that we should isolate the problem in a way analogous to Galileo's
techniques for experiments; and so on. "So, in my opinion," I said, "we had
no dialogue at all. Instead, we had nothing but chaos!"
Of course I was attacked, from all around. "Don't you think that order
can come from chaos?"
"Uh, well, as a general principle, or..." I didn't understand what to
do with a question like "Can order come from chaos?" Yes, no, what of it?
There were a lot of fools at that conference -- pompous fools -- and
pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can
talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools -- guys who are
fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful
they are with all this hocus pocus -- THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool
isn't a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is
terrible! And that's what I got at the conference, a bunch of pompous fools,
and I got very upset. I'm not going to get upset like that again, so I won't
participate in interdisciplinary conferences any more.
A footnote: While I was at the conference, I stayed at the Jewish
Theological Seminary, where young rabbis -- I think they were Orthodox --
were studying. Since I have a Jewish background, I knew of some of the
things they told me about the Talmud, but I had never seen the Talmud. It
was very interesting. It's got big pages, and in a little square in the
corner of the page is the original Talmud, and then in a sort of L-shaped
margin, all around this square, are commentaries written by different
people. The Talmud has evolved, and everything has been discussed again and
again, all very carefully, in a medieval kind of reasoning. I think the
commentaries were shut down around the thirteen- or fourteen- or
fifteen-hundreds -- there hasn't been any modern commentary. The Talmud is a
wonderful book, a great, big potpourri of things: trivial questions, and
difficult questions -- for example, problems of teachers, and how to teach
-- and then some trivia again, and so on. The students told me that the
Talmud was never translated, something I thought was curious, since the book
is so valuable.
One day, two or three of the young rabbis came to me and said, "We
realize that we can't study to be rabbis in the modern world without knowing
something about science, so we'd like to ask you some questions."
Of course there are thousands of places to find out about science, and
Columbia University was right near there, but I wanted to know what kinds of
questions they were interested in.
They said, "Well, for instance, is electricity fire?"
"No," I said, "but... what is the problem?"
They said, "In the Talmud it says you're not supposed to make fire on a
Saturday, so our question is, can we use electrical things on Saturdays?"
I was shocked. They weren't interested in science at all! The only way
science was influencing their lives was so they might be able to interpret
better the Talmud! They weren't interested in the world outside, in natural
phenomena; they were only interested in resolving some question brought up
in the Talmud.
And then one day -- I guess it was a Saturday -- I want to go up in the
elevator, and there's a guy standing near the elevator. The elevator comes,
I go in, and he goes in with me. I say, "Which floor?" and my hand's ready
to push one of the buttons.
"No, no!" he says, "I'm supposed to push the buttons for you."
"What?"
"Yes! The boys here can't push the buttons on Saturday, so I have to do
it for them. You see, I'm not Jewish, so it's all right for me to push the
buttons. I stand near the elevator, and they tell me what floor, and I push
the button for them."
Well, this really bothered me, so I decided to trap the students in a
logical discussion. I had been brought up in a Jewish home, so I knew the
kind of nitpicking logic to use, and I thought, "Here's fun!"
My plan went like this: I'd start off by asking, "Is the Jewish
viewpoint a viewpoint that any man can have? Because if it is not, then it's
certainly not something that is truly valuable for humanity... yak, yak,
yak." And then they would have to say, "Yes, the Jewish viewpoint is good
for any man."
Then I would steer them around a little more by asking, "Is it ethical
for a man to hire another man to do something which is unethical for him to
do? Would you hire a man to rob for you, for instance?" And I keep working
them into the channel, very slowly, and very carefully, until I've got them
-- trapped!
And do you know what happened? They're rabbinical students, right? They
were ten times better than I was! As soon as they saw I could put them in a
hole, they went twist, turn, twist -- I can't remember how -- and they were
free! I thought I had come up with an original idea -- phooey! It had been
discussed in the Talmud for ages! So they cleaned me up just as easy as pie
-- they got right out.
Finally I tried to assure the rabbinical students that the electric
spark that was bothering them when they pushed the elevator buttons was not
fire. I said, "Electricity is not fire. It's not a chemical process, as fire
is."
"Oh?" they said.
"Of course, there's electricity in amongst the atoms in a fire."
"Aha!" they said.
"And in every other phenomenon that occurs in the world."
I even proposed a practical solution for eliminating the spark. "If
that's what's bothering you, you can put a condenser across the switch, so
the electricity will go on and off without any spark whatsoever --
anywhere." But for some reason, they didn't like that idea either.
It really was a disappointment. Here they are, slowly coming to life,
only to better interpret the Talmud. Imagine! In modern times like this,
guys are studying to go into society and do something -- to be a rabbi --
and the only way they think that science might be interesting is because
their ancient, provincial, medieval problems are being confounded slightly
by some new phenomena.
Something else happened at that time which is worth mentioning here.
One of the questions the rabbinical students and I discussed at some length
was why it is that in academic things, such as theoretical physics, there is
a higher proportion of Jewish kids than their proportion in the general
population. The rabbinical students thought the reason was that the Jews
have a history of respecting learning: They respect their rabbis, who are
really teachers, and they respect education. The Jews pass on this tradition
in their families all the time, so that if a boy is a good student, it's as
good as, if not better than, being a good football player.
It was the same afternoon that I was reminded how true it is. I was
invited to one of the rabbinical students' home, and he introduced me to his
mother, who had just come back from Washington, D.C. She clapped her hands
together, in ecstasy, and said, "Oh! My day is complete. Today I met a
general, and a professor!"
I realized that there are not many people who think it's just as
important, and just as nice, to meet a professor as to meet a general. So I
guess there's something in what they said.
--------
Judging Books by Their Covers
After the war, physicists were often asked to go to Washington and give
advice to various sections of the government, especially the military. What
happened, I suppose, is that since the scientists had made these bombs that
were so important, the military felt we were useful for something.
Once I was asked to serve on a committee which was to evaluate various
weapons for the army, and I wrote a letter back which explained that I was
only a theoretical physicist, and I didn't know anything about weapons for
the army.
The army responded that they had found in their experience that
theoretical physicists were very useful to them in making decisions, so
would I please reconsider?
I wrote back again and said I didn't really know anything, and doubted
I could help them.
Finally I got a letter from the Secretary of the Army, which proposed a
compromise: I would come to the first meeting, where I could listen and see
whether I could make a contribution or not. Then I could decide whether I
should continue.
I said I would, of course. What else could I do?
I went down to Washington and the first thing that I went to was a
cocktail party to meet everybody. There were generals and other important
characters from the army, and everybody talked. It was pleasant enough.
One guy in a uniform came to me and told me that the army was glad that
physicists were advising the military because it had a lot of problems. One
of the problems was that tanks use up their fuel very quickly and thus can't
go very far. So the question was how to refuel them as they're going along.
Now this guy had the idea that, since the physicists can get energy out of
uranium, could I work out a way in which we could use silicon dioxide --
sand, dirt -- as a fuel? If that were possible, then all this tank would
have to do would be to have a little scoop underneath, and as it goes along,
it would pick up the dirt and use it for fuel! He thought that was a great
idea, and that all I had to do was to work out the details. That was the
kind of problem I thought we would be talking about in the meeting the next
day.
I went to the meeting and noticed that some guy who had introduced me
to all the people at the cocktail party was sitting next to me. He was
apparently some flunky assigned to be at my side at all times. On my other
side was some super general I had heard of before.
At the first session of the meeting they talked about some technical
matters, and I made a few comments. But later on, near the end of the
meeting, they began to discuss some problem of logistics, about which I knew
nothing. It had to do with figuring out how much stuff you should have at
different places at different times. And although I tried to keep my trap
shut, when you get into a situation like that, where you're sitting around a
table with all these "important people" discussing these "important
problems," you can't keep your mouth shut, even if you know nothing
whatsoever! So I made some comments in that discussion, too.
During the next coffee break the guy who had been assigned to shepherd
me around said, "I was very impressed by the things you said during the
discussion. They certainly were an important contribution."
I stopped and thought about my "contribution" to the logistics problem,
and realized that a man like the guy who orders the stuff for Christmas at
Macy's would be better able to figure out how to handle problems like that
than I. So I concluded: a) if I had made an important contribution, it was
sheer luck; b) anybody else could have done as well, but most people could
have done better, and c) this flattery should wake me up to the fact that I
am not capable of contributing much.
Right after that they decided, in the meeting, that they could do
better discussing the organization of scientific research (such as, should
scientific development be under the Corps of Engineers or the Quartermaster
Division?) than specific technical matters. I knew that if there was to be
any hope of my making a real contribution, it would be only on some specific
technical matter, and surely not on how to organize research in the army.
Until then I didn't let on any of my feelings about the situation to
the chairman of the meeting -- the big shot who had invited me in the first
place. As we were packing our bags to leave, he said to me, all smiles,
"You'll be joining us, then, for the next meeting..."
"No, I won't." I could see his face change suddenly. He was very
surprised that I would say no, after making those "contributions."
In the early sixties, a lot of my friends were still giving advice to
the government. Meanwhile, I was having no feeling of social responsibility
and resisting, as much as possible, offers to go to Washington, which took a
certain amount of courage in those times.
I was giving a series of freshman physics lectures at that time, and
after one of them, Tom Harvey, who assisted me in putting on the
demonstrations, said, "You oughta see what's happening to mathematics in
schoolbooks! My daughter comes home with a lot of crazy stuff!"
I didn't pay much attention to what he said.
But the next day I got a telephone call from a pretty famous lawyer
here in Pasadena, Mr. Norris, who was at that time on the State Board of
Education. He asked me if I would serve on the State Curriculum Commission,
which had to choose the new schoolbooks for the state of California. You
see, the state had a law that all of the schoolbooks used by all of the kids
in all of the public schools have to be chosen by the State Board of
Education, so they have a committee to look over the books and to give them
advice on which books to take.
It happened that a lot of the books were on a new method of teaching
arithmetic that they called "new math," and since usually the only people to
look at the books were schoolteachers or administrators in education, they
thought it would be a good idea to have somebody who uses mathematics
scientifically, who knows what the end product is and what we're trying to
teach it for, to help in the evaluation of the schoolbooks.
I must have had, by this time, a guilty feeling about not cooperating
with the government, because I agreed to get on this committee.
Immediately I began getting letters and telephone calls from book
publishers. They said things like, "We're very glad to hear you're on the
committee because we really wanted a scientific guy..." and "It's wonderful
to have a scientist on the committee, because our books are scientifically
oriented..." But they also said things like, "We'd like to explain to you
what our book is about..." and "We'll be very glad to help you in any way we
can to judge our books..." That seemed to me kind of crazy. I'm an objective
scientist, and it seemed to me that since the only thing the kids in school
are going to get is the books (and the teachers get the teacher's manual,
which I would also get), any extra explanation from the company was a
distortion. So I didn't want to speak to any of the publishers and always
replied, "You don't have to explain; I'm sure the books will speak for
themselves."
I represented a certain district, which comprised most of the Los
Angeles area except for the city of Los Angeles, which was represented by a
very nice lady from the L.A. school system named Mrs. Whitehouse. Mr. Norris
suggested that I meet her and find out what the committee did and how it
worked.
Mrs. Whitehouse started out telling me about the stuff they were going
to talk about in the next meeting (they had already had one meeting; I was
appointed late). "They're going to talk about the counting numbers." I
didn't know what that was, but it turned out they were what I used to call
integers. They had different names for everything, so I had a lot of trouble
right from the start.
She told me how the members of the commission normally rated the new
schoolbooks. They would get a relatively large number of copies of each book
and would give them to various teachers and administrators in their
district. Then they would get reports back on what these people thought
about the books. Since I didn't know a lot of teachers or administrators,
and since I felt that I could, by reading the books myself, make up my mind
as to how they looked to me, I chose to read all the books myself. (There
were some people in my district who had expected to look at the books and
wanted a chance to give their opinion. Mrs. Whitehouse offered to put their
reports in with hers so they would feel better and I wouldn't have to worry
about their complaints. They were satisfied, and I didn't get much trouble.)
A few days later a guy from the book depository called me up and said,
"We're ready to send you the books, Mr. Feynman; there are three hundred
pounds."
I was overwhelmed.
"It's all right, Mr. Feynman; we'll get someone to help you read them."
I couldn't figure out how you do that: you either read them or you
don't read them. I had a special bookshelf put in my study downstairs (the
books took up seventeen feet), and began reading all the books that were
going to be discussed in the next meeting. We were going to start out with
the elementary schoolbooks.
It was a pretty big job, and I worked all the time at it down in the
basement. My wife says that during this period it was like living over a
volcano. It would be quiet for a while, but then all of a sudden,
"BLLLLLOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!" -- there would be a big explosion from the "volcano"
below. The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They
were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples
(like automobiles in the street for "sets") which were almost OK, but in
which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate.
Everything was a little bit ambiguous -- they weren't smart enough to
understand what was meant by "rigor." They were faking it. They were
teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in fact, useless,
at that time, for the child.
I understood what they were trying to do. Many people thought we were
behind the Russians after Sputnik, and some mathematicians were asked to
give advice on how to teach math by using some of the rather interesting
modern concepts of mathematics. The purpose was to enhance mathematics for
the children who found it dull.
I'll give you an example: They would talk about different bases of
numbers -- five, six, and so on -- to show the possibilities. That would be
interesting for a kid who could understand base ten -- something to
entertain his mind. But what they had turned it into, in these books, was
that every child had to learn another base! And then the usual horror would
come: "Translate these numbers, which are written in base seven, to base
five." Translating from one base to another is an utterly useless thing. If
you can do it, maybe it's entertaining; if you can't do it, forget it.
There's no point to it.
Anyhow, I'm looking at all these books, all these books, and none of
them has said anything about using arithmetic in science. If there are any
examples on the use of arithmetic at all (most of the time it's this
abstract new modern nonsense), they are about things like buying stamps.
Finally I come to a book that says, "Mathematics is used in science in
many ways. We will give you an example from astronomy, which is the science
of stars." I turn the page, and it says, "Red stars have a temperature of
four thousand degrees, yellow stars have a temperature of five thousand
degrees..." -- so far, so good. It continues: "Green stars have a
temperature of seven thousand degrees, blue stars have a temperature of ten
thousand degrees, and violet stars have a temperature of... (some big
number)." There are no green or violet stars, but the figures for the others
are roughly correct. It's vaguely right -- but already, trouble! That's the
way everything was: Everything was written by somebody who didn't know what
the hell he was talking about, so it was a little bit wrong, always! And how
we are going to teach well by using books written by people who don't quite
understand what they're talking about, I cannot understand. I don't know
why, but the books are lousy; UNIVERSALLY LOUSY!
Anyway, I'm happy with this book, because it's the first example of
applying arithmetic to science. I'm a bit unhappy when I read about the
stars' temperatures, but I'm not very unhappy because it's more or less
right -- it's just an example of error. Then comes the list of problems. It
says, "John and his father go out to look at the stars. John sees two blue
stars and a red star. His father sees a green star, a violet star, and two
yellow stars. What is the total temperature of the stars seen by John and
his father?" -- and I would explode in horror.
My wife would talk about the volcano downstairs. That's only an
example: it was perpetually like that. Perpetual absurdity! There's no
purpose whatsoever in adding the temperature of two stars. Nobody ever does
that except, maybe, to then take the average temperature of the stars, but
not to find out the total temperature of all the stars! It was awful! All it
was was a game to get you to add, and they didn't understand what they were
talking about. It was like reading sentences with a few typographical
errors, and then suddenly a whole sentence is written backwards. The
mathematics was like that. Just hopeless!
Then I came to my first meeting. The other members had given some kind
of ratings to some of the books, and they asked me what my ratings were. My
rating was often different from theirs, and they would ask, "Why did you
rate that book low?"
I would say the trouble with that book was this and this on page
so-and-so -- I had my notes.
They discovered that I was kind of a goldmine: I would tell them, in
detail, what was good and bad in all the books; I had a reason for every
rating.
I would ask them why they had rated this book so high, and they would
say, "Let us hear what you thought about such and such a book." I would
never find out why they rated anything the way they did. Instead, they kept
asking me what I thought.
We came to a certain book, part of a set of three supplementary books
published by the same company, and they asked me what I thought about it.
I said, "The book depository didn't send me that book, but the other
two were nice."
Someone tried repeating the question: "What do you think about that
book?"
"I said they didn't send me that one, so I don't have any judgment on
it."
The man from the book depository was there, and he said, "Excuse me; I
can explain that. I didn't send it to you because that book hadn't been
completed yet. There's a rule that you have to have every entry in by a
certain time, and the publisher was a few days late with it. So it was sent
to us with just the covers, and it's blank in between. The company sent a
note excusing themselves and hoping they could have their set of three books
considered, even though the third one would be late."
It turned out that the blank book had a rating by some of the other
members! They couldn't believe it was blank, because they had a rating. In
fact, the rating for the missing book was a little bit higher than for the
two others. The fact that there was nothing in the book had nothing to do
with the rating.
I believe the reason for all this is that the system works this way.
When you give books all over the place to people, they're busy; they're
careless; they think, "Well, a lot of people are reading this book, so it
doesn't make any difference." And they put in some kind of number -- some of
them, at least; not all of them, but some of them. Then when you receive
your reports, you don't know why this particular book has fewer reports than
the other books -- that is, perhaps one book has ten, and this one only has
six people reporting -- so you average the rating of those who reported; you
don't average the ones who didn't report, so you get a reasonable number.
This process of averaging all the time misses the fact that there is
absolutely nothing between the covers of the book!
I made that theory up because I saw what happened in the curriculum
commission: For the blank book, only six out of the ten members were
reporting, whereas with the other books, eight or nine out of the ten were
reporting. And when they averaged the six, they got as good an average as
when they averaged with eight or nine. They were very embarrassed to
discover they were giving ratings to that book, and it gave me a little bit
more confidence. It turned out the other members of the committee had done a
lot of work in giving out the books and collecting reports, and had gone to
sessions in which the book publishers would explain the books before they
read them; I was the only guy on that commission who read all the books and
didn't get any information from the book publishers except what was in the
books themselves, the things that would ultimately go to the schools.
This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by
looking at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who
looked at it carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was
permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the
length of the Emperor of China's nose? To find out, you go all over the
country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China's
nose is, and you average it. And that would be very "accurate" because you
averaged so many people. But it's no way to find anything out; when you have
a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it,
you don't improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging.
At first we weren't supposed to talk about the cost of the books. We
were told how many books we could choose, so we designed a program which
used a lot of supplementary books, because all the new textbooks had
failures of one kind or another. The most serious failures were in the "new
math" books: there were no applications; not enough word problems. There was
no talk of selling stamps; instead there was too much talk about commutation
and abstract things and not enough translation to situations in the world.
What do you do: add, subtract, multiply, or divide? So we suggested some
books which had some of that as supplementary -- one or two for each
classroom -- in addition to a textbook for each student. We had it all
worked out to balance everything, after much discussion.
When we took our recommendations to the Board of Education, they told
us they didn't have as much money as they had thought, so we'd have to go
over the whole thing and cut out this and that, now taking the cost into
consideration, and ruining what was a fairly balanced program, in which
there was a chance for a teacher to find examples of the things (s)he
needed.
Now that they changed the rules about how many books we could recommend
and we had no more chance to balance, it was a pretty lousy program. When
the senate budget committee got to it, the program was emasculated still
further. Now it was really lousy! I was asked to appear before the state
senators when the issue was being discussed, but I declined: By that time,
having argued this stuff so much, I was tired. We had prepared our
recommendations for the Board of Education, and I figured it was their job
to present it to the state -- which was legally right, but not politically
sound. I shouldn't have given up so soon, but to have worked so hard and
discussed so much about all these books to make a fairly balanced program,
and then to have the whole thing scrapped at the end -- that was
discouraging! The whole thing was an unnecessary effort that could have been
turned around and done the opposite way: start with the cost of the books,
and buy what you can afford.
What finally clinched it, and made me ultimately resign, was that the
following year we were going to discuss science books. I thought maybe the
science would be different, so I looked at a few of them.
The same thing happened: something would look good at first and then
turn out to be horrifying. For example, there was a book that started out
with four pictures: first there was a wind-up toy; then there was an
automobile; then there was a boy riding a bicycle; then there was something
else. And underneath each picture it said, "What makes it go?"
I thought, "I know what it is: They're going to talk about mechanics,
how the springs work inside the toy; about chemistry, how the engine of the
automobile works; and biology, about how the muscles work."
It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: "What makes
it go? Everything goes because the sun is shining." And then we would have
fun discussing it:
"No, the toy goes because the spring is wound up," I would say.
"How did the spring get wound up?" he would ask.
"I wound it up."
"And how did you get moving?"
"From eating."
"And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it's because the
sun is shining that all these things are moving." That would get the concept
across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun's power.
I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, "Energy makes
it go." And for the boy on the bicycle, "Energy makes it go." For
everything, "Energy makes it go."
Now that doesn't mean anything. Suppose it's "Wakalixes." That's the
general principle: "Wakalixes makes it go." There's no knowledge coming in.
The child doesn't learn anything; it's just a word!
What they should have done is to look at the wind-up toy, see that
there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never
mind "energy." Later on, when the children know something about how the toy
actually works, they can discuss the more general principles of energy.
It's also not even true that "energy makes it go," because if it stops,
you could say, "energy makes it stop" just as well. What they're talking
about is concentrated energy being transformed into more dilute forms, which
is a very subtle aspect of energy. Energy is neither increased nor decreased
in these examples; it's just changed from one form to another. And when the
things stop, the energy is changed into heat, into general chaos.
But that's the way all the books were: They said things that were
useless, mixed-up, ambiguous, confusing, and partially incorrect. How
anybody can learn science from these books, I don't know, because it's not
science.
So when I saw all these horrifying books with the same kind of trouble
as the math books had, I saw my volcano process starting again. Since I was
exhausted from reading all the math books, and discouraged from its all
being a wasted effort, I couldn't face another year of that, and had to
resign. Sometime later I heard that the energy-makes-it-go book was going to
be recommended by the curriculum commission to the Board of Education, so I
made one last effort. At each meeting of the commission the public was
allowed to make comments, so I got up and said why I thought the book was
bad.
The man who replaced me on the commission said, "That book was approved
by sixty-five engineers at the Such-and-such Aircraft Company!"
I didn't doubt that the company had some pretty good engineers, but to
take sixty-five engineers is to take a wide range of ability -- and to
necessarily include some pretty poor guys! It was once again the problem of
averaging the length of the emperor's nose, or the ratings on a book with
nothing between the covers. It would have been far better to have the
company decide who their better engineers were, and to have them look at the
book. I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys -- but
the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!
I couldn't get through to him, and the book was approved by the board.
When I was still on the commission, I had to go to San Francisco a few
times for some of the meetings, and when I returned to Los Angeles from the
first trip, I stopped in the commission office to get reimbursed for my
expenses.
"How much did it cost, Mr. Feynman?"
"Well, I flew to San Francisco, so it's the airfare, plus the parking
at the airport while I was away."
"Do you have your ticket?"
I happened to have the ticket.
"Do you have a receipt for the parking?"
"No, but it cost $2.35 to park my car."
"But we have to have a receipt."
"I told you how much it cost. If you don't trust me, why do you let me
tell you what I think is good and bad about the schoolbooks?".
There was a big stew about that. Unfortunately, I had been used to
giving lectures for some company or university or for ordinary people, not
for the government. I was used to, "What were your expenses?" -- "So-and-so
much." -- "Here you are, Mr. Feynman."
I then decided I wasn't going to give them a receipt for anything.
After the second trip to San Francisco they again asked me for my
ticket and receipts.
"I haven't got any."
"This can't go on, Mr. Feynman."
"When I accepted to serve on the commission, I was told you were going
to pay my expenses."
"But we expected to have some receipts to prove the expenses."
"I have nothing to prove it, but you know I live in Los Angeles and I
go to these other towns; how the hell do you think I get there?"
They didn't give in, and neither did I. I feel when you're in a
position like that, where you choose not to buckle down to the System, you
must pay the consequences if it doesn't work. So I'm perfectly satisfied,
but I never did get compensation for the trips.
It's one of those games I play. They want a receipt? I'm not giving
them a receipt. Then you're not going to get the money. OK, then I'm not
taking the money. They don't trust me? The hell with it; they don't have to
pay me. Of course it's absurd! I know that's the way the government works;
well, screw the government! I feel that human beings should treat human
beings like human beings. And unless I'm going to be treated like one, I'm
not going to have anything to do with them! They feel bad? They feel bad. I
feel bad, too. We'll just let it go. I know they're "protecting the
taxpayer," but see how well you think the taxpayer was being protected in
the following situation.
There were two books that we were unable to come to a decision about
after much discussion; they were extremely close. So we left it open to the
Board of Education to decide. Since the board was now taking the cost into
consideration, and since the two books were so evenly matched, the board
decided to open the bids and take the lower one.
Then the question came up, "Will the schools be getting the books at
the regular time, or could they, perhaps, get them a little earlier, in time
for the coming term?"
One publisher's representative got up and said, "We are happy that you
accepted our bid; we can get it out in time for the next term."
A representative of the publisher that lost out was also there, and he
got up and said, "Since our bids were submitted based on the later deadline,
I think we should have a chance to bid again for the earlier deadline,
because we too can meet the earlier deadline."
Mr. Norris, the Pasadena lawyer on the board, asked the guy from the
other publisher, "And how much would it cost for us to get your books at the
earlier date?"
And he gave a number: It was less!
The first guy got up: "If he changes his bid, I have the right to
change my bid!" -- and his bid is still less!
Norris asked, "Well how is that -- we get the books earlier and it's
cheaper?"
"Yes," one guy says. "We can use a special offset method we wouldn't
normally use..." -- some excuse why it came out cheaper.
The other guy agreed: "When you do it quicker, it costs less!"
That was really a shock. It ended up two million dollars cheaper.
Norris was really incensed by this sudden change.
What happened, of course, was that the uncertainty about the date had
opened the possibility that these guys could bid against each other.
Normally, when books were supposed to be chosen without taking the cost into
consideration, there was no reason to lower the price; the book publishers
could put the prices at any place they wanted to. There was no advantage in
competing by lowering the price; the way you competed was to impress the
members of the curriculum commission.
By the way, whenever our commission had a meeting, there were book
publishers entertaining curriculum commission members by taking them to
lunch and talking to them about their books. I never went.
It seems obvious now, but I didn't know what was happening the time I
got a package of dried fruit and whatnot delivered by Western Union with a
message that read, "From our family to yours, Happy Thanksgiving -- The
Families."
It was from a family I had never heard of in Long Beach, obviously
someone wanting to send this to his friend's family who got the name and
address wrong, so I thought I'd better straighten it out. I called up
Western Union, got the telephone number of the people who sent the stuff,
and I called them.
"Hello, my name is Mr. Feynman. I received a package..."
"Oh, hello, Mr. Feynman, this is Pete Pamilio" and he says it in such a
friendly way that I think I'm supposed to know who he is! I'm normally such
a dunce that I can't remember who anyone is.
So I said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Pamilio, but I don't quite remember who you
are..."
It turned out he was a representative of one of the publishers whose
books I had to judge on the curriculum commission.
"I see. But this could be misunderstood."
"It's only family to family."
"Yes, but I'm judging a book that you're publishing, and maybe someone
might misinterpret your kindness!" I knew what was happening, but I made it
sound like I was a complete idiot.
Another thing like this happened when one of the publishers sent me a
leather briefcase with my name nicely written in gold on it. I gave them the
same stuff: "I can't accept it; I'm judging some of the books you're
publishing. I don't think you understand that!"
One commissioner, who had been there for the greatest length of time,
said, "I never accept the stuff; it makes me very upset. But it just goes
on."
But I really missed one opportunity. If I had only thought fast enough,
I could have had a very good time on that commission. I got to the hotel in
San Francisco in the evening to attend my very first meeting the next day,
and I decided to go out to wander in the town and eat something. I came out
of the elevator, and sitting on a bench in the hotel lobby were two guys who
jumped up and said, "Good evening, Mr. Feynman. Where are you going? Is
there something we can show you in San Francisco?" They were from a
publishing company, and I didn't want to have anything to do with them.
"I'm going out to eat."
"We can take you out to dinner."
"No, I want to be alone."
"Well, whatever you want, we can help you."
I couldn't resist. I said, "Well, I'm going out to get myself in
trouble."
"I think we can help you in that, too."
"No, I think I'll take care of that myself." Then I thought, "What an
error! I should have let all that stuff operate and keep a diary, so the
people of the state of California could find out how far the publishers will
go!" And when I found out about the two-million-dollar difference, God knows
what the pressures are!
--------
Alfred Nobel's Other Mistake
In Canada they have a big association of physics students. They have
meetings; they give papers, and so on. One time the Vancouver chapter wanted
to have me come and talk to them. The girl in charge of it arranged with my
secretary to fly all the way to Los Angeles without telling me. She just
walked into my office. She was really cute, a beautiful blonde. (That
helped; it's not supposed to, but it did.) And I was impressed that the
students in Vancouver had financed the whole thing. They treated me so
nicely in Vancouver that now I know the secret of how to really be
entertained and give talks: Wait for the students to ask you.
One time, a few years after I had won the Nobel Prize, some kids from
the Irvine students' physics club came around and wanted me to talk. I said,
"I'd love to do it. What I want to do is talk just to the physics club. But
-- I don't want to be immodest -- I've learned from experience that there'll
be trouble."
I told them how I used to go over to a local high school every year to
talk to the physics club about relativity, or whatever they asked about.
Then, after I got the Prize, I went over there again, as usual, with no
preparation, and they stuck me in front of an assembly of three hundred
kids.
It was a mess!
I got that shock about three or four times, being an idiot and not
catching on right away. When I was invited to Berkeley to give a talk on
something in physics, I prepared something rather technical, expecting to
give it to the usual physics department group. But when I got there, this
tremendous lecture hall is full of people! And I know there's not that many
people in Berkeley who know the level at which I prepared my talk. My
problem is, I like to please the people who come to hear me, and I can't do
it if everybody and his brother wants to hear: I don't know my audience
then.
After the students understood that I can't just easily go over
somewhere and give a talk to the physics club, I said, "Let's cook up a
dull-sounding title and a dull-sounding professor's name, and then only the
kids who are really interested in physics will bother to come, and those are
the ones we want, OK? You don't have to sell anything."
A few posters appeared on the Irvine campus: Professor Henry Warren
from the University of Washington is going to talk about the structure of
the proton on May 17th at 3:00 in Room D102.
Then I came and said, "Professor Warren had some personal difficulties
and was unable to come and speak to you today, so he telephoned me and asked
me if I would talk to you about the subject, since I've been doing some work
in the field. So here I am." It worked great.
But then, somehow or other, the faculty adviser of the club found out
about the trick, and he got very angry at them. He said, "You know, if it
were known that Professor Feynman was coming down here, a lot of people
would like to have listened to him."
The students explained, "That's just it!" But the adviser was mad that
he hadn't been allowed in on the joke.
Hearing that the students were in real trouble, I decided to write a
letter to the adviser and explained that it was all my fault, that I
wouldn't have given the talk unless this arrangement had been made; that I
had told the students not to tell anyone; I'm very sorry; please excuse me,
blah, blah, blah... That's the kind of stuff I have to go through on account
of that damn prize!
Just last year I was invited by the students at the University of
Alaska in Fairbanks to talk, and had a wonderful time, except for the
interviews on local television. I don't need interviews; there's no point to
it. I came to talk to the physics students, and that's it. If everybody in
town wants to know that, let the school newspaper tell them. It's on account
of the Nobel Prize that I've got to have an interview -- I'm a big shot,
right?
A friend of mine who's a rich man -- he invented some kind of simple
digital switch -- tells me about these people who contribute money to make
prizes or give lectures: "You always look at them carefully to find out what
crockery they're trying to absolve their conscience of."
My friend Matt Sands was once going to write a book to be called Alfred
Nobel's Other Mistake.
For many years I would look, when the time was coming around to give
out the Prize, at who might get it. But after a while I wasn't even aware of
when it was the right "season." I therefore had no idea why someone would be
calling me at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. "Professor Feynman?"
"Hey! Why are you bothering me at this time in the morning?"
"I thought you'd like to know that you've won the Nobel Prize."
"Yeah, but I'm sleeping! It would have been better if you had called me
in the morning."-- and I hung up.
My wife said, "Who was that?"
"They told me I won the Nobel Prize."
"Oh, Richard, who was it?" I often kid around and she is so smart that
she never gets fooled, but this time I caught her.
The phone rings again: "Professor Feynman, have you heard..."
(In a disappointed voice) "Yeah."
Then I began to think, "How can I turn this all off? I don't want any
of this!" So the first thing was to take the telephone off the hook, because
calls were coming one right after the other. I tried to go back to sleep,
but found it was impossible.
I went down to the study to think: What am I going to do? Maybe I won't
accept the Prize. What would happen then? Maybe that's impossible.
I put the receiver back on the hook and the phone rang right away. It
was a guy from Time magazine. I said to him, "Listen, I've got a problem, so
I want this off the record. I don't know how to get out of this thing. Is
there some way not to accept the Prize?"
He said, "I'm afraid, sir, that there isn't any way you can do it
without making more of a fuss than if you leave it alone." It was obvious.
We had quite a conversation, about fifteen or twenty minutes, and the Time
guy never published anything about it.
I said thank you very much to the Time guy and hung up. The phone rang
immediately: it was the newspaper.
"Yes, you can come up to the house. Yes, it's all right. Yes, Yes,
Yes..."
One of the phone calls was a guy from the Swedish consulate. He was
going to have a reception in Los Angeles. I figured that since I decided to
accept the Prize, I've got to go through with all this stuff.
The consul said, "Make a list of the people you would like to invite,
and we'll make a list of the people we are inviting. Then I'll come to your
office and we'll compare the lists to see if there are any duplicates, and
we'll make up the invitations..."
So I made up my list. It had about eight people -- my neighbor from
across the street, my artist friend Zorthian, and so on.
The consul came over to my office with his list: the Governor of the
State of California, the This, the That; Getty, the oilman; some actress --
it had three hundred people! And, needless to say, there was no duplication
whatsoever!
Then I began to get a little bit nervous. The idea of meeting all these
dignitaries frightened me.
The consul saw I was worried. "Oh, don't worry," he said. "Most of them
don't come."
Well, I had never arranged a party that I invited people to, and knew
to expect them not to come! I don't have to kowtow to anybody and give them
the delight of being honored with this invitation that they can refuse; it's
stupid! By the time I got home I was really upset with the whole thing. I
called the consul back and said, "I've thought it over, and I realize that I
just can't go through with the reception." He was delighted. He said,
"You're perfectly right." I think he was in the same position -- having to
set up a party for this jerk was just a pain in the ass. It turned out, in
the end, everybody was happy. Nobody wanted to come, including the guest of
honor! The host was much better off, too!
I had a certain psychological difficulty all the way through this
period. You see, I had been brought up by my father against royalty and pomp
(he was in the uniforms business, so he knew the difference between a man
with a uniform on, and with the uniform off -- it's the same man). I had
actually learned to ridicule this stuff all my life, and it was so strong
and deeply cut into me that I couldn't go up to a king without some strain.
It was childish, I know, but I was brought up that way, so it was a problem.
People told me that there was a rule in Sweden that after you accept
the Prize, you have to back away from the king without turning around. You
come down some steps, accept the Prize, and then go back up the steps. So I
said to myself, "All right, I'm gonna fix them!" -- and I practiced jumping
up stairs, backwards, to show how ridiculous their custom was. I was in a
terrible mood! That was stupid and silly, of course. I found out this wasn't
a rule any more; you could turn around when you left the king, and walk like
a normal human being, in the direction you were intending to go, with your
nose in front.
I was pleased to find that not all the people in Sweden take the royal
ceremonies as seriously as you might think. When you get there, you discover
that they're on your side. The students had, for example, a special ceremony
in which they granted each Nobel-Prize-winner the special "Order of the
Frog." When you get this little frog, you have to make a frog noise.
When I was younger I was anti-culture, but my father had some good
books around. One was a book with the old Greek play The Frogs in it, and I
glanced at it one time and I saw in there that a frog talks. It was written
as "brek, kek, kek." I thought, "No frog ever made a sound like that; that's
a crazy way to describe it!" so I tried it, and after practicing it awhile,
I realized that it's very accurately what a frog says.
So my chance glance into a book by Aristophanes turned out to be
useful, later on: I could make a good frog noise at the students' ceremony
for the Nobel-Prize-winners! And jumping backwards fit right in, too. So I
liked that part of it; that ceremony went well.
While I had a lot of fun, I did still have this psychological
difficulty all the way through. My greatest problem was the Thank-You speech
that you give at the King's Dinner. When they give you the Prize they give
you some nicely bound books about the years before, and they have all the
Thank-You speeches written out as if they're some big deal. So you begin to
think it's of some importance what you say in this Thank-You speech, because
it's going to be published. What I didn't realize was that hardly anyone was
going to listen to it carefully, and nobody was going to read it! I had lost
my sense of proportion: I couldn't just say thank you very much,
blah-blah-blah-blah-blah; it would have been so easy to do that, but no, I
have to make it honest. And the truth was, I didn't really want this Prize,
so how do I say thank you when I don't want it?
My wife says I was a nervous wreck, worrying about what I was going to
say in the speech, but I finally figured out a way to make a perfectly
satisfactory-sounding speech that was nevertheless completely honest. I'm
sure those who heard the speech had no idea what this guy had gone through
in preparing it.
I started out by saying that I had already received my prize in the
pleasure I got in discovering what I did, from the fact that others used my
work, and so on. I tried to explain that I had already received everything I
expected to get, and the rest was nothing compared to it. I had already
received my prize.
But then I said I received, all at once, a big pile of letters -- I
said it much better in the speech -- reminding me of all these people that I
knew: letters from childhood friends who jumped up when they read the
morning newspaper and cried out, "I know him! He's that kid we used to play
with!" and so on; letters like that, which were very supportive and
expressed what I interpreted as a kind of love. For that I thanked them.
The speech went fine, but I was always getting into slight difficulties
with royalty. During the King's Dinner I was sitting next to a princess who
had gone to college in the United States. I assumed, incorrectly, that she
had the same attitudes as I did. I figured she was just a kid like everybody
else. I remarked on how the king and all the royalty had to stand for such a
long time, shaking hands with all the guests at the reception before the
dinner. "In America," I said, "we could make this more efficient. We would
design a machine to shake hands."
"Yes, but there wouldn't be very much of a market for it here," she
said, uneasily. "There's not that much royalty."
"On the contrary, there'd be a very big market. At first, only the king
would have a machine, and we could give it to him free. Then, of course,
other people would want a machine, too. The question now becomes, who will
be allowed to have a machine? The prime minister is permitted to buy one;
then the president of the senate is allowed to buy one, and then the most
important senior deputies. So there's a very big, expanding market, and
pretty soon, you wouldn't have to go through the reception line to shake
hands with the machines; you'd send your machine!"
I also sat next to the lady who was in charge of organizing the dinner.
A waitress came by to fill my wineglass, and I said, "No, thank you. I don't
drink."
The lady said, "No, no. Let her pour the drink."
"But I don't drink."
She said, "It's all right. Just look. You see, she has two bottles. We
know that number eighty-eight doesn't drink." (Number eighty-eight was on
the back of my chair.) "They look exactly the same, but one has no alcohol."
"But how do you know?" I exclaimed.
She smiled. "Now watch the king," she said. "He doesn't drink either."
She told me some of the problems they had had this particular year. One
of them was, where should the Russian ambassador sit? The problem always is,
at dinners like this, who sits nearer to the king. The Prize-winners
normally sit closer to the king than the diplomatic corps does. And the
order in which the diplomats sit is determined according to the length of
time they have been in Sweden. Now at that time, the United States
ambassador had been in Sweden longer than the Russian ambassador. But that
year, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Mr. Sholokhov, a
Russian, and the Russian ambassador wanted to be Mr. Sholokhov's translator
-- and therefore to sit next to him. So the problem was how to let the
Russian ambassador sit closer to the king without offending the United
States ambassador and the rest of the diplomatic corps.
She said, "You should have seen what a fuss they went through --
letters back and forth, telephone calls, and so on -- before I ever got
permission to have the ambassador sit next to Mr. Sholokhov. It was finally
agreed that the ambassador wouldn't officially represent the embassy of the
Soviet Union that evening; rather, he was to be only the translator for Mr.
Sholokhov."
After the dinner we went off into another room, where there were
different conversations going on. There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark
sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty
chair at their table and sat down.
She turned to me and said, "Oh! You're one of the Nobel-Prize-winners.
In what field did you do your work?"
"In physics," I said.
"Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can't talk
about it."
"On the contrary," I answered. "It's because somebody knows something
about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows
anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can
talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about
international finance -- gold transfers we can't talk about, because those
are understood -- so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that
we can all talk about!"
I don't know how they do it. There's a way of forming ice on the
surface of the face, and she did it! She turned to talk to somebody else.
After a while I could tell I was completely cut out of the
conversation, so I got up and started away. The Japanese ambassador, who was
also sitting at that table, jumped up and walked after me. "Professor
Feynman," he said, "there is something I should like to tell you about
diplomacy."
He went into a long story about how a young man in Japan goes to the
university and studies international relations because he thinks he can make
a contribution to his country. As a sophomore he begins to have slight
twinges of doubt about what he is learning. After college he takes his first
post in an embassy and has still more doubts about his understanding of
diplomacy, until he finally realizes that nobody knows anything about
international relations. At that point, he can become an ambassador! "So
Professor Feynman," he said, "next time you give examples of things that
everybody talks about that nobody knows about, please include international
relations!"
He was a very interesting man, and we got to talking. I had always been
interested in how it is the different countries and different peoples
develop differently. I told the ambassador that there was one thing that
always seemed to me to be a remarkable phenomenon: how Japan had developed
itself so rapidly to become such a modern and important country in the
world. "What is the aspect and character of the Japanese people that made it
possible for the Japanese to do that?" I asked.
The ambassador answered in a way I like to hear: "I don't know," he
said. "I might suppose something, but I don't know if it's true. The people
of Japan believed they had only one way of moving up: to have their children
educated more than they were; that it was very important for them to move
out of their peasantry to become educated. So there has been a great energy
in the family to encourage the children to do well in school, and to be
pushed forward. Because of this tendency to learn things all the time, new
ideas from the outside would spread through the educational system very
easily. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Japan has advanced so
rapidly."
All in all, I must say I enjoyed the visit to Sweden, in the end.
Instead of coming home immediately, I went to CERN, the European center for
nuclear research in Switzerland, to give a talk. I appeared before my
colleagues in the suit that I had worn to the King's Dinner -- I had never
given a talk in a suit before -- and I began by saying, "Funny thing, you
know; in Sweden we were sitting around, talking about whether there are any
changes as a result of our having won the Nobel Prize, and as a matter of
fact, I think I already see a change: I rather like this suit."
Everybody says "Booooo!" and Weisskopf jumps up and tears off his coat
and says, "We're not gonna wear suits at lectures!"
I took my coat off, loosened my tie, and said, "By the time I had been
through Sweden, I was beginning to like this stuff, but now that I'm back in
the world, everything's all right again. Thanks for straightening me out!"
They didn't want me to change. So it was very quick: at CERN they undid
everything that they had done in Sweden.
It's nice that I got some money -- I was able to buy a beach house --
but altogether, I think it would have been much nicer not to have had the
Prize -- because you never, any longer, can be taken straightforwardly in
any public situation.
In a way, the Nobel Prize has been something of a pain in the neck,
though there was at least one time that I got some fun out of it. Shortly
after I won the Prize, Gweneth and I received an invitation from the
Brazilian government to be the guests of honor at the Carnaval celebrations
in Rio. We gladly accepted and had a great time. We went from one dance to
another and reviewed the big street parade that featured the famous samba
schools playing their wonderful rhythms and music. Photographers from
newspapers and magazines were taking pictures all the time -- "Here, the
Professor from America is dancing with Miss Brazil."
It was fun to be a "celebrity," but we were obviously the wrong
celebrities. Nobody was very excited about the guests of honor that year. I
found out later how our invitation had come about. Gina Lollobrigida was
supposed to be the guest of honor, but just before Carnaval, she said no.
The Minister of Tourism, who was in charge of organizing Carnaval, had some
friends at the Center for Physical Research who knew I had played in a samba
band, and since I had recently won the Nobel Prize, I was briefly in the
news. In a moment of panic the Minister and his friends got this crazy idea
to replace Gina Lollobrigida with the professor of physics!
Needless to say, the Minister did such a bad job on that Carnaval that
he lost his position in the government.
--------
Bringing Culture to the Physicists
Nina Byers, a professor at UCLA, became in charge of the physics
colloquium sometime in the early seventies. The colloquia are normally a
place where physicists from other universities come and talk pure technical
stuff. But partly as a result of the atmosphere of that particular period of
time, she got the idea that the physicists needed more culture, so she
thought she would arrange something along those lines: Since Los Angeles is
near Mexico, she would have a colloquium on the mathematics and astronomy of
the Mayans -- the old civilization of Mexico.
(Remember my attitude to culture: This kind of thing would have driven
me crazy if it were in my university!)
She started looking for a professor to lecture on the subject, and
couldn't find anybody at UCLA who was quite an expert. She telephoned
various places and still couldn't find anybody.
Then she remembered Professor Otto Neugebauer, of Brown University, the
great expert on Babylonian mathematics.* She telephoned him in Rhode Island
and asked if he knew someone on the West Coast who could lecture on Mayan
mathematics and astronomy.
* When I was a young professor at Cornell, Professor Neugebauer had
come one year to give a sequence of lectures, called the Messenger Lectures,
on Babylonian mathematics. They were wonderful. Oppenheimer lectured the
next year. I remember thinking to myself, "Wouldn't it be nice to come,
someday, and be able to give lectures like that!" Some years later, when I
was refusing invitations to lecture at various places, I was invited to give
the Messenger Lectures at Cornell. Of course I couldn't refuse, because I
had put that in my mind so I accepted an invitation to go over to Bob
Wilson's house for a weekend and we discussed various ideas. The result was
a series of lectures called "The Character of Physical Law."
"Yes," he said. "I do. He's not a professional anthropologist or a
historian; he's an amateur. But he certainly knows a lot about it. His name
is Richard Feynman."
She nearly died! She's trying to bring some culture to the physicists,
and the only way to do it is to get a physicist!
The only reason I knew anything about Mayan mathematics was that I was
getting exhausted on my honeymoon in Mexico with my second wife, Mary Lou.
She was greatly interested in art history, particularly that of Mexico. So
we went to Mexico for our honeymoon and we climbed up pyramids and down
pyramids; she had me following her all over the place. She showed me many
interesting things, such as certain relationships in the designs of various
figures, but after a few days (and nights) of going up and down in hot and
steamy jungles, I was exhausted.
In some little Guatemalan town in the middle of nowhere we went into a
museum that had a case displaying a manuscript full of strange symbols,
pictures, and bars and dots. It was a copy (made by a man named Villacorta)
of the Dresden Codex, an original book made by the Mayans found in a museum
in Dresden. I knew the bars and dots were numbers. My father had taken me to
the New York World's Fair when I was a little kid, and there they had
reconstructed a Mayan temple. I remembered him telling me how the Mayans had
invented the zero and had done many interesting things.
The museum had copies of the codex for sale, so I bought one. On each
page at the left was the codex copy, and on the right a description and
partial translation in Spanish.
I love puzzles and codes, so when I saw the bars and dots, I thought,
"I'm gonna have some fun!" I covered up the Spanish with a piece of yellow
paper and began playing this game of deciphering the Mayan bars and dots,
sitting in the hotel room, while my wife climbed up and down the pyramids
all day.
I quickly figured out that a bar was equal to five dots, what the
symbol for zero was, and so on. It took me a little longer to figure out
that the bars and dots always carried at twenty the first time, but they
carried at eighteen the second time (making cycles of 360). I also worked
out all kinds of things about various faces: they had surely meant certain
days and weeks.
After we got back home I continued to work on it. Altogether, it's a
lot of fun to try to decipher something like that, because when you start
out you don't know anything -- you have no clue to go by. But then you
notice certain numbers that appear often, and add up to other numbers, and
so on.
There was one place in the codex where the number 584 was very
prominent. This 584 was divided into periods of 236, 90, 250, and 8. Another
prominent number was 2920, or 584 x 5 (also 365 x 8). There was a table of
multiples of 2920 up to 13 x 2920, then there were multiples of 13 x 2920
for a while, and then -- funny numbers! They were errors, as far as I could
tell. Only many years later did I figure out what they were.
Because figures denoting days were associated with this 584 which was
divided up so peculiarly, I figured if it wasn't some mythical period of
some sort, it might be something astronomical. Finally I went down to the
astronomy library and looked it up, and found that 583.92 days is the period
of Venus as it appears from the earth. Then the 236, 90, 250, 8 became
apparent: it must be the phases that Venus goes through. It's a morning
star, then it can't be seen (it's on the far side of the sun); then it's an
evening star, and finally it disappears again (it's between the earth and
the sun). The 90 and the 8 are different because Venus moves more slowly
through the sky when it is on the far side of the sun compared to when it
passes between the earth and the sun. The difference between the 236 and the
250 might indicate a difference between the eastern and western horizons in
Maya land.
I discovered another table nearby that had periods of 11,959 days. This
turned out to be a table for predicting lunar eclipses. Still another table
had multiples of 91 in descending order. I never did figure that one out
(nor has anyone else).
When I had worked out as much as I could, I finally decided to look at
the Spanish commentary to see how much I was able to figure out. It was
complete nonsense. This symbol was Saturn, this symbol was a god -- it
didn't make the slightest bit of sense. So I didn't have to have covered the
commentary; I wouldn't have learned anything from it anyway.
After that I began to read a lot about the Mayans, and found that the
great man in this business was Eric Thompson, some of whose books I now
have.
When Nina Byers called me up I realized that I had lost my copy of the
Dresden Codex. (I had lent it to Mrs. H. E. Robertson, who had found a Mayan
codex in an old trunk of an antique dealer in Paris. She had brought it back
to Pasadena for me to look at -- I still remember driving home with it on
the front seat of my car, thinking, "I've gotta be careful driving: I've got
the new codex" -- but as soon as I looked at it carefully, I could see
immediately that it was a complete fake. After a little bit of work I could
find where each picture in the new codex had come from in the Dresden Codex.
So I lent her my book to show her, and I eventually forgot she had it.) So
the librarians at UCLA worked very hard to find another copy of Villacorta's
rendition of the Dresden Codex, and lent it to me.
I did all the calculations all over again, and in fact I got a little
bit further than I did before: I figured out that those "funny numbers"
which I thought before were errors were really integer multiples of
something closer to the correct period (583.923) -- the Mayans had realized
that 584 wasn't exactly right!*
* While I was studying this table of corrections for the period of
Venus, I discovered a rare exaggeration by Mr. Thompson. He wrote that by
looking at the table, you can deduce how the Mayans calculated the correct
period of Venus -- use this number four times and that difference once and
you get an accuracy of one day in 4000 years, which is really quite
remarkable, especially since the Mayans observed for only a few hundred
years.
Thompson happened to pick a combination which fit what he thought was
the right period for Venus, 583.92. But when you put in a more exact figure,
something like 583.923, you find the Mayans were off by more. Of course, by
choosing a different combination you can get the numbers in the table to
give you 583.923 with the same remarkable accuracy!
After the colloquium at UCLA Professor Byers presented me with some
beautiful color reproductions of the Dresden Codex. A few months later
Caltech wanted me to give the same lecture to the public in Pasadena. Robert
Rowan, a real estate man, lent me some very valuable stone carvings of Mayan
gods and ceramic figures for the Caltech lecture. It was probably highly
illegal to take something like that out of Mexico, and they were so valuable
that we hired security guards to protect them.
A few days before the Caltech lecture there was a big splurge in the
New York Times, which reported that a new codex had been discovered. There
were only three codices (two of which are hard to get anything out of) known
to exist at the time -- hundreds of thousands had been burned by Spanish
priests as "works of the Devil." My cousin was working for the AP, so she
got me a glossy picture copy of what the New York Times had published and I
made a slide of it to include in my talk.
This new codex was a fake. In my lecture I pointed out that the numbers
were in the style of the Madrid codex, but were 236, 90, 250, 8 -- rather a
coincidence! Out of the hundred thousand books originally made we get
another fragment, and it has the same thing on it as the other fragments! It
was obviously, again, one of these put-together things which had nothing
original in it.
These people who copy things never have the courage to make up
something really different. If you find something that is really new, it's
got to have something different. A real hoax would be to take something like
the period of Mars, invent a mythology to go with it, and then draw pictures
associated with this mythology with numbers appropriate to Mars -- not in an
obvious fashion; rather, have tables of multiples of the period with some
mysterious "errors," and so on. The numbers should have to be worked out a
little bit. Then people would say, "Geez! This has to do with Mars!" In
addition, there should be a number of things in it that are not
understandable, and are not exactly like what has been seen before. That
would make a good fake.
I got a big kick out of giving my talk on "Deciphering Mayan
Hieroglyphics." There I was, being something I'm not, again. People filed
into the auditorium past these glass cases, admiring the color reproductions
of the Dresden Codex and the authentic Mayan artifacts watched over by an
armed guard in uniform; they heard a two-hour lecture on Mayan mathematics
and astronomy from an amateur expert in the field (who even told them how to
spot a fake codex), and then they went out, admiring the cases again. Murray
Gell-Mann countered in the following weeks by giving a beautiful set of six
lectures concerning the linguistic relations of all the languages of the
world.
--------
I gave a series of lectures in physics that the Addison-Wesley Company
made into a book, and one time at lunch we were discussing what the cover of
the book should look like. I thought that since the lectures were a
combination of the real world and mathematics, it would be a good idea to
have a picture of a drum, and on top of it some mathematical diagrams --
circles and lines for the nodes of the oscillating drumheads, which were
discussed in the book.
The book came out with a plain, red cover, but for some reason, in the
preface, there's a picture of me playing a drum. I think they put it in
there to satisfy this idea they got that "the author wants a drum
somewhere." Anyway, everybody wonders why that picture of me playing drums
is in the preface of the Feynman Lectures, because it doesn't have any
diagrams on it, or any other things which would make it clear. (It's true
that I like drumming, but that's another story.)
At Los Alamos things were pretty tense from all the work, and there
wasn't any way to amuse yourself: there weren't any movies, or anything like
that. But I discovered some drums that the boys' school, which had been
there previously, had collected: Los Alamos was in the middle of New Mexico,
where there are lots of Indian villages. So I amused myself -- sometimes
alone, sometimes with another guy -- just making noise, playing on these
drums. I didn't know any particular rhythm, but the rhythms of the Indians
were rather simple, the drums were good, and I had fun.
Sometimes I would take the drums with me into the woods at some
distance, so I wouldn't disturb anybody, and would beat them with a stick,
and sing. I remember one night walking around a tree, looking at the moon,
and beating the drum, making believe I was an Indian.
One day a guy came up to me and said, "Around Thanksgiving you weren't
out in the woods beating a drum, were you?"
"Yes, I was," I said.
"Oh! Then my wife was right!" Then he told me this story:
One night he heard some drum music in the distance, and went upstairs
to the other guy in the duplex house that they live in, and the other guy
heard it too. Remember, all these guys were from the East. They didn't know
anything about Indians, and they were very interested: the Indians must have
been having some kind of ceremony, or something exciting, and the two men
decided to go out to see what it was.
As they walked along, the music got louder as they came nearer, and
they began to get nervous. They realized that the Indians probably had
scouts out watching so that nobody would disturb their ceremony. So they got
down on their bellies and crawled along the trail until the sound was just
over the next hill, apparently. They crawled up over the hill and discovered
to their surprise that it was only one Indian, doing the ceremony all by
himself -- dancing around a tree, beating the drum with a stick, chanting.
The two guys backed away from him slowly, because they didn't want to
disturb him: He was probably setting up some kind of spell, or something.
They told their wives what they saw, and the wives said, "Oh, it must
have been Feynman -- he likes to beat drums."
"Don't be ridiculous!" the men said. "Even Feynman wouldn't be that
crazy!"
So the next week they set about trying to figure out who the Indian
was. There were Indians from the nearby reservation working at Los Alamos,
so they asked one Indian, who was a technician in the technical area, who it
could be. The Indian asked around, but none of the other Indians knew who it
might be, except there was one Indian whom nobody could talk to. He was an
Indian who knew his race: He had two big braids down his back and held his
head high; whenever he walked anywhere he walked with dignity, alone; and
nobody could talk to him. You would be afraid to go up to him and ask him
anything; he had too much dignity. He was a furnace man. So nobody ever had
the nerve to ask this Indian, and they decided it must have been him. (I was
pleased to find that they had discovered such a typical Indian, such a
wonderful Indian, that I might have been. It was quite an honor to be
mistaken for this man.)
So the fella who'd been talking to me was just checking at the last
minute -- husbands always like to prove their wives wrong -- and he found
out, as husbands often do, that his wife was quite right.
I got pretty good at playing the drums, and would play them when we had
parties. I didn't know what I was doing; I just made rhythms -- and I got a
reputation: Everybody at Los Alamos knew I liked to play drums.
When the war was over, and we were going back to "civilization," the
people there at Los Alamos teased me that I wouldn't be able to play drums
any more because they made too much noise. And since I was trying to become
a dignified professor in Ithaca, I sold the drum that I had bought sometime
during my stay at Los Alamos.
The following summer I went back out to New Mexico to work on some
report, and when I saw the drums again, I couldn't stand it. I bought myself
another drum, and thought, "I'll just bring it back with me this time so I
can look at it."
That year at Cornell I had a small apartment inside a bigger house. I
had the drum in there, just to look at, but one day I couldn't quite resist:
I said, "Well, I'll just be very quiet..."
I sat on a chair and put the drum between my legs and played it with my
fingers a little bit: hup, bup, bup, huddle hup. Then a little bit louder --
after all, it was tempting me! I got a little bit louder and BOOM! -- the
telephone rang.
"Hello?"
"This is your landlady. Are you beating drums down there?"
"Yes; I'm sor --"
"It sounds so good. I wonder if I could come down and listen to it more
directly?"
So from that time on the landlady would always come down when I'd start
to drum. That was freedom, all right. I had a very good time from then on,
beating the drums.
Around that time I met a lady from the Belgian Congo who gave me some
ethnological records. In those days, records like that were rare, with drum
music from the Watusi and other tribes of Africa. I really admired the
Watusi drummers very, very much, and I used to try to imitate them -- not
very accurately, but just to sound something like them -- and I developed a
larger number of rhythms as a result of that.
One time I was in the recreation hall, late at night, when there
weren't many people, and I picked up a wastebasket and started to beat the
back end of it. Some guy from way downstairs came running all the way up and
said, "Hey! You play drums!" It turned out he really knew how to play drums,
and he taught me how to play bongos.
There was some guy in the music department who had a collection of
African music, and I'd come to his house and play drums. He'd make
recordings of me, and then at his parties, he had a game that he called
"Africa or Ithaca?" in which he'd play some recordings of drum music, and
the idea was to guess whether what you were hearing was manufactured in the
continent of Africa, or locally. So I must have been fairly good at
imitating African music by that time.
When I came to Caltech, I used to go down to the Sunset Strip a lot.
One time there was a group of drummers led by a big fella from Nigeria
called Ukonu, playing this wonderful drum music -- just percussion -- at one
of the nightclubs. The second-in-command, who was especially nice to me,
invited me to come up on the stage with them and play a little. So I got up
there with the other guys and played along with them on the drums for a
little while.
I asked the second guy if Ukonu ever gave lessons, and he said yes. So
I used to go down to Ukonu's place, near Century Boulevard (where the Watts
riots later occurred) to get lessons in drumming. The lessons weren't very
efficient: he would stall around, talk to other people, and be interrupted
by all kinds of things. But when they worked they were very exciting, and I
learned a lot from him.
At dances near Ukonu's place, there would be only a few whites, but it
was much more relaxed than it is today. One time they had a drumming
contest, and I didn't do very well: They said my drumming was "too
intellectual"; theirs was much more pulsing.
One day when I was at Caltech I got a very serious telephone call.
"This is Mr. Trowbridge, Mahster of the Polytechnic School." The
Polytechnic School was a small, private school which was across the street
diagonally from Caltech. Mr. Trowbridge continued in a very formal voice: "I
have a friend of yours here, who would like to speak to you."
"OK."
"Hello, Dick!" It was Ukonu! It turned out the Master of the
Polytechnic School was not as formal as he was making himself out to be, and
had a great sense of humor. Ukonu was visiting the school to play for the
kids, so he invited me to come over and be on the stage with him, and play
along. So we played for the kids together: I played bongos (which I had in
my office) against his big tumba drum.
Ukonu had a regular thing: He went to various schools and talked about
the African drums and what they meant, and told about the music. He had a
terrific personality and a grand smile; he was a very, very nice man. He was
just sensational on the drums -- he had records out -- and was here studying
medicine. He went back to Nigeria at the beginning of the war there -- or
before the war -- and I don't know what happened to him.
After Ukonu left I didn't do very much drumming, except at parties once
in a while, entertaining a little bit. One time I was at a dinner party at
the Leightons' house, and Bob's son Ralph and a friend asked me if I wanted
to drum. Thinking that they were asking me to do a solo, I said no. But then
they started drumming on some little wooden tables, and I couldn't resist: I
grabbed a table too, and the three of us played on these little wooden
tables, which made lots of interesting sounds.
Ralph and his friend Tom Rutishauser liked playing drums, and we began
meeting every week to just ad lib, develop rhythms and work stuff out. These
two guys were real musicians: Ralph played piano, and Tom played the cello.
All I had done was rhythms, and I didn't know anything about music, which,
as far as I could tell, was just drumming with notes. But we worked out a
lot of good rhythms and played a few times at some of the schools to
entertain the kids. We also played rhythms for a dance class at a local
college -- something I learned was fun to do when I was working at
Brookhaven for a while -- and called ourselves The Three Quarks, so you can
figure out when that was.
One time I went to Vancouver to talk to the students there, and they
had a party with a real hot rock-type band playing down in the basement. The
band was very nice: they had an extra cowbell lying around, and they
encouraged me to play it. So I started to play a little bit, and since their
music was very rhythmic (and the cowbell is just an accompaniment -- you
can't screw it up) I really got hot.
After the party was over, the guy who organized the party told me that
the bandleader said, "Geez! Who was that guy who came down and played on the
cowbell! He can really knock out a rhythm on that thing! And by the way,
that big shot this party was supposed to be for -- you know, he never came
down here; I never did see who it was!"
Anyhow, at Caltech there's a group that puts on plays. Some of the
actors are Caltech students; others are from the outside. When there's a
small part, such as a policeman who's supposed to arrest somebody, they get
one of the professors to do it. It's always a big joke -- the professor
comes on and arrests somebody, and goes off again.
A few years ago the group was doing Guys and Dolls, and there was a
scene where the main guy takes the girl to Havana, and they're in a
nightclub. The director thought it would be a good idea to have the bongo
player on the stage in the nightclub be me.
I went to the first rehearsal, and the lady directing the show pointed
to the orchestra conductor and said, "Jack will show you the music."
Well, that petrified me. I don't know how to read music; I thought all
I had to do was get up there on the stage and make some noise.
Jack was sitting by the piano, and he pointed to the music and said,
"OK, you start here, you see, and you do this. Then I play plonk, plonk,
plonk" -- he played a few notes on the piano. He turned the page. "Then you
play this, and now we both pause for a speech, you see, here" -- and he
turned some more pages and said, "Finally, you play this."
He showed me this "music" that was written in some kind of crazy
pattern of little x's in the bars and lines. He kept telling me all this
stuff, thinking I was a musician, and it was completely impossible for me to
remember any of it.
Fortunately, I got ill the next day, and couldn't come to the next
rehearsal. I asked my friend Ralph to go for me, and since he's a musician,
he should know what it's all about. Ralph came back and said, "It's not so
bad. First, at the very beginning, you have to do something exactly right
because you're starting the rhythm out for the rest of the orchestra, which
will mesh in with it. But after the orchestra comes in, it's a matter of
ad-libbing, and there will be times when we have to pause for speeches, but
I think we'll be able to figure that out from the cues the orchestra
conductor gives."
In the meantime I had gotten the director to accept Ralph too, so the
two of us would be on the stage. He'd play the tumba and I'd play the bongos
-- so that made it a helluva lot easier for me.
So Ralph showed me what the rhythm was. It must have been only about
twenty or thirty beats, but it had to be just so. I'd never had to play
anything just so, and it was very hard for me to get it right. Ralph would
patiently explain, "left hand, and right hand, and two left hands, then
right..." I worked very hard, and finally, very slowly, I began to get the
rhythm just right. It took me a helluva long time -- many days -- to get it.
A week later we went to the rehearsal and found there was a new drummer
there -- the regular drummer had quit the band to do something else -- and
we introduced ourselves to him:
"Hi. We're the guys who are going to be on stage for the Havana scene."
"Oh, hi. Let me find the scene here..." and he turned to the page where
our scene was, took out his drumming stick, and said, "Oh, you start off the
scene with..." and with his stick against the side of his drum he goes bing,
bong, bang-a-bang, bing-a-bing, bang, bang at full speed, while he was
looking at the music! What a shock that was to me. I had worked for four
days to try to get that damn rhythm, and he could just patter it right out!
Anyway, after practicing again and again I finally got it straight and
played it in the show. It was pretty successful: Everybody was amused to see
the professor on stage playing the bongos, and the music wasn't so bad; but
that part at the beginning, that had to be the same: that was hard.
In the Havana nightclub scene some of the students had to do some sort
of dance that had to be choreographed. So the director had gotten the wife
of one of the guys at Caltech, who was a choreographer working at that time
for Universal Studios, to teach the boys how to dance. She liked our
drumming, and when the shows were over, she asked us if we would like to
drum in San Francisco for a ballet.
"WHAT?"
Yes. She was moving to San Francisco, and was choreographing a ballet
for a small ballet school there. She had the idea of creating a ballet in
which the music was nothing but percussion. She wanted Ralph and me to come
over to her house before she moved and play the different rhythms that we
knew, and from those she would make up a story that went with the rhythms.
Ralph had some misgivings, but I encouraged him to go along with this
adventure. I did insist, however, that she not tell anybody there that I was
a professor of physics, Nobel-Prize-winner, or any other baloney. I didn't
want to do the drumming if I was doing it because, as Samuel Johnson said,
If you see a dog walking on his hind legs, it's not so much that he does it
well, as that he does it at all. I didn't want to do it if I was a physics
professor doing it at all; we were just some musicians she had found in Los
Angeles, who were going to come up and play this drum music that they had
composed.
So we went over to her house and played various rhythms we had worked
out. She took some notes, and soon after, that same night, she got this
story cooked up in her mind and said, "OK, I want fifty-two repetitions of
this; forty bars of that; whatever of this, that, this, that..."
We went home, and the next night we made a tape at Ralph's house. We
played all the rhythms for a few minutes, and then Ralph made some cuts and
splices with his tape recorder to get the various lengths right. She took a
copy of our tape with her when she moved, and began training the dancers
with it in San Francisco.
Meanwhile we had to practice what was on that tape: fifty-two cycles of
this, forty cycles of that, and so on. What we had done spontaneously (and
spliced) earlier, we now had to learn exactly. We had to imitate our own
damn tape!
The big problem was counting. I thought Ralph would know how to do that
because he's a musician, but we both discovered something funny. The
"playing department" in our minds was also the "talking department" for
counting -- we couldn't play and count at the same time!
When we got to our first rehearsal in San Francisco, we discovered that
by watching the dancers we didn't have to count because the dancers went
through certain motions.
There were a number of things that happened to us because we were
supposed to be professional musicians and I wasn't. For example, one of the
scenes was about a beggar woman who sifts through the sand on a Caribbean
beach where the society ladies, who had come out at the beginning of the
ballet, had been. The music that the choreographer had used to create this
scene was made on a special drum that Ralph and his father had made rather
amateurishly some years before, and out of which we had never had much luck
in getting a good tone. But we discovered that if we sat opposite each other
on chairs and put this "crazy drum" between us on our knees, with one guy
beating bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda rapidly with his two fingers,
constantly, the other fella could push on the drum in different places with
his two hands and change the pitch. Now it would go
booda-booda-booda-bidda-beeda-beeda-beeda-bidda-booda-booda-booda-badda-bidda-bidda-bidda-badda,
creating a lot of interesting sounds.
Well, the dancer who played the beggar woman wanted the rises and falls
to coincide with her dance (our tape had been made arbitrarily for this
scene), so she proceeded to explain to us what she was going to do: "First,
I do four of these movements this way; then I bend down and sift through the
sand this way for eight counts; then I stand and turn this way." I knew damn
well I couldn't keep track of this, so I interrupted her:
"Just go ahead and do the dance, and I'll play along."
"But don't you want to know how the dance goes? You see, after I've
finished the second sifting part, I go for eight counts over this way." It
was no use; I couldn't remember anything, and I wanted to interrupt her
again, but then there was this problem: I would look like I was not a real
musician!
Well, Ralph covered for me very smoothly by explaining, "Mr. Feynman
has a special technique for this type of situation: He prefers to develop
the dynamics directly and intuitively, as he sees you dance. Let's try it
once that way, and if you're not satisfied, we can correct it."
Well, she was a first-rate dancer, and you could anticipate what she
was going to do. If she was going to dig into the sand, she would get ready
to go down into the sand; every motion was smooth and expected, so it was
rather easy to make the bzzzzs and bshshs and boodas and biddas with my
hands quite appropriate to what she was doing, and she was very satisfied
with it. So we got past that moment where we might have had our cover blown.
The ballet was kind of a success. Although there weren't many people in
the audience, the people who came to see the performances liked it very
much.
Before we went to San Francisco for the rehearsals and the
performances, we weren't sure of the whole idea. I mean, we thought the
choreographer was insane: first, the ballet has only percussion; second,
that we're good enough to make music for a ballet and get paid for it was
surely crazy! For me, who had never had any "culture," to end up as a
professional musician for a ballet was the height of achievement, as it
were.
We didn't think that she'd be able to find ballet dancers who would be
willing to dance to our drum music. (As a matter of fact, there was one
prima donna from Brazil, the wife of the Portuguese consul, who decided it
was beneath her to dance to it.) But the other dancers seemed to like it
very much, and my heart felt good when we played for them for the first time
in rehearsal. The delight they felt when they heard how our rhythms really
sounded (they had until then been using our tape played on a small cassette
recorder) was genuine, and I had much more confidence when I saw how they
reacted to our actual playing. And from the comments of the people who had
come to the performances, we realized that we were a success.
The choreographer wanted to do another ballet to our drumming the
following spring, so we went through the same procedure. We made a tape of
some more rhythms, and she made up another story, this time set in Africa. I
talked to Professor Munger at Caltech and got some real African phrases to
sing at the beginning (GAwa baNYUma GAwa WO, or something like that), and I
practiced them until I had them just so.
Later, we went up to San Francisco for a few rehearsals. When we first
got there, we found they had a problem. They couldn't figure out how to make
elephant tusks that looked good on stage. The ones they had made out of
papier mache were so bad that some of the dancers were embarrassed to dance
in front of them.
We didn't offer any solution, but rather waited to see what would
happen when the performances came the following weekend. Meanwhile, I
arranged to visit Werner Erhard, whom I had known from participating in some
conferences he had organized. I was sitting in his beautiful home, listening
to some philosophy or idea he was trying to explain to me, when all of a
sudden I was hypnotized.
"What's the matter?" he said.
My eyes popped out as I exclaimed, "Tusks!" Behind him, on the floor,
were these enormous, massive, beautiful ivory tusks!
He lent us the tusks. They looked very good on stage (to the great
relief of the dancers): real elephant tusks, super size, courtesy of Werner
Erhard.
The choreographer moved to the East Coast, and put on her Caribbean
ballet there. We heard later that she entered that ballet in a contest for
choreographers from all over the United States, and she finished first or
second. Encouraged by this success, she entered another competition, this
time in Paris, for choreographers from all over the world. She brought a
high-quality tape we had made in San Francisco and trained some dancers
there in France to do a small section of the ballet -- that's how she
entered the contest.
She did very well. She got into the final round, where there were only
two left -- a Latvian group that was doing a standard ballet with their
regular dancers to beautiful classical music, and a maverick from America,
with only the two dancers that she had trained in France, dancing to a
ballet which had nothing but our drum music.
She was the favorite of the audience, but it wasn't a popularity
contest, and the judges decided that the Latvians had won. She went to the
judges afterwards to find out the weakness in her ballet.
"Well, Madame, the music was not really satisfactory. It was not subtle
enough. Controlled crescendoes were missing..."
And so we were at last found out: When we came to some really cultured
people in Paris, who knew music from drums, we flunked out.
--------
I used to give a lecture every Wednesday over at the Hughes Aircraft
Company, and one day I got there a little ahead of time, and was flirting
around with the receptionist, as usual, when about half a dozen people came
in -- a man, a woman, and a few others. I had never seen them before. The
man said, "Is this where Professor Feynman is giving some lectures?"
"This is the place," the receptionist replied.
The man asks if his group can come to the lectures.
"I don't think you'd like 'em much," I say. "They're kind of
technical."
Pretty soon the woman, who was rather clever, figured it out: "I bet
you're Professor Feynman!"
It turned out the man was John Lilly, who had earlier done some work
with dolphins. He and his wife were doing some research into sense
deprivation, and had built some tanks.
"Isn't it true that you're supposed to get hallucinations under those
circumstances?" I asked, excitedly.
"That is true indeed."
I had always had this fascination with the images from dreams and other
images that come to the mind that haven't got a direct sensory source, and
how it works in the head, and I wanted to see hallucinations. I had once
thought to take drugs, but I got kind of scared of that: I love to think,
and I don't want to screw up the machine. But it seemed to me that just
lying around in a sense-deprivation tank had no physiological danger, so I
was very anxious to try it.
I quickly accepted the Lillys' invitation to use the tanks, a very kind
invitation on their part, and they came to listen to the lecture with their
group.
So the following week I went to try the tanks. Mr. Lilly introduced me
to the tanks as he must have done with other people. There were lots of
bulbs, like neon lights, with different gases in them. He showed me the
Periodic Table and made up a lot of mystic hokey-poke about different kinds
of lights that have different kinds of influences. He told me how you get
ready to go into the tank by looking at yourself in the mirror with your
nose up against it -- all kinds of wicky-wack things, all kinds of gorp. I
didn't pay any attention to the gorp, but I did everything because I wanted
to get into the tanks, and I also thought that perhaps such preparations
might make it easier to have hallucinations. So I went through everything
according to the way he said. The only thing that proved difficult was
choosing what color light I wanted, especially as the tank was supposed to
be dark inside.
A sense-deprivation tank is like a big bathtub, but with a cover that
comes down. It's completely dark inside, and because the cover is thick,
there's no sound. There's a little pump that pumps air in, but it turns out
you don't need to worry about air because the volume of air is rather large,
and you're only in there for two or three hours, and you don't really
consume a lot of air when you breathe normally. Mr. Lilly said that the
pumps were there to put people at ease, so I figured it's just
psychological, and asked him to turn the pump off, because it made a little
bit of noise.
The water in the tank has Epsom salts in it to make it denser than
normal water, so you float in it rather easily. The temperature is kept at
body temperature, or 94, or something -- he had it all figured out. There
wasn't supposed to be any light, any sound, any temperature sensation, no
nothing! Once in a while you might drift over to the side and bump slightly,
or because of condensation on the ceiling of the tank a drop of water might
fall, but these slight disturbances were very rare.
I must have gone about a dozen times, each time spending about two and
a half hours in the tank. The first time I didn't get any hallucinations,
but after I had been in the tank, the Lillys introduced me to a man billed
as a medical doctor, who told me about a drug called ketamine, which was
used as an anesthetic. I've always been interested in questions related to
what happens when you go to sleep, or what happens when you get conked out,
so they showed me the papers that came with the medicine and gave me one
tenth of the normal dose.
I got this strange kind of feeling which I've never been able to figure
out whenever I tried to characterize what the effect was. For instance, the
drug had quite an effect on my vision; I felt I couldn't see clearly. But
when I'd look hard at something, it would be OK. It was sort of as if you
didn't care to look at things; you're sloppily doing this and that, feeling
kind of woozy, but as soon as you look, and concentrate, everything is, for
a moment at least, all right. I took a book they had on organic chemistry
and looked at a table full of complicated substances, and to my surprise was
able to read them.
I did all kinds of other things, like moving my hands toward each other
from a distance to see if my fingers would touch each other, and although I
had a feeling of complete disorientation, a feeling of an inability to do
practically anything, I never found a specific thing that I couldn't do.
As I said before, the first time in the tank I didn't get any
hallucinations, and the second time I didn't get any hallucinations. But the
Lillys were very interesting people; I enjoyed them very, very much. They
often gave me lunch, and so on, and after a while we discussed things on a
different level than the early stuff with the lights. I realized that other
people had found the sense-deprivation tank somewhat frightening, but to me
it was a pretty interesting invention. I wasn't afraid because I knew what
it was: it was just a tank of Epsom salts.
The third time there was a man visiting -- I met many interesting
people there -- who went by the name Baba Ram Das. He was a fella from
Harvard who had gone to India and had written a popular book called Be Here
Now. He related how his guru in India told him how to have an "out-of-body
experience" (words I had often seen written on the bulletin board):
Concentrate on your breath, on how it goes in and out of your nose as you
breathe.
I figured I'd try anything to get a hallucination, and went into the
tank. At some stage of the game I suddenly realized that -- it's hard to
explain -- I'm an inch to one side. In other words, where my breath is
going, in and out, in and out, is not centered: My ego is off to one side a
little bit, by about an inch.
I thought: "Now where is the ego located? I know everybody thinks the
seat of thinking is in the brain, but how do they know that?" I knew already
from reading things that it wasn't so obvious to people before a lot of
psychological studies were made. The Greeks thought the seat of thinking was
in the liver, for instance. I wondered, "Is it possible that where the ego
is located is learned by children looking at people putting their hand to
their head when they say, 'Let me think'? Therefore the idea that the ego is
located up there, behind the eyes, might be conventional!" I figured that if
I could move my ego an inch to one side, I could move it further. This was
the beginning of my hallucinations.
I tried and after a while I got my ego to go down through my neck into
the middle of my chest. When a drop of water came down and hit me on the
shoulder, I felt it "up there," above where "I" was. Every time a drop came
I was startled a little bit, and my ego would jump back up through the neck
to the usual place. Then I would have to work my way down again. At first it
took a lot of work to go down each time, but gradually it got easier. I was
able to get myself all the way down to the loins, to one side, but that was
about as far as I could go for quite a while.
It was another time I was in the tank when I decided that if I could
move myself to my loins, I should be able to get completely outside of my
body. So I was able to "sit to one side." It's hard to explain -- I'd move
my hands and shake the water, and although I couldn't see them, I knew where
they were. But unlike in real life, where the hands are to each side, part
way down, they were both to one side! The feeling in my fingers and
everything else was exactly the same as normal, only my ego was sitting
outside, "observing" all this.
From then on I had hallucinations almost every time, and was able to
move further and further outside of my body. It developed that when I would
move my hands I would see them as sort of mechanical things that were going
up and down -- they weren't flesh; they were mechanical. But I was still
able to feel everything. The feelings would be exactly consistent with the
motion, but I also had this feeling of "he is that." "I" even got out of the
room, ultimately, and wandered about, going some distance to locations where
things happened that I had seen earlier another day.
I had many types of out-of-the-body experiences. One time, for example,
I could "see" the back of my head, with my hands resting against it. When I
moved my fingers, I saw them move, but between the fingers and the thumb I
saw the blue sky. Of course that wasn't right; it was a hallucination. But
the point is that as I moved my fingers, their movement was exactly
consistent with the motion that I was imagining that I was seeing. The
entire imagery would appear, and be consistent with what you feel and are
doing, much like when you slowly wake up in the morning and are touching
something (and you don't know what it is), and suddenly it becomes clear
what it is. So the entire imagery would suddenly appear, except it's
unusual, in the sense that you usually would imagine the ego to be located
in front of the back of the head, but instead you have it behind the back of
the head.
One of the things that perpetually bothered me, psychologically, while
I was having a hallucination, was that I might have fallen asleep and would
therefore be only dreaming. I had already had some experience with dreams,
and I wanted a new experience. It was kind of dopey, because when you're
having hallucinations, and things like that, you're not very sharp, so you
do these dumb things that you set your mind to do, such as checking that
you're not dreaming. So I perpetually was checking that I wasn't dreaming by
-- since my hands were often behind my head -- rubbing my thumbs together,
back and forth, feeling them. Of course I could have been dreaming that, but
I wasn't: I knew it was real.
After the very beginning, when the excitement of having a hallucination
made them "jump out," or stop happening, I was able to relax and have long
hallucinations.
A week or two after, I was thinking a great deal about how the brain
works compared to how a computing machine works -- especially how
information is stored. One of the interesting problems in this area is how
memories are stored in the brain: You can get at them from so many
directions compared to a machine -- you don't have to come directly with the
correct address to the memory. If I want to get at the word "rent," for
example, I can be filling in a crossword puzzle, looking for a four-letter
word that begins with r and ends in t; I can be thinking of types of income,
or activities such as borrowing and lending; this in turn can lead to all
sorts of other related memories or information. I was thinking about how to
make an "imitating machine," which would learn language as a child does: you
would talk to the machine. But I couldn't figure out how to store the stuff
in an organized way so the machine could get it out for its own purposes.
When I went into the tank that week, and had my hallucination, I tried
to think of very early memories. I kept saying to myself, "It's gotta be
earlier; it's gotta be earlier" -- I was never satisfied that the memories
were early enough. When I got a very early memory -- let's say from my home
town of Far Rockaway -- then immediately would come a whole sequence of
memories, all from the town of Far Rockaway. If I then would think of
something from another city -- Cedarhurst, or something -- then a whole lot
of stuff that was associated with Cedarhurst would come. And so I realized
that things are stored according to the location where you had the
experience.
I felt pretty good about this discovery, and came out of the tank, had
a shower, got dressed, and so forth, and started driving to Hughes Aircraft
to give my weekly lecture. It was therefore about forty-five minutes after I
came out of the tank that I suddenly realized for the first time that I
hadn't the slightest idea of how memories are stored in the brain; all I had
was a hallucination as to how memories are stored in the brain! What I had
"discovered" had nothing to do with the way memories are stored in the
brain; it had to do with the way I was playing games with myself.
In our numerous discussions about hallucinations on my earlier visits,
I had been trying to explain to Lilly and others that the imagination that
things are real does not represent true reality. If you see golden globes,
or something, several times, and they talk to you during your hallucination
and tell you they are another intelligence, it doesn't mean they're another
intelligence; it just means that you have had this particular hallucination.
So here I had this tremendous feeling of discovering how memories are
stored, and it's surprising that it took forty-five minutes before I
realized the error that I had been trying to explain to everyone else.
One of the questions I thought about was whether hallucinations, like
dreams, are influenced by what you already have in your mind -- from other
experiences during the day or before, or from things you are expecting to
see. The reason, I believe, that I had an out-of-body experience was that we
were discussing out-of-body experiences just before I went into the tank.
And the reason I had a hallucination about how memories are stored in the
brain was, I think, that I had been thinking about that problem all week.
I had considerable discussion with the various people there about the
reality of experiences. They argued that something is considered real, in
experimental science, if the experience can be reproduced. Thus when many
people see golden globes that talk to them, time after time, the globes must
be real. My claim was that in such situations there was a bit of discussion
previous to going into the tank about the golden globes, so when the person
hallucinating, with his mind already thinking about golden globes when he
went into the tank, sees some approximation of the globes -- maybe they're
blue, or something -- he thinks he's reproducing the experience. I felt that
I could understand the difference between the type of agreement among people
whose minds are set to agree, and the kind of agreement that you get in
experimental work. It's rather amusing that it's so easy to tell the
difference -- but so hard to define it!
I believe there's nothing in hallucinations that has anything to do
with anything external to the internal psychological state of the person
who's got the hallucination. But there are nevertheless a lot of experiences
by a lot of people who believe there's reality in hallucinations. The same
general idea may account for a certain amount of success that interpreters
of dreams have. For example, some psychoanalysts interpret dreams by talking
about the meanings of various symbols. And then, it's not completely
impossible that these symbols do appear in dreams that follow. So I think
that, perhaps, the interpretation of hallucinations and dreams is a
self-propagating process: you'll have a general, more or less, success at
it, especially if you discuss it carefully ahead of time.
Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a
hallucination going, but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana
beforehand, it came very quickly. But fifteen minutes was fast enough for
me.
One thing that often happened was that as the hallucination was coming
on, what you might describe as "garbage" would come: there were simply
chaotic images -- complete, random junk. I tried to remember some of the
items of the junk in order to be able to characterize it again, but it was
particularly difficult to remember. I think I was getting close to the kind
of thing that happens when you begin to fall asleep: There are apparent
logical connections, but when you try to remember what made you think of
what you're thinking about, you can't remember. As a matter of fact, you
soon forget what it is that you're trying to remember. I can only remember
things like a white sign with a pimple on it, in Chicago, and then it
disappears. That kind of stuff all the time.
Mr. Lilly had a number of different tanks, and we tried a number of
different experiments. It didn't seem to make much difference as far as
hallucinations were concerned, and I became convinced that the tank was
unnecessary. Now that I saw what to do, I realized that all you have to do
is sit quietly -- why was it necessary that you had to have everything
absolutely super duper?
So when I'd come home I'd turn out the lights and sit in the living
room in a comfortable chair, and try and try -- it never worked. I've never
been able to have a hallucination outside of the tanks. Of course I would
like to have done it at home, and I don't doubt that you could meditate and
do it if you practice, but I didn't practice.
--------
* Adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974.
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as
that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was
discovered for separating the ideas -- which was to try one to see if it
worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became
organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we
are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we
have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed,
when nothing that they proposed ever really worked -- or very little of it
did.
But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a
conversation about UFOs, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded
consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded
that it's not a scientific world.
Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to
investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for
investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that
I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of
mysticism, and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many
hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to
Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place;
you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how
much there was.
At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a
ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable
experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves
crashing onto the rocky shore below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above,
and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the
bath with me.
One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl sitting
with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee!
How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude babe?"
I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm,
uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?"
"Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a
massage table nearby.
I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything
like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it," he says. "I
feel a kind of dent -- is that the pituitary?"
I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!"
They looked at me, horrified -- I had blown my cover -- and said, "It's
reflexology!"
I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also
looked into extrasensory perception and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze
there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by
rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his
invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He
didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess.
And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he
told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us
standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and
him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to
investigate that phenomenon.
But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I
thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to
check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things
that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to
educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods,
and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going
down -- or hardly going up -- in spite of the fact that we continually use
these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that
doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method
should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have
made no progress -- lots of theory, but no progress -- in decreasing the
amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think
ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this
pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children
to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way -- or is even
fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily
a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or
another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the
right thing," according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science
that isn't science.
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are
examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas
there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with
lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So
they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides
of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden
pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like
antennas -- he's the controller -- and they wait for the airplanes to land.
They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the
way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call
these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent
precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing
something essential, because the planes don't land.
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it
would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how
they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It
is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the
earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in
cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in
studying science in school -- we never explicitly say what this is, but just
hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It
is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly.
It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that
corresponds to a kind of utter honesty -- a kind of leaning over backwards.
For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything
that you think might make it invalid -- not only what you think is right
about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things
you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they
worked -- to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if
you know them. You must do the best you can -- if you know anything at all
wrong, or possibly wrong -- to explain it. If you make a theory, for
example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all
the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There
is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to
make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it
fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the
idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come
out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help
others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information
that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example,
with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn't soak through
food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest; but the thing I'm talking about
is not just a matter of not being dishonest, it's a matter of scientific
integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that
advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a
certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will --
including Wesson oil. So it's the implication which has been conveyed, not
the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.
We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other
experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were
wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your
theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you
will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be
very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this
kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much
of the research in cargo cult science.
A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the
subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject.
Nevertheless, it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty.
That's why the planes don't land -- but they don't land.
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the
ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an
electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we
now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the
incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the
history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If
you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger
than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the
next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to
a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away?
It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of -- this history -- because it's
apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was
too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong -- and they
would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got
a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they
eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like
that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind
of a disease.
But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves -- of
having utter scientific integrity -- is, I'm sorry to say, something that we
haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We
just hope you've caught on by osmosis.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are
the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After
you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just
have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but
something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman
when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do
about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like
that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an
ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi.
I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but
bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to
have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as
scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend
who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy,
and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work
were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't
get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of
dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should
explain to the layman what you're doing -- and if they don't want to support
you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to
test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to
publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a
certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds
of results.
I say that's also important in giving certain types of government
advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a
hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some
other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not
giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come
out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it
as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't
publish it at all. That's not giving scientific advice.
Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I
was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department.
One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went
something like this -- it had been found by others that under certain
circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if
she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal
was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.
I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her
laboratory the experiment of the other person -- to do it under condition X
to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A
changed. Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she
thought she had under control.
She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor.
And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has
already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or
so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat
psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what
happens.
Nowadays there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in
the famous field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an experiment done at
the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person
used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might
happen with light hydrogen, he had to use data from someone else's
experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When
asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program
(because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the
experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn't be
any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious
for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for
public relations purposes, they are destroying -- possibly -- the value of
the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is
often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their
scientific integrity demands.
All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For
example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of
mazes, and so on -- with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young
did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one
side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food
was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door
down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the
door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so
beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before?
Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the
other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures
on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then
he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to
change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized
the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in
the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and
still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when
they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in
sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was
able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If
he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment.
That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because
it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using -- not what you think
it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions
you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an
experiment with rat-running.
I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next
experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never
used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very
careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid
no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not
referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he
discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats.
But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of
cargo cult science.
Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other people.
As various people have made criticisms -- and they themselves have made
criticisms of their own experiments -- they improve the techniques so that
the effects are smaller, and smaller, and smaller until they gradually
disappear. All the parapsychologists are looking for some experiment that
can be repeated -- that you can do again and get the same effect --
statistically, even. They run a million rats -- no, it's people this time --
they do a lot of things and get a certain statistical effect. Next time they
try it they don't get it any more. And now you find a man saying that it is
an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is science?
This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which he was
resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology. And, in telling
people what to do next, he says that one of the things they have to do is be
sure they only train students who have shown their ability to get PSI
results to an acceptable extent -- not to waste their time on those
ambitious and interested students who get only chance results. It is very
dangerous to have such a policy in teaching -- to teach students only how to
get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific
integrity.
So I have just one wish for you -- the good luck to be somewhere where
you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where
you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the
organization or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you
have that freedom.
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