the U.S. Embassy who knew I liked samba music. I
think I told him that when I had been in Brazil the first time, I had heard
a samba band practicing in the street, and I wanted to learn more about
Brazilian music.
He said a small group, called a regional, practiced at his apartment
every week, and I could come over and listen to them play.
There were three or four people -- one was the janitor from the
apartment house -- and they played rather quiet music up in his apartment;
they had no other place to play. One guy had a tambourine that they called a
pandeiro, and another guy had a small guitar. I kept hearing the beat of a
drum somewhere, but there was no drum! Finally I figured out that it was the
tambourine, which the guy was playing in a complicated way, twisting his
wrist and hitting the skin with his thumb. I found that interesting, and
learned how to play the pandeiro, more or less.
Then the season for Carnaval began to come around. That's the season
when new music is presented. They don't put out new music and records all
the time; they put them all out during Carnaval time, and it's very
exciting.
It turned out that the janitor was the composer for a small samba
"school" -- not a school in the sense of education, but in the sense of fish
-- from Copacabana Beach, called Farqantes de Copacabana, which means
"Fakers from Copacabana," which was just right for me, and he invited me to
be in it.
Now this samba school was a thing where guys from the favelas -- the
poor sections of the city -- would come down, and meet behind a construction
lot where some apartment houses were being built, and practice the new music
for the Carnaval.
I chose to play a thing called a "frigideira," which is a toy frying
pan made of metal, about six inches in diameter, with a little metal stick
to beat it with. It's an accompanying instrument which makes a tinkly, rapid
noise that goes with the main samba music and rhythm and fills it out. So I
tried to play this thing and everything was going all right. We were
practicing, the music was roaring along and we were going like sixty, when
all of a sudden the head of the batteria section, a great big black man,
yelled out, "STOP! Hold it, hold it -- wait a minute!" And everybody
stopped. "Something's wrong with the frigideiras!" he boomed out. "O
Americana, outra vez!" ("The American again!")
So I felt uncomfortable. I practiced all the time. I'd walk along the
beach holding two sticks that I had picked up, getting the twisty motion of
the wrists, practicing, practicing, practicing. I kept working on it, but I
always felt inferior, that I was some kind of trouble, and wasn't really up
to it.
Well, it was getting closer to Carnaval time, and one evening there was
a conversation between the leader of the band and another guy, and then the
leader started coming around, picking people out: "You!" he said to a
trumpeter. "You!" he said to a singer. "You!" -- and he pointed to me. I
figured we were finished. He said, "Go out in front!"
We went out to the front of the construction site -- the five or six of
us -- and there was an old Cadillac convertible, with its top down. "Get
in!" the leader said.
There wasn't enough room for us all, so some of us had to sit up on the
back. I said to the guy next to me, "What's he doing -- is he putting us
out?"
"Nao se, nao se." ("I don't know.")
We drove off way up high on a road which ended near the edge of a cliff
overlooking the sea. The car stopped and the leader said, "Get out!" -- and
they walked us right up to the edge of the cliff!
And sure enough, he said, "Now line up! You first, you next, you next!
Start playing! Now march!"
We would have marched off the edge of the cliff -- except for a steep
trail that went down. So our little group goes down the trail -- the
trumpet, the singer, the guitar, the pandeiro, and the frigideira -- to an
outdoor party in the woods. We weren't picked out because the leader wanted
to get rid of us; he was sending us to this private party that wanted some
samba music! And afterwards he collected money to pay for some costumes for
our band.
After that I felt a little better, because I realized, that when he
picked the frigideira player, he picked me!
Another thing happened to increase my confidence. Some time later, a
guy came from another samba school, in Leblon, a beach further on. He wanted
to join our school.
The boss said, "Where're you from?"
"Leblon."
"What do you play?"
"Frigideira."
"OK. Let me hear you play the frigideira."
So this guy picked up his frigideira and his metal stick and...
"brrra-dup-dup; chick-a-chick." Gee whiz! It was wonderful!
The boss said to him, "You go over there and stand next to O Americana,
and you'll learn how to play the frigideira!"
My theory is that it's like a person who speaks French who comes to
America. At first they're making all kinds of mistakes, and you can hardly
understand them. Then they keep on practicing until they speak rather well,
and you find there's a delightful twist to their way of speaking -- their
accent is rather nice, and you love to listen to it. So I must have had some
sort of accent playing the frigideira, because I couldn't compete with those
guys who had been playing it all their lives; it must have been some kind of
dumb accent. But whatever it was, I became a rather successful frigideira
player.
One day, shortly before Carnaval time, the leader of the samba school
said, "OK, we're going to practice marching in the street."
We all went out from the construction site to the street, and it was
full of traffic. The streets of Copacabana were always a big mess. Believe
it or not, there was a trolley line in which the trolley cars went one way,
and the automobiles went the other way. Here it was rush hour in Copacabana,
and we were going to march down the middle of Avenida Atlantica.
I said to myself, "Jesus! The boss didn't get a license, he didn't OK
it with the police, he didn't do anything. He's decided we're just going to
go out."
So we started to go out into the street, and everybody, all around, was
excited. Some volunteers from a group of bystanders took a rope and formed a
big square around our band, so the pedestrians wouldn't walk through our
lines. People started to lean out of the windows. Everybody wanted to hear
the new samba music. It was very exciting!
As soon as we started to march, I saw a policeman, way down at the
other end of the road. He looked, saw what was happening, and started
diverting traffic! Everything was informal. Nobody made any arrangements,
but it worked fine. The people were holding the ropes around us, the
policeman was diverting the traffic, the pedestrians were crowded and the
traffic was jammed, but we were going along great! We walked down the
street, around the corners, and all over the damn Copacabana, at random!
Finally we ended up in a little square in front of the apartment where
the boss's mother lived. We stood there in this place, playing, and the
guy's mother, and aunt, and so on, came down. They had aprons on; they had
been working in the kitchen, and you could see their excitement -- they were
almost crying. It was really nice to do that human stuff. And all the people
leaning out of the windows -- that was terrific! And I remembered the time I
had been in Brazil before, and had seen one of these samba bands -- how I
loved the music and nearly went crazy over it -- and now I was in it!
By the way, when we were marching around the streets of Copacabana that
day, I saw in a group on the sidewalk two young ladies from the embassy.
Next week I got a note from the embassy saying, "It's a great thing you are
doing, yak, yak, yak..." as if my purpose was to improve relations between
the United States and Brazil! So it was a "great" thing I was doing.
Well, in order to go to these rehearsals, I didn't want to go dressed
in my regular clothes that I wore to the university. The people in the band
were very poor, and had only old, tattered clothes. So I put on an old
undershirt, some old pants, and so forth, so I wouldn't look too peculiar.
But then I couldn't walk out of my luxury hotel on Avenida Atlantica in
Copacabana Beach through the lobby. So I always took the elevator down to
the bottom and went out through the basement.
A short time before Carnaval, there was going to be a special
competition between the samba schools of the beaches -- Copacabana, Ipanema,
and Leblon; there were three or four schools, and we were one. We were going
to march in costume down Avenida Atlantica. I felt a little uncomfortable
about marching in one of those fancy Carnaval costumes, since I wasn't a
Brazilian. But we were supposed to be dressed as Greeks, so I figured I'm as
good a Greek as they are.
On the day of the competition, I was eating at the hotel restaurant,
and the head waiter, who had often seen me tapping on the table when there
was samba music playing, came over to me and said, "Mr. Feynman, this
evening there's going to be something you will love! It's tipico Brasileiro
-- typical Brazilian: There's going to be a march of the samba schools right
in front of the hotel! And the music is so good -- you must hear it."
I said, "Well, I'm kind of busy tonight. I don't know if I can make
it."
"Oh! But you'd love it so much! You must not miss it! It's tipico
Brasileiro!"
He was very insistent, and as I kept telling him I didn't think I'd be
there to see it, he became disappointed.
That evening I put on my old clothes and went down through the
basement, as usual. We put on the costumes at the construction lot and began
marching down Avenida Atlantica, a hundred Brazilian Greeks in paper
costumes, and I was in the back, playing away on the frigideira.
Big crowds were along both sides of the Avenida; everybody was leaning
out of the windows, and we were coming up to the Miramar Hotel, where I was
staying. People were standing on the tables and chairs, and there were
crowds and crowds of people. We were playing along, going like sixty, as our
band started to pass in front of the hotel. Suddenly I saw one of the
waiters shoot up in the air, pointing with his arm, and through all this
noise I can hear him scream, "O PROFESSOR!" So the head waiter found out why
I wasn't able to be there that evening to see the competition -- I was in
it!
The next day I saw a lady I knew from meeting her on the beach all the
time, who had an apartment overlooking the Avenida. She had some friends
over to watch the parade of the samba schools, and when we went by, one of
her friends exclaimed, "Listen to that guy play the frigideira -- he is
good!" I had succeeded. I got a kick out of succeeding at something I wasn't
supposed to be able to do.
When the time came for Carnaval, not very many people from our school
showed up. There were some special costumes that were made just for the
occasion, but not enough people. Maybe they had the attitude that we
couldn't win against the really big samba schools from the city; I don't
know. I thought we were working day after day, practicing and marching for
the Carnaval, but when Carnaval came, a lot of the band didn't show up, and
we didn't compete very well. Even as we were marching around in the street,
some of the band wandered off. Funny result! I never did understand it very
well, but maybe the main excitement and fun was trying to win the contest of
the beaches, where most people felt their level was. And we did win, by the
way.
During that ten-month stay in Brazil I got interested in the energy
levels of the lighter nuclei. I worked out all the theory for it in my hotel
room, but I wanted to check how the data from the experiments looked. This
was new stuff that was being worked out up at the Kellogg Laboratory by the
experts at Caltech, so I made contact with them -- the timing was all
arranged -- by ham radio. I found an amateur radio operator in Brazil, and
about once a week I'd go over to his house. He'd make contact with the ham
radio operator in Pasadena, and then, because there was something slightly
illegal about it, he'd give me some call letters and would say, "Now I'll
turn you over to WKWX, who's sitting next to me and would like to talk to
you."
So I'd say, "This is WKWX. Could you please tell me the spacing between
the certain levels in boron we talked about last week," and so on. I would
use the data from the experiments to adjust my constants and check whether I
was on the right track.
The first guy went on vacation, but he gave me another amateur radio
operator to go to. This second guy was blind and operated his station. They
were both very nice, and the contact I had with Caltech by ham radio was
very effective and useful to me.
As for the physics itself, I worked out quite a good deal, and it was
sensible. It was worked out and verified by other people later. I decided,
though, that I had so many parameters that I had to adjust -- too much
"phenomenological adjustment of constants" to make everything fit -- that I
couldn't be sure it was very useful. I wanted a rather deeper understanding
of the nuclei, and I was never quite convinced it was very significant, so I
never did anything with it.
In regard to education in Brazil, I had a very interesting experience.
I was teaching a group of students who would ultimately become teachers,
since at that time there were not many opportunities in Brazil for a highly
trained person in science. These students had already had many courses, and
this was to be their most advanced course in electricity and magnetism --
Maxwell's equations, and so on.
The university was located in various office buildings throughout the
city, and the course I taught met in a building which overlooked the bay.
I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which
the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the
question -- the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell
-- they couldn't answer it at all! For instance, one time I was talking
about polarized light, and I gave them all some strips of polaroid.
Polaroid passes only light whose electric vector is in a certain
direction, so I explained how you could tell which way the light is
polarized from whether the polaroid is dark or light.
We first took two strips of polaroid and rotated them until they let
the most light through. From doing that we could tell that the two strips
were now admitting light polarized in the same direction -- what passed
through one piece of polaroid could also pass through the other. But then I
asked them how one could tell the absolute direction of polarization, for a
single piece of polaroid.
They hadn't any idea.
I knew this took a certain amount of ingenuity, so I gave them a hint:
"Look at the light reflected from the bay outside."
Nobody said anything.
Then I said, "Have you ever heard of Brewster's Angle?"
"Yes, sir! Brewster's Angle is the angle at which light reflected from
a medium with an index of refraction is completely polarized."
"And which way is the light polarized when it's reflected?"
"The light is polarized perpendicular to the plane of reflection, sir."
Even now, I have to think about it; they knew it cold! They even knew the
tangent of the angle equals the index!
I said, "Well?"
Still nothing. They had just told me that light reflected from a medium
with an index, such as the bay outside, was polarized; they had even told me
which way it was polarized.
I said, "Look at the bay outside, through the polaroid. Now turn the
polaroid."
"Ooh, it's polarized!" they said.
After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students
had memorized everything, but they didn't know what anything meant. When
they heard "light that is reflected from a medium with an index," they
didn't know that it meant a material such as water. They didn't know that
the "direction of the light" is the direction in which you see something
when you're looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet
nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, "What is
Brewster's Angle?" I'm going into the computer with the right keywords. But
if I say, "Look at the water," nothing happens -- they don't have anything
under "Look at the water"!
Later I attended a lecture at the engineering school. The lecture went
like this, translated into English: "Two bodies... are considered
equivalent... if equal torques... will produce... equal acceleration. Two
bodies, are considered equivalent, if equal torques, will produce equal
acceleration." The students were all sitting there taking dictation, and
when the professor repeated the sentence, they checked it to make sure they
wrote it down all right. Then they wrote down the next sentence, and on and
on. I was the only one who knew the professor was talking about objects with
the same moment of inertia, and it was hard to figure out.
I didn't see how they were going to learn anything from that. Here he
was talking about moments of inertia, but there was no discussion about how
hard it is to push a door open when you put heavy weights on the outside,
compared to when you put them near the hinge -- nothing!
After the lecture, I talked to a student: "You take all those notes --
what do you do with them?"
"Oh, we study them," he says. "We'll have an exam."
"What will the exam be like?"
"Very easy. I can tell you now one of the questions." He looks at his
notebook and says, " 'When are two bodies equivalent?' And the answer is,
'Two bodies are considered equivalent if equal torques will produce equal
acceleration.' " So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and "learn"
all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had
memorized.
Then I went to an entrance exam for students coming into the
engineering school. It was an oral exam, and I was allowed to listen to it.
One of the students was absolutely super: He answered everything nifty! The
examiners asked him what diamagnetism was, and he answered it perfectly.
Then they asked, "When light comes at an angle through a sheet of material
with a certain thickness, and a certain index N, what happens to the light?"
"It comes out parallel to itself, sir -- displaced."
"And how much is it displaced?"
"I don't know, sir, but I can figure it out." So he figured it out. He
was very good. But I had, by this time, my suspicions.
After the exam I went up to this bright young man, and explained to him
that I was from the United States, and that I wanted to ask him some
questions that would not affect the result of his examination in any way.
The first question I ask is, "Can you give me some example of a diamagnetic
substance?"
"No."
Then I asked, "If this book was made of glass, and I was looking at
something on the table through it, what would happen to the image if I
tilted the glass?"
"It would be deflected, sir, by twice the angle that you've turned the
book."
I said, "You haven't got it mixed up with a mirror, have you?"
"No, sir!"
He had just told me in the examination that the light would be
displaced, parallel to itself, and therefore the image would move over to
one side, but would not be turned by any angle. He had even figured out how
much it would be displaced, but he didn't realize that a piece of glass is a
material with an index, and that his calculation had applied to my question.
I taught a course at the engineering school on mathematical methods in
physics, in which I tried to show how to solve problems by trial and error.
It's something that people don't usually learn, so I began with some simple
examples of arithmetic to illustrate the method. I was surprised that only
about eight out of the eighty or so students turned in the first assignment.
So I gave a strong lecture about having to actually try it, not just sit
back and watch me do it.
After the lecture some students came up to me in a little delegation,
and told me that I didn't understand the backgrounds that they have, that
they can study without doing the problems, that they have already learned
arithmetic, and that this stuff was beneath them.
So I kept going with the class, and no matter how complicated or
obviously advanced the work was becoming, they were never handing a damn
thing in. Of course I realized what it was: They couldn't do it!
One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions.
Finally, a student explained it to me: "If I ask you a question during the
lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, 'What are you wasting our
time for in the class? We're trying to learn something. And you're stopping
him by asking a question'."
It was a kind of one-upmanship, where nobody knows what's going on, and
they'd put the other one down as if they did know. They all fake that they
know, and if one student admits for a moment that something is confusing by
asking a question, the others take a high-handed attitude, acting as if it's
not confusing at all, telling him that he's wasting their time.
I explained how useful it was to work together, to discuss the
questions, to talk it over, but they wouldn't do that either, because they
would be losing face if they had to ask someone else. It was pitiful! All
the work they did, intelligent people, but they got themselves into this
funny state of mind, this strange kind of self-propagating "education" which
is meaningless, utterly meaningless!
At the end of the academic year, the students asked me to give a talk
about my experiences of teaching in Brazil. At the talk there would be not
only students, but professors and government officials, so I made them
promise that I could say whatever I wanted. They said, "Sure. Of course.
It's a free country."
So I came in, carrying the elementary physics textbook that they used
in the first year of college. They thought this book was especially good
because it had different kinds of typeface -- bold black for the most
important things to remember, lighter for less important things, and so on.
Right away somebody said, "You're not going to say anything bad about
the textbook, are you? The man who wrote it is here, and everybody thinks
it's a good textbook."
"You promised I could say whatever I wanted."
The lecture hall was full. I started out by defining science as an
understanding of the behavior of nature. Then I asked, "What is a good
reason for teaching science? Of course, no country can consider itself
civilized unless... yak, yak, yak." They were all sitting there nodding,
because I know that's the way they think.
Then I say, "That, of course, is absurd, because why should we feel we
have to keep up with another country? We have to do it for a good reason, a
sensible reason; not just because other countries do." Then I talked about
the utility of science, and its contribution to the improvement of the human
condition, and all that -- I really teased them a little bit.
Then I say, "The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that
no science is being taught in Brazil!"
I can see them stir, thinking, "What? No science? This is absolutely
crazy! We have all these classes."
So I tell them that one of the first things to strike me when I came to
Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics
books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much
earlier than kids do in the United States, that it's amazing you don't find
many physicists in Brazil -- why is that? So many kids are working so hard,
and nothing comes of it.
Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek
language, who knows that in his own country there aren't many children
studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to
find everybody studying Greek -- even the smaller kids in the elementary
schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his
degree in Greek, and asks him, "What were Socrates' ideas on the
relationship between Truth and Beauty?" -- and the student can't answer.
Then he asks the student, "What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third
Symposium?" the student lights up and goes, "Brrrrrrrrr-up" -- he tells you
everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.
But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the
relationship between Truth and Beauty!
What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country
learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and
then sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates
said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To
the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them
into words the students can understand.
I said, "That's how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids
'science' here in Brazil." (Big blast, right?)
Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using. "There
are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one
place where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it
says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and
so on. The numbers have 'errors' in them -- that is, if you look at them,
you think you're looking at experimental results, because the numbers are a
little above, or a little below, the theoretical values. The book even talks
about having to correct the experimental errors -- very fine. The trouble
is, when you calculate the value of the acceleration constant from these
values, you get the right answer. But a ball rolling down an inclined plane,
if it is actually done, has an inertia to get it to turn, and will, if you
do the experiment, produce five-sevenths of the right answer, because of the
extra energy needed to go into the rotation of the ball. Therefore this
single example of experimental 'results' is obtained from a fake experiment.
Nobody had rolled such a ball, or they would never have gotten those
results!
"I have discovered something else," I continued. "By flipping the pages
at random, and putting my finger in and reading the sentences on that page,
I can show you what's the matter -- how it's not science, but memorizing, in
every circumstance. Therefore I am brave enough to flip through the pages
now, in front of this audience, to put my finger in, to read, and to show
you."
So I did it. Brrrrrrrup -- I stuck my finger in, and I started to read:
"Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the light emitted when crystals are
crushed..."
I said, "And there, have you got science? No! You have only told what a
word means in terms of other words. You haven't told anything about nature
-- what crystals produce light when you crush them, why they produce light.
Did you see any student go home and try it? He can't.
"But if, instead, you were to write, 'When you take a lump of sugar and
crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some
other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called
"triboluminescence." ' Then someone will go home and try it. Then there's an
experience of nature." I used that example to show them, but it didn't make
any difference where I would have put my finger in the book; it was like
that everywhere.
Finally, I said that I couldn't see how anyone could be educated by
this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to
pass exams, but nobody knows anything. "However," I said, "I must be wrong.
There were two Students in my class who did very well, and one of the
physicists I know was educated entirely in Brazil. Thus, it must be possible
for some people to work their way through the system, bad as it is."
Well, after I gave the talk, the head of the science education
department got up and said, "Mr. Feynman has told us some things that are
very hard for us to hear, but it appears to be that he really loves science,
and is sincere in his criticism. Therefore, I think we should listen to him.
I came here knowing we have some sickness in our system of education; what I
have learned is that we have a cancer!" -- and he sat down.
That gave other people the freedom to speak out, and there was a big
excitement. Everybody was getting up and making suggestions. The students
got some committee together to mimeograph the lectures in advance, and they
got other committees organized to do this and that.
Then something happened which was totally unexpected for me. One of the
students got up and said, "I'm one of the two students whom Mr. Feynman
referred to at the end of his talk. I was not educated in Brazil; I was
educated in Germany, and I've just come to Brazil this year."
The other student who had done well in class had a similar thing to
say. And the professor I had mentioned got up and said, "I was educated here
in Brazil during the war, when, fortunately, all of the professors had left
the university, so I learned everything by reading alone. Therefore I was
not really educated under the Brazilian system."
I didn't expect that. I knew the system was bad, but 100 percent -- it
was terrible!
Since I had gone to Brazil under a program sponsored by the United
States Government, I was asked by the State Department to write a report
about my experiences in Brazil, so I wrote out the essentials of the speech
I had just given. I found out later through the grapevine that the reaction
of somebody in the State Department was, "That shows you how dangerous it is
to send somebody to Brazil who is so naive. Foolish fellow; he can only
cause trouble. He didn't understand the problems." Quite the contrary! I
think this person in the State Department was naive to think that because he
saw a university with a list of courses and descriptions, that's what it
was.
--------
Man of a Thousand Tongues
When I was in Brazil I had struggled to learn the local language, and
decided to give my physics lectures in Portuguese. Soon after I came to
Caltech, I was invited to a party hosted by Professor Bacher. Before I
arrived at the party, Bacher told the guests, "This guy Feynman thinks he's
smart because he learned a little Portuguese, so let's fix him good: Mrs.
Smith, here (she's completely Caucasian), grew up in China. Let's have her
greet Feynman in Chinese."
I walk into the party innocently, and Bacher introduces me to all these
people: "Mr. Feynman, this is Mr. So-and-so."
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Feynman."
"And this is Mr. Such-and-such."
"My pleasure, Mr. Feynman."
"And this is Mrs. Smith."
"Ai, choong, ngong jia!" she says, bowing.
This is such a surprise to me that I figure the only thing to do is to
reply in the same spirit. I bow politely to her, and with complete
confidence I say, "Ah ching, jong jien!"
"Oh, my God!" she exclaims, losing her own composure. "I knew this
would happen -- I speak Mandarin and he speaks Cantonese!"
--------
Certainly, Mr. Big!
I used to cross the United States in my automobile every summer, trying
to make it to the Pacific Ocean. But, for various reasons, I would always
get stuck somewhere -- usually in Las Vegas.
I remember the first time, particularly, I liked it very much. Then, as
now, Las Vegas made its money on the people who gamble, so the whole problem
for the hotels was to get people to come there to gamble. So they had shows
and dinners which were very inexpensive -- almost free. You didn't have to
make any reservations for anything: you could walk in, sit down at one of
the many empty tables, and enjoy the show. It was just wonderful for a man
who didn't gamble, because I was enjoying all the advantages -- the rooms
were inexpensive, the meals were next to nothing, the shows were good, and I
liked the girls.
One day I was lying around the pool at my motel, and some guy came up
and started to talk to me. I can't remember how he got started, but his idea
was that I presumably worked for a living, and it was really quite silly to
do that. "Look how easy it is for me," he said. "I just hang around the pool
all the time and enjoy life in Las Vegas."
"How the hell do you do that without working?"
"Simple: I bet on the horses."
"I don't know anything about horses, but I don't see how you can make a
living betting on the horses," I said, skeptically.
"Of course you can," he said. "That's how I live! I'll tell you what:
I'll teach you how to do it. We'll go down and I'll guarantee that you'll
win a hundred dollars."
"How can you do that?"
"I'll bet you a hundred dollars that you'll win," he said. "So if you
win it doesn't cost you anything, and if you lose, you get a hundred
dollars!"
So I think, "Gee! That's right! If I win a hundred dollars on the
horses and I have to pay him, I don't lose anything; it's just an exercise
-- it's just proof that his system works. And if he fails, I win a hundred
dollars. It's quite wonderful!"
He takes me down to some betting place where they have a list of horses
and racetracks all over the country. He introduces me to other people who
say, "Geez, he's great! I won a hunerd dollas!"
I gradually realize that I have to put up some of my own money for the
bets, and I begin to get a little nervous. "How much money do I have to
bet?" I ask. "Oh, three or four hundred dollars." I haven't got that much.
Besides, it begins to worry me: Suppose I lose all the bets?
So then he says, "I'll tell you what: My advice will cost you only
fifty dollars, and only if it works. If it doesn't work, I'll give you the
hundred dollars you would have won anyway." I figure, "Wow! Now I win both
ways -- either fifty or a hundred dollars! How the heck can he do that?"
Then I realize that if you have a reasonably even game -- forget the little
losses from the take for the moment in order to understand it -- the chance
that you'll win a hundred dollars versus losing your four hundred dollars is
four to one. So out of five times that he tries this on somebody, four times
they're going to win a hundred dollars, he gets two hundred (and he points
out to them how smart he is); the fifth time he has to pay a hundred
dollars. So he receives two hundred, on the average, when he's paying out
one hundred! So I finally understood how he could do that.
This process went on for a few days. He would invent some scheme that
sounded like a terrific deal at first, but after I thought about it for a
while I'd slowly figure out how it worked. Finally, in some sort of
desperation he says, "All right, I'll tell you what: You pay me fifty
dollars for the advice, and if you lose, I'll pay you back all your money."
Now I can't lose on that! So I say, "All right, you've got a deal!"
"Fine," he says. "But unfortunately, I have to go to San Francisco this
weekend, so you just mail me the results, and if you lose your four hundred
dollars, I'll send you the money."
The first schemes were designed to make him money by honest arithmetic.
Now, he's going to be out of town. The only way he's going to make money on
this scheme is not to send it -- to be a real cheat.
So I never accepted any of his offers. But it was very entertaining to
see how he operated.
The other thing that was fun in Las Vegas was meeting show girls. I
guess they were supposed to hang around the bar between shows to attract
customers. I met several of them that way, and talked to them, and found
them to be nice people. People who say, "Show girls, eh?" have already made
up their mind what they are! But in any group, if you look at it, there's
all kinds of variety. For example, there was the daughter of a dean of an
Eastern university. She had a talent for dancing and liked to dance; she had
the summer off and dancing jobs were hard to find, so she worked as a chorus
girl in Las Vegas. Most of the show girls were very nice, friendly people.
They were all beautiful, and I just love beautiful girls. In fact, show
girls were my real reason for liking Las Vegas so much.
At first I was a little bit afraid: the girls were so beautiful, they
had such a reputation, and so forth. I would try to meet them, and I'd choke
a little bit when I talked. It was difficult at first, but gradually it got
easier, and finally I had enough confidence that I wasn't afraid of anybody.
I had a way of having adventures which is hard to explain: it's like
fishing, where you put a line out and then you have to have patience. When I
would tell someone about some of my adventures, they might say, "Oh, come on
-- let's do that!" So we would go to a bar to see if something will happen,
and they would lose patience after twenty minutes or so. You have to spend a
couple of days before something happens, on average. I spent a lot of time
talking to show girls. One would introduce me to another, and after a while,
something interesting would often happen.
I remember one girl who liked to drink Gibsons. She danced at the
Flamingo Hotel, and I got to know her rather well. When I'd come into town,
I'd order a Gibson put at her table before she sat down, to announce my
arrival.
One time I went over and sat next to her and she said, "I'm with a man
tonight -- a high-roller from Texas." (I had already heard about this guy.
Whenever he'd play at the craps table, everybody would gather around to see
him gamble.) He came back to the table where we were sitting, and my show
girl friend introduced me to him.
The first thing he said to me was, "You know somethin'? I lost sixty
thousand dollars here last night."
I knew what to do: I turned to him, completely unimpressed, and I said,
"Is that supposed to be smart, or stupid?"
We were eating breakfast in the dining room. He said, "Here, let me
sign your check. They don't charge me for all these things because I gamble
so much here."
"I've got enough money that I don't need to worry about who pays for my
breakfast, thank you." I kept putting him down each time he tried to impress
me.
He tried everything: how rich he was, how much oil he had in Texas, and
nothing worked, because I knew the formula!
We ended up having quite a bit of fun together.
One time when we were sitting at the bar he said to me, "You see those
girls at the table over there? They're whores from Los Angeles."
They looked very nice; they had a certain amount of class.
He said, "Tell you what I'll do: I'll introduce them to you, and then
I'll pay for the one you want."
I didn't feel like meeting the girls, and I knew he was saying that to
impress me, so I began to tell him no. But then I thought, "This is
something! This guy is trying so hard to impress me, he's willing to buy
this for me. If I'm ever going to tell the story..." So I said to him,
"Well, OK, introduce me."
We went over to their table and he introduced me to the girls and then
went off for a moment. A waitress came around and asked us what we wanted to
drink. I ordered some water, and the girl next to me said, "Is it all right
if I have a champagne?"
"You can have whatever you want," I replied, coolly, " 'cause you're
payin' for it."
"What's the matter with you?" she said. "Cheapskate, or something?"
"That's right."
"You're certainly not a gentleman!" she said indignantly.
"You figured me out immediately!" I replied. I had learned in New
Mexico many years before not to be a gentleman.
Pretty soon they were offering to buy me drinks -- the tables were
turned completely! (By the way, the Texas oilman never came back.)
After a while, one of the girls said, "Let's go over to the El Rancho.
Maybe things are livelier over there." We got in their car. It was a nice
car, and they were nice people. On the way, they asked me my name.
"Dick Feynman."
"Where are you from, Dick? What do you do?"
"I'm from Pasadena; I work at Caltech."
One of the girls said, "Oh, isn't that the place where that scientist
Pauling comes from?"
I had been in Las Vegas many times, over and over, and there was nobody
who ever knew anything about science. I had talked to businessmen of all
kinds, and to them, a scientist was a nobody. "Yeah!" I said, astonished.
"And there's a fella named Gellan, or something like that -- a
physicist." I couldn't believe it. I was riding in a car full of prostitutes
and they know all this stuff!
"Yeah! His name is Gell-Mann! How did you happen to know that?"
"Your pictures were in Time magazine." It's true, they had pictures
often U.S. scientists in Time magazine, for some reason. I was in it, and so
were Pauling and Gell-Mann.
"How did you remember the names?" I asked.
"Well, we were looking through the pictures, and we picked out the
youngest and the handsomest!" (Gell-Mann is younger than I am.)
We got to the El Rancho Hotel and the girls continued this game of
acting towards me like everybody normally acts towards them: "Would you like
to gamble?" they asked. I gambled a little bit with their money and we all
had a good time.
After a while they said, "Look, we see a live one, so we'll have to
leave you now," and they went back to work.
One time I was sitting at a bar and I noticed two girls with an older
man. Finally he walked away, and they came over and sat next to me: the
prettier and more active one next to me, and her duller friend, named Pam,
on the other side.
Things started going along very nicely right away. She was very
friendly. Soon she was leaning against me, and I put my arm around her. Two
men came in and sat at a table nearby. Then, before the waitress came, they
walked out.
"Did you see those men?" my new-found friend said.
"Yeah."
"They're friends of my husband."
"Oh? What is this?"
"You see, I just married John Big" -- she mentioned a very famous name
-- "and we've had a little argument. We're on our honeymoon, and John is
always gambling. He doesn't pay any attention to me, so I go off and enjoy
myself, but he keeps sending spies around to check on what I'm doing."
She asked me to take her to her motel room, so we went in my car. On
the way I asked her, "Well, what about John?"
She said, "Don't worry. Just look around for a big red car with two
antennas. If you don't see it, he's not around."
The next night I took the "Gibson girl" and a friend of hers to the
late show at the Silver Slipper, which had a show later than all the hotels.
The girls who worked in the other shows liked to go there, and the master of
ceremonies announced the arrival of the various dancers as they came in. So
in I went with these two lovely dancers on my arm, and he said, "And here
comes Miss So-and-so and Miss So-and-so from the Flamingo!" Everybody looked
around to see who was coming in. I felt great!
We sat down at a table near the bar, and after a little while there was
a bit of a flurry-waiters moving tables around, security guards, with guns,
coming in. They were making room for a celebrity. JOHN BIG was coming in!
He came over to the bar, right next to our table, and right away two
guys wanted to dance with the girls I brought. They went off to dance, and I
was sitting alone at the table when John came over and sat down at my table.
"How are yah?" he said. "Whattya doin' in Vegas?"
I was sure he'd found out about me and his wife. "Just foolin'
around..." (I've gotta act tough, right?)
"How long ya been here?"
"Four or five nights."
"I know ya," he said. "Didn't I see you in Florida?"
"Well, I really don't know..."
He tried this place and that place, and I didn't know what he was
getting at. "I know," he said; "It was in El Morocco." (El Morocco was a big
nightclub in New York, where a lot of big operators go -- like professors of
theoretical physics, right?)
"That must have been it," I said. I was wondering when he was going to
get to it. Finally he leaned over to me and said, "Hey, will you introduce
me to those girls you're with when they come back from dancing?"
That's all he wanted; he didn't know me from a hole in the wall! So I
introduced him, but my show girl friends said they were tired and wanted to
go home.
The next afternoon, I saw John Big at the Flamingo, standing at the
bar, talking to the bartender about cameras and taking pictures. He must be
an amateur photographer: He's got all these bulbs and cameras, but he says
the dumbest things about them. I decided he wasn't an amateur photographer
after all; he was just a rich guy who bought himself some cameras.
I figured by that time that he didn't know I had been fooling around
with his wife; he only wanted to talk to me because of the girls I had. So I
thought I would play a game. I'd invent a part for myself: John Big's
assistant.
"Hi, John," I said. "Let's take some pictures. I'll carry your
flashbulbs."
I put the flashbulbs in my pocket, and we started off taking pictures.
I'd hand him flashbulbs and give him advice here and there; he likes that
stuff.
We went over to the Last Frontier to gamble, and he started to win. The
hotels don't like a high roller to leave, but I could see he wanted to go.
The problem was how to do it gracefully.
"John, we have to leave now," I said in a serious voice.
"But I'm winning."
"Yes, but we have made an appointment this afternoon."
"OK, get my car."
"Certainly, Mr. Big!" He handed me the keys and told me what it looked
like (I didn't let on that I knew).
I went out to the parking lot, and sure enough, there was this big,
fat, wonderful car with the two antennas. I climbed into it and turned the
key -- and it wouldn't start. It had an automatic transmission; they had
just come out and I didn't know anything about them. After a bit I
accidentally shifted it into PARK and it started. I drove it very carefully,
like a million-dollar car, to the hotel entrance, where I got out and went
inside to the table where he was still gambling, and said, "Your car is
ready, sir!"
"I have to quit," he announced, and we left. He had me drive the car.
"I want to go to the El Rancho," he said. "Do you know any girls there?"
I knew one girl there rather well, so I said "Yeah." By this time I
felt confident enough that the only reason he was going along with this game
I had invented was that he wanted to meet some girls, so I brought up a
delicate subject: "I met your wife the other night..."
"My wife? My wife's not here in Las Vegas." I told him about the girl I
met in the bar. "Oh! I know who you mean; I met that girl and her friend in
Los Angeles and brought them to Las Vegas. The first thing they did was use
my phone for an hour to talk to their friends in Texas. I got mad and threw
'em out! So she's been going around telling everybody that she's my wife,
eh?" So that was cleared up.
We went into the El Rancho, and the show was going to start in about
fifteen minutes. The place was packed; there wasn't a seat in the house.
John went over to the majordomo and said, "I want a table."
"Yes, sir, Mr. Big! It will be ready in a few minutes." John tipped him
and went off to gamble. Meanwhile I went around to the back, where the girls
were getting ready for the show, and asked for my friend. She came out and I
explained to her that John Big was with me, and he'd like some company after
the show.
"Certainly, Dick," she said. "I'll bring some friends and we'll see you
after the show."
I went around to the front to find John. He was still gambling. "Just
go in without me," he said. "I'll be there in a minute."
There were two tables, at the very front, right at the edge of the
stage. Every other table in the place was packed. I sat down by myself. The
show started before John came in, and the show girls came out. They could
see me at the table, all by myself. Before, they thought I was some
small-time professor; now they see I'm a BIG OPERATOR.
Finally John came in, and soon afterwards some people sat down at the
table next to us -- John's "wife" and her friend Pam, with two men!
I leaned over to John: "She's at the other table."
"Yeah."
She saw I was taking care of John, so she leaned over to me from the
other table and asked, "Could I talk to John?"
I didn't say a word. John didn't say anything either.
I waited a little while, then I leaned over to John: "She wants to talk
to you."
Then he waited a little bit. "All right," he said.
I waited a little more, and then I leaned over to her: "John will speak
to you now."
She came over to our table. She started working on "Johnnie," sitting
very close to him. Things were beginning to get straightened out a little
bit, I could tell.
I love to be mischievous, so every time they got things straightened
out a little bit, I reminded John of something: "The telephone, John..."
"Yeah!" he said. "What's the idea, spending an hour on the telephone?"
She said it was Pam who did the calling.
Things improved a little bit more, so I pointed out that it was her
idea to bring Pam.
"Yeah!" he said. (I was having a great time playing this game; it went
on for quite a while.)
When the show was over, the girls from the El Rancho came over to our
table and we talked to them until they had to go back for the next show.
Then John said, "I know a nice little bar not too far away from here. Let's
go over there."
I drove him over to the bar and we went in. "See that woman over
there?" he said. "She's a really good lawyer. Come on, I'll introduce you to
her."
John introduced us and excused himself to go to the restroom. He never
came back. I think he wanted to get back with his "wife" and I was beginning
to interfere.
I said, "Hi" to the woman and ordered a drink for myself (still playing
this game of not being impressed and not being a gentleman).
"You know," she said to me, "I'm one of the better lawyers here in Las
Vegas."
"Oh, no, you're not," I replied coolly. "You might be a lawyer during
the day, but you know what you are right now? You're just a barfly in a
small bar in Vegas."
She liked me, and we went to a few places dancing. She danced very
well, and I love to dance, so we had a great time together.
Then, all of a sudden in the middle of a dance, my back began to hurt.
It was some kind of big pain, and it started suddenly. I know now what it
was: I had been up for three days and nights having these crazy adventures,
and I was completely exhausted.
She said she would take me home. As soon as I got into her bed I went
BONGO! I was out.
The next morning I woke up in this beautiful bed. The sun was shining,
and there was no sign of her. Instead, there was a maid. "Sir," she said,
"are you awake? I'm ready with breakfast."
"Well, uh..."
"I'll bring it to you. What would you like?" and she went through a
whole menu of breakfasts.
I ordered breakfast and had it in bed -- in the bed of a woman I didn't
know; I didn't know who she was or where she came from!
I asked the maid a few questions, and she didn't know anything about
this mysterious woman either: She had just been hired, and it was her first
day on the job. She thought I was the man of the house, and found it curious
that I was asking her questions. I got dressed, finally, and left. I never
saw the mysterious woman again.
The first time I was in Las Vegas I sat down and figured out the odds
for everything, and I discovered that the odds for the crap table were
something like .493. If I bet a dollar, it would only cost me 1.4 cents. So
I thought to myself, "Why am I so reluctant to bet? It hardly costs
anything!"
So I started betting, and right away I lost five dollars in succession
-- one, two, three, four, five. I was supposed to be out only seven cents;
instead, I was five dollars behind! I've never gambled since then (with my
own money, that is). I'm very lucky that I started off losing.
One time I was eating lunch with one of the show girls. It was a quiet
time in the afternoon; there was not the usual big bustle, and she said,
"See that man over there, walking across the lawn? That's Nick the Greek.
He's a professional gambler."
Now I knew damn well what all the odds were in Las Vegas, so I said,
"How can he be a professional gambler?"
"I'll call him over."
Nick came over and she introduced us. "Marilyn tells me that you're a
professional gambler."
"That's correct."
"Well, I'd like to know how it's possible to make your living gambling,
because at the table, the odds are .493."
"You're right," he said, "and I'll explain it to you. I don't bet on
the table, or things like that. I only bet when the odds are in my favor."
"Huh? When are the odds ever in your favor?" I asked incredulously.
"It's really quite easy," he said. "I'm standing around a table, when
some guy says, 'It's comin' out nine! It's gotta be a nine!' The guy's
excited; he thinks it's going to be a nine, and he wants to bet. Now I know
the odds for all the numbers inside out, so I say to him, 'I'll bet you four
to three it's not a nine,' and I win in the long run. I don't bet on the
table; instead, I bet with people around the table who have prejudices --
superstitious ideas about lucky numbers."
Nick continued: "Now that I've got a reputation, it's even easier,
because people will bet with me even when they know the odds aren't very
good, just to have the chance of telling the story, if they win, of how they
beat Nick the Greek. So I really do make a living gambling, and it's
wonderful!"
So Nick the Greek was really an educated character. He was a very nice
and engaging man. I thanked him for the explanation; now I understood it. I
have to understand the world, you see.
--------
An Offer You Must Refuse
Cornell had all kinds of departments that I didn't have much interest
in. (That doesn't mean there was anything wrong with them; it's just that I
didn't happen to have much interest in them.) There was domestic science,
philosophy (the guys from this department were particularly inane), and
there were the cultural things -- music and so on. There were quite a few
people I did enjoy talking to, of course. In the math department there was
Professor Kac and Professor Feller; in chemistry, Professor Calvin; and a
great guy in the zoology department, Dr. Griffin, who found out that bats
navigate by making echoes. But it was hard to find enough of these guys to
talk to, and there was all this other stuff which I thought was low-level
baloney. And Ithaca was a small town.
The weather wasn't really very good. One day I was driving in the car,
and there came one of those quick snow flurries that you don't expect, so
you're not ready for it, and you figure, "Oh, it isn't going to amount to
much; I'll keep on going."
But then the snow gets deep enough that the car begins to skid a little
bit, so you have to put the chains on. You get out of the car, put the
chains out on the snow, and it's cold, and you're beginning to shiver. Then
you roll the car back onto the chains, and you have this problem -- or we
had it in those days; I don't know what there is now -- that there's a hook
on the inside that you have to hook first. And because the chains have to go
on pretty tight, it's hard to get the hook to hook. Then you have to push
this clamp down with your fingers, which by this time are nearly frozen. And
because you're on the outside of the tire, and the hook is on the inside,
and your hands are cold, it's very difficult to control. It keeps slipping,
and it's cold, and the snow's coming down, and you're trying to push this
clamp, and your hand's hurting, and the damn thing's not going down -- well,
I remember that that was the moment when I decided that this is insane;
there must be a part of the world that doesn't have this problem.
I remembered the couple of times I had visited Caltech, at the
invitation of Professor Bacher, who had previously been at Cornell. He was
very smart when I visited. He knew me inside out, so he said, "Feynman, I
have this extra car, which I'm gonna lend you. Now here's how you go to
Hollywood and the Sunset Strip. Enjoy yourself."
So I drove his car every night down to the Sunset Strip -- to the
nightclubs and the bars and the action. It was the kind of stuff I liked
from Las Vegas -- pretty girls, big operators, and so on. So Bacher knew how
to get me interested in Caltech.
You know the story about the donkey who is standing exactly in the
middle of two piles of hay, and doesn't go to either one, because it's
balanced? Well, that's nothing. Cornell and Caltech started making me
offers, and as soon as I would move, figuring that Caltech was really
better, they would up their offer at Cornell; and when I thought I'd stay at
Cornell, they'd up something at Caltech. So you can imagine this donkey
between the two piles of hay, with the extra complication that as soon as he
moves toward one, the other one gets higher. That makes it very difficult!
The argument that finally convinced me was my sabbatical leave. I
wanted to go to Brazil again, this time for ten months, and I had just
earned my sabbatical leave from Cornell. I didn't want to lose that, so now
that I had invented a reason to come to a decision, I wrote Bacher and told
him what I had decided.
Caltech wrote back: "We'll hire you immediately, and we'll give you
your first year as a sabbatical year." That's the way they were acting: no
matter what I decided to do, they'd screw it up. So my first year at Caltech
was really spent in Brazil. I came to Caltech to teach on my second year.
That's how it happened.
Now that I have been at Caltech since 1951, I've been very happy here.
It's exactly the thing for a one-sided guy like me. There are all these
people who are close to the top, who are very interested in what they are
doing, and who I can talk to. So I've been very comfortable.
But one day, when I hadn't been at Caltech very long, we had a bad
attack of smog. It was worse then than it is now -- at least your eyes
smarted much more. I was standing on a corner, and my eyes were watering,
and I thought to myself, "This is crazy! This is absolutely INSANE! It was
all right back at Cornell. I'm getting out of here."
So I called up Cornell, and asked them if they thought it was possible
for me to come back. They said, "Sure! We'll set it up and call you back
tomorrow."
The next day, I had the greatest luck in making a decision. God must
have set it up to help me decide. I was walking to my office, and a guy came
running up to me and said, "Hey, Feynman! Did you hear what happened? Baade
found that there are two different populations of stars! All the
measurements we had been making of the distances to the galaxies had been
based on Cephid variables of one type, but there's another type, so the
universe is twice, or three, or even four times as old as we thought!"
I knew the problem. In those days, the earth appeared to be older than
the universe. The earth was four and a half billion, and the universe was
only a couple, or three billion years old. It was a great puzzle. And this
discovery resolved all that: The universe was now demonstrably older than
was previously thought. And I got this information right away -- the guy
came running up to me to tell me all this.
I didn't even make it across the campus to get to my office, when
another guy came up -- Matt Meselson, a biologist who had minored in
physics. (I had been on his committee for his Ph.D.) He had built the first
of what they call a density gradient centrifuge -- it could measure the
density of molecules. He said, "Look at the results of the experiment I've
been doing!"
He had proved that when a bacterium makes a new one, there's a whole
molecule, intact, which is passed from one bacterium to another -- a
molecule we now know as DNA. You see, we always think of everything
dividing, dividing. So we think everything in the bacterium divides and
gives half of it to the new bacterium. But that's impossible: Somewhere, the
smallest molecule that contains genetic information can't divide in half; it
has to make a copy of itself, and send one copy to the new bacterium, and
keep one copy for the old one. And he had proved it in this way: He first
grew the bacteria in heavy nitrogen, and later grew them all in ordinary
nitrogen. As he went along, he weighed the molecules in his density gradient
centrifuge.
The first generation of new bacteria had all of their chromosome
molecules at a weight exactly in between the weight of molecules made with
heavy, and molecules made with ordinary, nitrogen -- a result that could
occur if everything divided, including the chromosome molecules.
But in succeeding generations, when one might expect that the weight of
the chromosome molecules would be one-fourth, one-eighth, and one-sixteenth
of the difference between the heavy and ordinary molecules, the weights of
the molecules fell into only two groups. One group was the same weight as
the first new generation (halfway between the heavier and the lighter
molecules), and the other group was lighter -- the weight of molecules made
in ordinary nitrogen. The percentage of heavier molecules was cut in half in
each succeeding generation, but not their weights. That was tremendously
exciting, and very important -- it was a fundamental discovery. And I
realized, as I finally got to my office, that this is where I've got to be.
Where people from all different fields of science would tell me stuff, and
it was all exciting. It was exactly what I wanted, really.
So when Cornell called a little later, and said they were setting
everything up, and it was nearly ready, I said, "I'm sorry, I've changed my
mind again." But I decided then never to decide again. Nothing -- absolutely
nothing -- would ever change my mind again.
When you're young, you have all these things to worry about -- should
you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but
then something else comes up. It's much easier to just plain decide. Never
mind -- nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a
student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of
dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always
be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again -- I had the
solution to that problem. Anyway, I decided it would always be Caltech.
One time someone tried to change my mind about Caltech. Fermi had just
died a short time before, and the faculty at Chicago were looking for
someone to take his place. Two people from Chicago came out and asked to
visit me at my home -- I didn't know what it was about. They began telling
me all the good reasons why I ought to go to Chicago: I could do this, I
could do that, they had lots of great people there, I had the opportunity to
do all kinds of wonderful things. I didn't ask them how much they would pay,
and they kept hinting that they would tell me if I asked. Finally, they
asked me if I wanted to know the salary. "Oh, no!" I said. "I've already
decided to stay at Caltech. My wife Mary Lou is in the other room, and if
she hears how much the salary is, we'll get into an argument. Besides, I've
decided not to decide any more; I'm staying at Caltech for good." So I
didn't let them tell me the salary they were offering.
About a month later I was at a meeting, and Leona Marshall came over
and said, "It's funny you didn't accept our offer at Chicago. We were so
disappointed, and we couldn't understand how you could turn down such a
terrific offer."
"It was easy," I said, "because I never let them tell me what the offer
was."
A week later I got a letter from her. I opened it, and the first
sentence said, "The salary they were offering was--," a tremendous amount of
money, three or four times what I was making. Staggering! Her letter
continued, "I told you the salary before you could read any further. Maybe
now you want to reconsider, because they've told me the position is still
open, and we'd very much like to have you."
So I wrote them back a letter that said, "After reading the salary,
I've decided that I must refuse. The reason I have to refuse a salary like
that is I would be able to do what I've always wanted to do -- get a
wonderful mistress, put her up in an apartment, buy her nice things... With
the salary you have offered, I could actually do that, and I know what would
happen to me. I'd worry about her, what she's doing; I'd get into arguments
when I come home, and so on. All this bother would make me uncomfortable and
unhappy. I wouldn't be able to do physics well, and it would be a big mess!
What I've always wanted to do would be bad for me, so I've decided that I
can't accept your offer."
--------
Part 5
The World of One Physicist
--------
Would You Solve the Dirac Equation?
Near the end of the year I was in Brazil I received a letter from
Professor Wheeler which said that there was going to be an international
meeting of theoretical physicists in Japan, and might I like to go? Japan
had some famous physicists before the war -- Professor Yukawa, with a Nobel
prize, Tomonaga, and Nishina -- but this was the first sign of Japan coming
back to life after the war, and we all thought we ought to go and help them
along.
Wheeler enclosed an army phrasebook and wrote that it would be nice if
we would all learn a little Japanese. I found a Japanese woman in Brazil to
help me with the pronunciation, I practiced lifting little pieces of paper
with chopsticks, and I read a lot about Japan. At that time, Japan was very
mysterious to me, and I thought it would be interesting to go to such a
strange and wonderful country, so I worked very hard.
When we got there, we were met at the airport and taken to a hotel in
Tokyo designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was an imitation of a European
hotel, right down to the little guy dressed in an outfit like the Philip
Morris guy. We weren't in Japan; we might as well have been in Europe or
America! The guy who showed us to our rooms stalled around, pulling the
shades up and down, waiting for a tip. Everything was just like America.
Our hosts had everything organized. That first night we were served
dinner up at the top of the hotel by a woman dressed Japanese, but the menus
were in English. I had gone to a lot of trouble to learn a few phrases in
Japanese, so near the end of the meal, I said to the waitress, "Kohi-o motte
kite kudasai." She bowed and walked away.
My friend Marshak did a double take: "What? What?"
"I talk Japanese," I said,
"Oh, you faker! You're always kidding around, Feynman."
"What are you talkin' about?" I said, in a serious tone.
"OK," he said. "What did you ask?"
"I asked her to bring us coffee."
Marshak didn't believe me. "I'll make a bet with you," he said. "If she
brings us coffee..."
The waitress appeared with our coffee, and Marshak lost his bet.
It turned out I was the only guy who had learned some Japanese -- even
Wheeler, who had told everybody they ought to learn Japanese, hadn't learned
any -- and I couldn't stand it any more. I had read about the Japanese-style
hotels, which were supposed to be very different from the hotel we were
staying in.
The next morning I called the Japanese guy who was organizing
everything up to my room. "I would like to stay in a Japanese-style hotel."
"I am afraid that it is impossible, Professor Feynman."
I had read that the Japanese are very polite, but very obstinate: You
have to keep working on them. So I decided to be as obstinate as they, and
equally polite. It was a battle of minds: It took thirty minutes, back and
forth.
"Why do you want to go to a Japanese-style hotel?"
"Because in this hotel, I don't feel like I'm in Japan."
"Japanese-style hotels are no good. You have to sleep on the floor."
"That's what I want; I want to see how it is."
"And there are no chairs -- you sit on the floor at the table."
"It's OK. That will be delightful. That's what I'm looking for."
Finally he owns up to what the situation is: "If you're in another
hotel, the bus will have to make an extra stop on its way to the meeting."
"No, no!" I say. "In the morning, I'll come to this hotel, and get on
the bus here."
"Well, then, OK. That's fine." That's all there was to it -- except it
took half an hour to get to the real problem.
He's walking over to the telephone to make a call to the other hotel
when suddenly he stops; everything is blocked up again. It takes another
fifteen minutes to discover that this time it's the mail. If there are any
messages from the meeting, they already have it arranged where to deliver
them.
"It's OK," I say. "When I come in the morning to get the bus, I'll look
for any messages for me here at this hotel."
"All right. That's fine." He gets on the telephone and at last we're on
our way to the Japanese-style hotel.
As soon as I got there, I knew it was worth it: It was so lovely! There
was a place at the front where you take your shoes off, then a girl dressed
in the traditional outfit -- the obi -- with sandals comes shuffling out,
and takes your stuff; you follow her down a hallway which has mats on the
floor, past sliding doors made of paper, and she's going cht-cht-cht-cht
with little steps. It was all very wonderful!
We went into my room and the guy who arranged everything got all the
way down, prostrated, and touched his nose to the floor; she got down and
touched her nose to the floor. I felt very awkward. Should I touch my nose
to the floor, too?
They said greetings to each other, he accepted the room for me, and
went out. It was a really wonderful room. There were all the regular,
standard things that you know of now, but it was all new to me. There was a
little alcove with a painting in it, a vase with pussywillows nicely
arranged, a table along the floor with a cushion nearby, and at the end of
the room were two sliding doors which opened onto a garden.
The lady who was supposed to take care of me was a middle-aged woman.
She helped me undress and gave me a yukata, a simple blue and white robe, to
wear at the hotel.
I pushed open the doors and admired the lovely garden, and sat down at
the table to do a little work.
I wasn't there more than fifteen or twenty minutes when something
caught my eye. I looked up, out towards the garden, and I saw, sitting at
the entrance to the door, draped in the corner, a very beautiful young
Japanese woman, in a most lovely outfit.
I had read a lot about the customs of Japan, and I had an idea of why
she was sent to my room. I thought, "This might be very interesting!"
She knew a little English. "Would you rike to see the garden?" she
asked.
I put on the shoes that went with the yukata I was wearing, and we went
out into the garden. She took my arm and showed me everything.
It turned out that because she knew a little English, the hotel manager
thought I would like her to show me the garden -- that's all it was. I was a
bit disappointed, of course, but this was a meeting of cultures, and I knew
it was easy to get the wrong idea.
Sometime later the woman who took care of my room came in and said
something -- in Japanese -- about a bath. I knew that Japanese baths were
interesting and was eager to try it, so I said, "Hai."
I had read that Japanese baths are very complicated. They use a lot of
water that's heated from the outside, and you aren't supposed to get soap
into the bathwater and spoil it for the next guy.
I got up and walked into the lavatory section, where the sink was, and
I could hear some guy in the next section with the door closed, taking a
bath. Suddenly the door slides open: the man taking the bath looks to see
who is intruding. "Professor!" he says to me in English. "That's a very bad
error to go into the lavatory when someone else has the bath!" It was
Professor Yukawa!
He told me that the woman had no doubt asked do I want a bath, and if
so, she would get it ready for me and tell me when the bathroom was free.
But of all the people in the world to make that serious social error with, I
was lucky it was Professor Yukawa!
That Japanese-style hotel was delightful, especially when people came
to see me there. The other guys would come in to my room and we'd sit on the
floor and start to talk. We wouldn't be there more than five minutes when
the woman who took care of my room would come in with a tray of candies and
tea. It was as if you were a host in your own home, and the hotel staff was
helping you to entertain your guests. Here, when you have guests at your
hotel room, nobody cares; you have to call up for service, and so on.
Eating meals at the hotel was also different. The girl who brings in
the food stays with you while you eat, so you're not alone. I couldn't have
too good a conversation with her, but it was all right. And the food is
wonderful. For instance, the soup comes in a bowl that's covered. You lift
the cover and there's a beautiful picture: little pieces of onion floating
in the soup just so; it's gorgeous. How the food looks on the plate is very
important.
I had decided that I was going to live Japanese as much as I could.
That meant eating fish. I never liked fish when I was growing up, but I
found out in Japan that it was a childish thing: I ate a lot of fish, and
enjoyed it. (When I went back to the United States the first thing I did was
go to a fish place. It was horrible -- just like it was before. I couldn't
stand it. I later discovered the answer: The fish has to be very, very fresh
-- if it isn't, it gets a certain taste that bothers me.)
One time when I was eating at the Japanese-style hotel I was served a
round, hard thing, about the size of an egg yolk, in a cup of some yellow
liquid. So far I had eaten everything in Japan, but this thing frightened
me: it was all convoluted, like a brain looks. When I asked the girl what it
was, she replied "kuri." That didn't help much. I figured it was probably an
octopus egg, or something. I ate it, with some trepidation, because I wanted
to be as much in Japan as possible. (I also remembered the word "kuri" as if
my life depended on it -- I haven't forgotten it in thirty years:)
The next day I asked a Japanese guy at the conference what this
convoluted thing was. I told him I had found it very difficult to eat. What
the hell was "kuri"?
"It means 'chestnut,' " he replied.
Some of the Japanese I had learned had quite an effect. One time, when
the bus was taking a long time to get started, some guy says, "Hey, Feynman!
You know Japanese; tell 'em to get going!"
I said, "Hayaku! Hayaku! Ikimasho! Ikimasho!" -- which means, "Let's
go! Let's go! Hurry! Hurry!"
I realized my Japanese was out of control. I had learned these phrases
from a military phrase book, and they must have been very rude, because
everyone at the hotel began to scurry like mice, saying, "Yes, sir! Yes
sir!" and the bus left right away.
The meeting in Japan was in two parts: one was in Tokyo, and the other
was in Kyoto. In the bus on the way to Kyoto I told my friend Abraham Pais
about the Japanese-style hotel, and he wanted to try it. We stayed at the
Hotel Miyako, which had both American-style and Japanese-style rooms, and
Pais shared a Japanese-style room with me.
The next morning the young woman taking care of our room fixes the
bath, which was right in our room. Sometime later she returns with a tray to
deliver breakfast. I'm partly dressed. She turns to me and says, politely,
"Ohayo, gozai masu," which means, "Good morning."
Pais is just coming out of the bath, sopping wet and completely nude.
She turns to him and with equal composure says, "Ohayo, gozai masu," and
puts the tray down for us.
Pais looks at me and says, "God, are we uncivilized!" We realized that
in America if the maid was delivering breakfast and the guy's standing
there, stark naked, there would be little screams and a big fuss. But in
Japan they were completely used to it, and we felt that they were much more
advanced and civilized about those things than we were.
I had been working at that time on the theory of liquid helium, and had
figured out how the laws of quantum dynamics explain the strange phenomena
of super-fluidity. I was very proud of this achievement, and was going to
give a talk about my work at the Kyoto meeting.
The night before I gave my talk there was a dinner, and the man who sat
down next to me was none other than Professor Onsager, a topnotch expert in
solid-state physics and the problems of liquid helium. He was one of these
guys who doesn't say very much, but any time he said anything, it was
significant.
"Well, Feynman," he said in a gruff voice, "I hear you think you have
understood liquid helium."
"Well, yes..."
"Hoompf." And that's all he said to me during the whole dinner! So that
wasn't much encouragement.
The next day I gave my talk and explained all about liquid helium. At
the end, I complained that there was still something I hadn't been able to
figure out: that is, whether the transition between one phase and the other
phase of liquid helium was first-order (like when a solid melts or a liquid
boils -- the temperature is constant) or second-order (like you see
sometimes in magnetism, in which the temperature keeps changing).
Then Professor Onsager got up and said in a dour voice, "Well,
Professor Feynman is new in our field, and I think he needs to be educated.
There's something he ought to know, and we should tell him."
I thought, "Geesus! What did I do wrong?"
Onsager said, "We should tell Feynman that nobody has ever figured out
the order of any transition correctly from first principles... so the fact
that his theory does not allow him to work out the order correctly does not
mean that he hasn't understood all the other aspects of liquid helium
satisfactorily." It turned out to be a compliment, but from the way he
started out, I thought I was really going to get it!
It wasn't more than a day later when I was in my room and the telephone
rang. It was Time magazine. The guy on the line said, "We're very interested
in your work. Do you have a copy of it you could send us?"
I had never been in Time and was very excited. I was proud of my work,
which had been received well at the meeting, so I said, "Sure!"
"Fine. Please send it to our Tokyo bureau." The guy gave me the
address. I was feeling great.
I repeated the address, and the guy said, "That's right. Thank you very
much, Mr. Pais."
"Oh, no!" I said, startled. "I'm not Pais; it's Pais you want? Excuse
me. I'll tell him that you want to speak to him when he comes back."
A few hours later Pais came in: "Hey, Pais! Pais!" I said, in an
excited voice. "Time magazine called! They want you to send 'em a copy of
the paper you're giving."
"Aw!" he says. "Publicity is a whore!"
I was doubly taken aback.
I've since found out that Pais was right, but in those days, I thought
it would be wonderful to have my name in Time magazine.
That was the first time I was in Japan. I was eager to go back, and
said I would go to any university they wanted me to. So the Japanese
arranged a whole series of places to visit for a few days at a time.
By this time I was married to Mary Lou, and we were entertained
wherever we went. At one place they put on a whole ceremony with dancing,
usually performed only for larger groups of tourists, especially for us. At
another place we were met right at the boat by all the students. At another
place, the mayor met us.
One particular place we stayed was a little, modest place in the woods,
where the emperor would stay when he came by. It was a very lovely place,
surrounded by woods, just beautiful, the stream selected with care. It had a
certain calmness, a quiet elegance. That the emperor would go to such a
place to stay showed a greater sensitivity to nature, I think, than what we
were used to in the West.
At all these places everybody working in physics would tell me what
they were doing and I'd discuss it with them. They would tell me the general
problem they were working on, and would begin to write a bunch of equations.
"Wait a minute," I would say, "Is there a particular example of this
general problem?"
"Why yes; of course."
"Good. Give me one example." That was for me: I can't understand
anything in general unless I'm carrying along in my mind a specific example
and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I'm kind of slow
and I don't understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these "dumb"
questions: "Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an an ion this way, or that way?"
But later, when the guy's in the middle of a bunch of equations, he'll
say something and I'll say, "Wait a minute! There's an error! That can't be
right!"
The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he
finds the mistake and wonders, "How the hell did this guy, who hardly
understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these
equations?"
He thinks I'm following the steps mathematically, but that's not what
I'm doing. I have the specific, physical example of what he's trying to
analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the
thing. So when the equation says it should behave so-and-so, and I know
that's the wrong way around, I jump up and say, "Wait! There's a mistake!"
So in Japan I couldn't understand or discuss anybody's work unless they
could give me a physical example, and most of them couldn't find one. Of
those who could, it was often a weak example, one which could be solved by a
much simpler method of analysis.
Since I was perpetually asking not for mathematical equations, but for
physical circumstances of what they were trying to work out, my visit was
summarized in a mimeographed paper circulated among the scientists (it was a
modest but effective system of communication they had cooked up after the
war) with the title, "Feynman's Bombardments, and Our Reactions."
After visiting a number of universities I spent some months at the
Yukawa Institute in Kyoto. I really enjoyed working there. Everything was so
nice: You'd come to work, take your shoes off, and someone would come and
serve you tea in the morning when you felt like it. It was very pleasant.
While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked
much harder at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis and
do things. I took lessons from a Japanese man every day for an hour.
One day he was teaching me the word for "see."
"All right," he said. "You want to say, 'May I see your garden?' What
do you say?"
I made up a sentence with the word that I had just learned.
"No, no!" he said. "When you say to someone, 'Would you like to see my
garden? you use the first 'see.' But when you want to see someone else's
garden, you must use another 'see,' which is more polite."
"Would you like to glance at my lousy garden?" is essentially what
you're saying in the first case, but when you want to look at the other
fella's garden, you have to say something like, "May I observe your gorgeous
garden?" So there's two different words you have to use.
Then he gave me another one: "You go to a temple, and you want to look
at the gardens..."
I made up a sentence, this time with the polite "see."
"No, no!" he said. "In the temple, the gardens are much more elegant.
So you have to say something that would be equivalent to 'May I hang my eyes
on your most exquisite gardens?'
Three or four different words for one idea, because when I'm doing it,
it's miserable; when you're doing it, it's elegant.
I was learning Japanese mainly for technical things, so I decided to
check if this same problem existed among the scientists.
At the institute the next day, I said to the guys in the office, "How
would I say in Japanese, 'I solve the Dirac Equation'?"
They said such-and-so.
"OK. Now I want to say, 'Would you solve the Dirac Equation?' -- how do
I say that?"
"Well, you have to use a different word for 'solve,' " they say.
"Why?" I protested. "When I solve it, I do the same damn thing as when
you solve it!"
"Well, yes, but it's a different word -- it's more polite."
I gave up. I decided that wasn't the language for me, and stopped
learning Japanese.
--------
The 7 Percent Solution
The problem was to find the right laws of beta decay. There appeared to
be two particles, which were called a tau and a theta. They seemed to have
almost exactly the same mass, but one disintegrated into two pions, and the
other into three pions. Not only did they seem to have the same mass, but
they also had the same lifetime, which is a funny coincidence. So everybody
was concerned about this.
At a meeting I went to, it was reported that when these two particles
were produced in a cyclotron at different angles and different energies,
they were always produced in the same proportions -- so many taus compared
to so many thetas.
Now; one possibility, of course, was that it was the same particle,
which sometimes decayed into two pions, and sometimes into three pions. But
nobody would allow that, because there is a law called the parity rule,
which is based on the assumption that all the laws of physics are
mirror-image-symmetrical, and says that a thing that can go into two pions
can't also go into three pions.
At that particular time I was not really quite up to things: I was
always a little behind. Everybody seemed to be smart, and I didn't feel I
was keeping up. Anyway, I was sharing a room with a guy named Martin Block,
an experimenter. And one evening he said to me, "Why are you guys so
insistent on this parity rule? Maybe the tau and theta are the same
particle. What would be the consequences if the parity rule were wrong?"
I thought a minute and said, "It would mean that nature's laws are
different for the right hand and the left hand, that there's a way to define
the right hand by physical phenomena. I don't know that that's so terrible,
though there must be some bad consequences of that, but I don't know. Why
don't you ask the experts tomorrow?"
He said, "No, they won't listen to me. You ask."
So the next day, at the meeting, when we were discussing the tau-theta
puzzle, Oppenheimer said, "We need to hear some new, wilder ideas about this
problem."
So I got up and said, "I'm asking this question for Martin Block: What
would be the consequences if the parity rule was wrong?"
Murray Gell-Mann often teased me about this, saying I didn't have the
nerve to ask the question for myself. But that's not the reason. I thought
it might very well be an important idea.
Lee, of Lee and Yang, answered something complicated, and as usual I
didn't understand very well. At the end of the meeting, Block asked me what
he said, and I said I didn't know, but as far as I could tell, it was still
open -- there was still a possibility. I didn't think it was likely, but I
thought it was possible.
Norm Ramsey asked me if I thought he should do an experiment looking
for parity law violation, and I replied, "The best way to explain it is,
I'll bet you only fifty to one you don't find anything."
He said, "That's good enough for me." But he never did the experiment.
Anyway, the discovery of parity law violation was made, experimentally,
by Wu, and this opened up a whole bunch of new possibilities for beta decay
theory. It also unleashed a whole host of experiments immediately after
that. Some showed electrons coming out of the nuclei spun to the left, and
some to the right, and there were all kinds of experiments, all kinds of
interesting discoveries about parity. But the data were so confusing that
nobody could put things together.
At one point there was a meeting in Rochester -- the yearly Rochester
Conference. I was still always behind, and Lee was giving his paper on the
violation of parity. He and Yang had come to the conclusion that parity was
violated, and now he was giving the theory for it.
During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I
brought the paper home and said to her, "I can't understand these things
that Lee and Yang are saying. It's all so complicated."
"No," she' said, "what you mean is not that you can't understand it,
but that you didn't invent it. You didn't figure it out your own way, from
hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you're a student again, and
take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations.
Then you'll understand it very easily."
I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to
be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it, thinking it was
too difficult.
It reminded me of something I had done a long time ago with left and
right unsymmetrical equations. Now it became kind of clear, when I looked at
Lee's formulas, that the solution to it all was much simpler: Everything
comes out coupled to the left. For the electron and the muon, my predictions
were the same as Lee's, except I changed some signs around. I didn't realize
it at the time, but Lee had taken only the simplest example of muon
coupling, and hadn't proved that all muons would be full to the right,
whereas according to my theory, all muons would have to be full
automatically. Therefore, I had, in fact, a prediction on top of what he
had. I had different signs, but I didn't realize that I also had this
quantity right.
I predicted a few things that nobody had experiments for yet, but when
it came to the neutron and proton, I couldn't make it fit well with what was
then known about neutron and proton coupling: it was kind of messy.
The next day, when I went back to the meeting, a very kind man named
Ken Case, who was going to give a paper on something, gave me five minutes
of his allotted time to present my idea. I said I was convinced that
everything was coupled to the left, and that the signs for the electron and
muon are reversed, but I was struggling with the neutron. Later the
experimenters asked me some questions about my predictions, and then I went
to Brazil for the summer.
When I came back to the United States, I wanted to know what the
situation was with beta decay. I went to Professor Wu's laboratory at
Columbia, and she wasn't there, spinning to the left in the beta decay, came
out on the right in some cases. Nothing fit anything. When I got back to
Caltech, I asked some of the experimenters what the situation was with beta
decay. I remember three guys, Hans Jensen, Aaldert Wapstra, and Felix Boehm,
sitting me down on a little stool, and starting to tell me all these facts:
experimental results from other parts of the country, and their own
experimental results. Since I knew those guys, and how careful they were, I
paid more attention to their results than to the others. Their results,
alone, were not so inconsistent; it was all the others plus theirs.
Finally they get all this stuff into me, and they say, "The situation
is so mixed up that even some of the things they've established for years
are being questioned -- such as the beta decay of the neutron is S and T.
It's so messed up. Murray says it might even be V and A."
I jump up from the stool and say, "Then I understand EVVVVVERYTHING!"
They thought I was joking. But the thing that I had trouble with at the
Rochester meeting -- the neutron and proton disintegration: everything fit
but that, and if it was V and A instead of S and T, that would fit too.
Therefore I had the whole theory!
That night I calculated all kinds of things with this theory. The first
thing I calculated was the rate of disintegration of the muon and the
neutron. They should be connected together, if this theory was right, by a
certain relationship, and it was right to 9 percent. That's pretty close, 9
percent. It should have been more perfect than that, but it was close
enough.
I went on and checked some other things, which fit, and new things fit,
new things fit, and I was very excited. It was the first time, and the only
time, in my career that I knew a law of nature that nobody else knew. (Of
course it wasn't true, but finding out later that at least Murray Gell-Mann
-- and also Sudarshan and Marshak -- had worked out the same theory didn't
spoil my fun.)
The other things I had done before were to take somebody else's theory
and improve the method of calculating, or take an equation, such as the
Schrödinger Equation, to explain a phenomenon, such as helium. We know the
equation, and we know the phenomenon, but how does it work?
I thought about Dirac, who had his equation for a while -- a new
equation which told how an electron behaved -- and I had this new equation
for beta decay, which wasn't as vital as the Dirac Equation, but it was
good. It's the only time I ever discovered a new law.
I called up my sister in New York to thank her for getting me to sit
down and work through that paper by Lee and Yang at the Rochester
Conference. After feeling uncomfortable and behind, now I was in; I had made
a discovery, just from what she suggested. I was able to enter physics
again, so to speak, and I wanted to thank her for that. I told her that
everything fit, except for the 9 percent.
I was very excited, and kept on calculating, and things that fit kept
on tumbling out: they fit automatically, without a strain. I had begun to
forget about the 9 percent by now, because everything else was coming out
right.
I worked very hard into the night, sitting at a small table in the
kitchen next to a window. It was getting later and later -- about 2:00 or
3:00 A.M. I'm working hard, getting all these calculations packed solid with
things that fit, and I'm thinking, and concentrating, and it's dark, and
it's quiet... when suddenly there's a TAC-TAC-TAC-TAC -- loud, on the
window. I look, and there's this white face, right at the window, only
inches away, and I scream with shock and surprise!
It was a lady I knew who was angry at me because I had come back from
vacation and didn't immediately call her up to tell her I was back. I let
her in, and tried to explain that I was just now very busy, that I had just
discovered something, and it was very important. I said, "Please go out and
let me finish it."
She said, "No, I don't want to bother you. I'll just sit here in the
living room."
I said, "Well, all right, but it's very difficult." She didn't exactly
sit in the living room. The best way to say it is she sort of squatted in a
corner, holding her hands together, not wanting to "bother" me. Of course
her purpose was to bother the hell out of me! And she succeeded -- I
couldn't ignore her. I got very angry and upset, and I couldn't stand it. I
had to do this calculating; I was making a big discovery and was terribly
excited, and somehow, it was more important to me than this lady -- at least
at that moment. I don't remember how I finally got her out of there, but it
was very difficult.
After working some more, it got to be very late at night, and I was
hungry. I walked up the main street to a little restaurant five or ten
blocks away, as I had often done before, late at night.
On early occasions I was often stopped by the police, because I would
be walking along, thinking, and then I'd stop -- sometimes an idea comes
that's difficult enough that you can't keep walking; you have to make sure
of something. So I'd stop, and sometimes I'd hold my hands out in the air,
saying to myself, "The distance between these is that way, and then this
would turn over this way..."
I'd be moving my hands, standing in the street, when the police would
come: "What is your name? Where do you live? What are you doing?"
"Oh! I was thinking. I'm sorry; I live here, and go often to the
restaurant..." After a bit they knew who it was, and they didn't stop me any
more.
So I went to the restaurant, and while I'm eating I'm so excited that I
tell a lady that I just made a discovery. She starts in: She's the wife of a
fireman, or forester, or something. She's very lonely -- all this stuff that
I'm not interested in. So that happens.
The next morning when I got to work I went to Wapstra, Boehm, and
Jensen, and told them, "I've got it all worked out. Everything fits."
Christy, who was there, too, said, "What beta-decay constant did you
use?"
"The one from So-and-So's book."
"But that's been found out to be wrong. Recent measurements have shown
it's off by 7 percent."
Then I remember the 9 percent. It was like a prediction for me: I went
home and got this theory that says the neutron decay should be off by 9
percent, and they tell me the next morning that, as a matter of fact, it's 7
percent changed. But is it changed from 9 to 16, which is bad, or from 9 to
2, which is good?
Just then my sister calls from New York: "How about the 9 percent --
what's happened?"
"I've just discovered that th