"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."
--------
Part 4
From Cornell to Caltech, With A Touch of Brazil
--------
The Dignified Professor
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.
--------
Any Questions?
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?"
--------
I Want My Dollar!
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.
--------
You Just Ask Them?
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.
--------
Lucky Numbers
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.
--------
O Americana, Outra Vez!
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