ere's new data: 7 percent..."
"Which way?"
"I'm trying to find out. I'll call you back."
I was so excited that I couldn't think. It's like when you're rushing
for an airplane, and you don't know whether you're late or not, and you just
can't make it, when somebody says, "It's daylight saving time!" Yes, but
which way? You can't think in the excitement.
So Christy went into one room, and I went into another room, each of us
to be quiet, so we could think it through: This moves this way, and that
moves that way -- it wasn't very difficult, really; it's just exciting.
Christy came out, and I came out, and we both agreed: It's 2 percent,
which is well within experimental error. After all, if they just changed the
constant by 7 percent, the 2 percent could have been an error. I called my
sister back: "Two percent." The theory was right.
(Actually, it was wrong: it was off, really, by 1 percent, for a reason
we hadn't appreciated, which was only understood later by Nicola Cabibbo. So
that 2 percent was not all experimental.)
Murray Gell-Mann compared and combined our ideas and wrote a paper on
the theory. The theory was rather neat; it was relatively simple, and it fit
a lot of stuff. But as I told you, there was an awful lot of chaotic data.
And in some cases, we even went so far as to state that the experiments were
in error.
A good example of this was an experiment by Valentine Telegdi, in which
he measured the number of electrons that go out in each direction when a
neutron disintegrates. Our theory had predicted that the number should be
the same in all directions, whereas Telegdi found that 11 percent more came
out in one direction than the others. Telegdi was an excellent experimenter,
and very careful. And once, when he was giving a talk somewhere, he referred
to our theory and said, "The trouble with theorists is, they never pay
attention to the experiments!"
Telegdi also sent us a letter, which wasn't exactly scathing, but
nevertheless showed he was convinced that our theory was wrong. At the end
he wrote, "The F-G (Feynman-Gell-Mann) theory of beta decay is no F-G."
Murray says, "What should we do about this? You know, Telegdi's pretty
good."
I say, "We just wait."
Two days later there's another letter from Telegdi. He's a complete
convert. He found out from our theory that he had disregarded the
possibility that the proton recoiling from the neutron is not the same in
all directions. He had assumed it was the same. By putting in corrections
that our theory predicted instead of the ones he had been using, the results
straightened out and were in complete agreement.
I knew that Telegdi was excellent, and it would be hard to go upstream
against him. But I was convinced by that time that something must be wrong
with his experiment, and that he would find it -- he's much better at
finding it than we would be. That's why I said we shouldn't try to figure it
out but just wait.
I went to Professor Bacher and told him about our success, and he said,
"Yes, you come out and say that the neutron-proton coupling is V instead of
T. Everybody used to think it was T. Where is the fundamental experiment
that says it's T? Why don't you look at the early experiments and find out
what was wrong with them?"
I went out and found the original article on the experiment that said
the neutron-proton coupling is T, and I was shocked by something. I
remembered reading that article once before (back in the days when I read
every article in the Physical Review -- it was small enough). And I
remembered, when I saw this article again, looking at that curve and
thinking, "That doesn't prove anything!"
You see, it depended on one or two points at the very edge of the range
of the data, and there's a principle that a point on the edge of the range
of the data -- the last point -- isn't very good, because if it was, they'd
have another point further along. And I had realized that the whole idea
that neutron-proton coupling is T was based on the last point, which wasn't
very good, and therefore it's not proved. I remember noticing that!
And when I became interested in beta decay, directly, I read all these
reports by the "beta-decay experts," which said it's T. I never looked at
the original data; I only read those reports, like a dope. Had I been a good
physicist, when I thought of the original idea back at the Rochester
Conference I would have immediately looked up "how strong do we know it's
T?" -- that would have been the sensible thing to do. I would have
recognized right away that I had already noticed it wasn't satisfactorily
proved.
Since then I never pay any attention to anything by "experts." I
calculate everything myself. When people said the quark theory was pretty
good, I got two Ph.D.s, Finn Ravndal and Mark Kislinger, to go through the
whole works with me, just so I could check that the thing was really giving
results that fit fairly well, and that it was a significantly good theory.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. Of
course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn
what not to do, and that's the end of you.
--------
Thirteen Times
One time a science teacher from the local city college came around and
asked me if I'd give a talk there. He offered me fifty dollars, but I told
him I wasn't worried about the money. "That's the city college, right?"
"Yes."
I thought about how much paperwork I usually had to get involved with
when I deal with the government, so I laughed and said, "I'll be glad to
give the talk. There's only one condition on the whole thing" -- I pulled a
number out of a hat and continued -- "that I don't have to sign my name more
than thirteen times, and that includes the check!"
The guy laughs too. "Thirteen times! No problem."
So then it starts. First I have to sign something that says I'm loyal
to the government, or else I can't talk in the city college. And I have to
sign it double, OK? Then I have to sign some kind of release to the city --
I can't remember what. Pretty soon the numbers are beginning to climb up.
I have to sign that I was suitably employed as a professor -- to
ensure, of course, since it's a city thing, that no jerk at the other end
was hiring his wife or a friend to come and not even give the lecture. There
were all kinds of things to ensure, and the signatures kept mounting.
Well, the guy who started out laughing got pretty nervous, but we just
made it. I signed exactly twelve times. There was one more left for the
check, so I went ahead and gave the talk.
A few days later the guy came around to give me the check, and he was
really sweating. He couldn't give me the money unless I signed a form saying
I really gave the talk.
I said, "If I sign the form, I can't sign the check. But you were
there. You heard the talk; why don't you sign it?"
"Look," he said, "Isn't this whole thing rather silly?"
"No. It was an arrangement we made in the beginning. We didn't think it
was really going to get to thirteen, but we agreed on it, and I think we
should stick to it to the end."
He said, "I've been working very hard, calling all around. I've been
trying everything, and they tell me it's impossible. You simply can't get
your money unless you sign the form."
"It's OK," I said. "I've only signed twelve times, and I gave the talk.
I don't need the money."
"But I hate to do this to you."
"It's all right. We made a deal; don't worry."
The next day he called me up. "They can't not give you the money!
They've already earmarked the money and they've got it set aside, so they
have to give it to you!"
"OK, if they have to give me the money, let them give me the money."
"But you have to sign the form."
"I won't sign the form!"
They were stuck. There was no miscellaneous pot which was for money
that this man deserves but won't sign for.
Finally, it got straightened out. It took a long time, and it was very
complicated -- but I used the thirteenth signature to cash my check.
--------
It Sounds Greek to Me!
I don't know why, but I'm always very careless, when I go on a trip,
about the address or telephone number or anything of the people who invited
me. I figure I'll be met, or somebody else will know where we're going;
it'll get straightened out somehow.
One time, in 1957, I went to a gravity conference at the University of
North Carolina. I was supposed to be an expert in a different field who
looks at gravity.
I landed at the airport a day late for the conference (I couldn't make
it the first day), and I went out to where the taxis were. I said to the
dispatcher, "I'd like to go to the University of North Carolina."
"Which do you mean," he said, "the State University of North Carolina
at Raleigh, or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill?"
Needless to say, I hadn't the slightest idea. "Where are they?" I
asked, figuring that one must be near the other.
"One's north of here, and the other is south of here, about the same
distance."
I had nothing with me that showed which one it was, and there was
nobody else going to the conference a day late like I was.
That gave me an idea. "Listen," I said to the dispatcher. "The main
meeting began yesterday, so there were a whole lot of guys going to the
meeting who must have come through here yesterday. Let me describe them to
you: They would have their heads kind of in the air, and they would be
talking to each other, not paying attention to where they were going, saying
things to each other, like 'G-mu-nu. G-mu-nu.' "
His face lit up. "Ah, yes," he said. "You mean Chapel Hill!" He called
the next taxi waiting in line. "Take this man to the university at Chapel
Hill."
"Thank you," I said, and I went to the conference.
--------
But Is It Art?
Once I was at a party playing bongos, and I got going pretty well. One
of the guys was particularly inspired by the drumming. He went into the
bathroom, took off his shirt, smeared shaving cream in funny designs all
over his chest, and came out dancing wildly, with cherries hanging from his
ears. Naturally, this crazy nut and I became good friends right away. His
name is Jerry Zorthian; he's an artist.
We often had long discussions about art and science. I'd say things
like, "Artists are lost: they don't have any subject! They used to have the
religious subjects, but they lost their religion and now they haven't got
anything. They don't understand the technical world they live in; they don't
know anything about the beauty of the real world -- the scientific world --
so they don't have anything in their hearts to paint."
Jerry would reply that artists don't need to have a physical subject;
there are many emotions that can be expressed through art. Besides, art can
be abstract. Furthermore, scientists destroy the beauty of nature when they
pick it apart and turn it into mathematical equations.
One time I was over at Jerry's for his birthday, and one of these dopey
arguments lasted until 3:00 a.m. The next morning I called him up: "Listen,
Jerry," I said, "the reason we have these arguments that never get anywhere
is that you don't know a damn thing about science, and I don't know a damn
thing about art. So, on alternate Sundays, I'll give you a lesson in
science, and you give me a lesson in art."
"OK," he said. "I'll teach you how to draw."
"That will be impossible," I said, because when I was in high school,
the only thing I could draw was pyramids on deserts -- consisting mainly of
straight lines -- and from time to time I would attempt a palm tree and put
in a sun. I had absolutely no talent. I sat next to a guy who was equally
adept. When he was permitted to draw anything, it consisted of two flat,
elliptical blobs, like tires stacked on one another, with a stalk coming out
of the top, culminating in a green triangle. It was supposed to be a tree.
So I bet Jerry that he wouldn't be able to teach me to draw.
"Of course you'll have to work," he said.
I promised to work, but still bet that he couldn't teach me to draw. I
wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I
wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It's
difficult to describe because it's an emotion. It's analogous to the feeling
one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in
the whole universe: there's a generality aspect that you feel when you think
about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all
run "behind the scenes" by the same organization, the same physical laws.
It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works
inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity
of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful
it is. It's a feeling of awe -- of scientific awe -- which I felt could be
communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It
could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the
universe.
Jerry turned out to be a very good teacher. He told me first to go home
and draw anything. So I tried to draw a shoe; then I tried to draw a flower
in a pot. It was a mess!
The next time we met I showed him my attempts: "Oh, look!" he said.
"You see, around in back here, the line of the flower pot doesn't touch the
leaf." (I had meant the line to come up to the leaf.) "That's very good.
It's a way of showing depth. That's very clever of you."
"And the fact that you don't make all the lines the same thickness
(which I didn't mean to do) is good. A drawing with all the lines the same
thickness is dull." It continued like that: Everything that I thought was a
mistake, he used to teach me something in a positive way. He never said it
was wrong; he never put me down. So I kept on trying, and I gradually got a
little bit better, but I was never satisfied.
To get more practice I also signed up for a correspondence school
course, with International Correspondence Schools, and I must say they were
good. They started me off drawing pyramids and cylinders, shading them and
so on. We covered many areas: drawing, pastels, watercolors, and paints.
Near the end I petered out: I made an oil painting for them, but I never
sent it in. They kept sending me letters urging me to continue. They were
very good.
I practiced drawing all the time, and became very interested in it. If
I was at a meeting that wasn't getting anywhere -- like the one where Carl
Rogers came to Caltech to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a
psychology department -- I would draw the other people. I had a little pad
of paper I kept with me and I practiced drawing wherever I went. So, as
Jerry taught me, I worked very hard.
Jerry, on the other hand, didn't learn much physics. His mind wandered
too easily. I tried to teach him something about electricity and magnetism,
but as soon as I mentioned "electricity," he'd tell me about some motor he
had that didn't work, and how might he fix it. When I tried to show him how
an electromagnet works by making a little coil of wire and hanging a nail on
a piece of string, I put the voltage on, the nail swung into the coil, and
Jerry said, "Ooh! It's just like fucking!" So that was the end of that.
So now we have a new argument-whether he's a better teacher than I was,
or I'm a better student than he was.
I gave up the idea of trying to get an artist to appreciate the feeling
I had about nature so he could portray it. I would now have to double my
efforts in learning to draw so I could do it myself. It was a very ambitious
undertaking, and I kept the idea entirely to myself, because the odds were I
would never be able to do it.
Early on in the process of learning to draw, some lady I knew saw my
attempts and said, "You should go down to the Pasadena Art Museum. They have
drawing classes there, with models -- nude models."
"No," I said; "I can't draw well enough: I'd feel very embarrassed."
"You're good enough; you should see some of the others!"
So I worked up enough courage to go down there. In the first lesson
they told us about newsprint -- very large sheets of low-grade paper, the
size of a newspaper -- and the various kinds of pencils and charcoal to get.
For the second class a model came, and she started off with a ten-minute
pose.
I started to draw the model, and by the time I'd done one leg, the ten
minutes were up. I looked around and saw that everyone else had already
drawn a complete picture, with shading in the back -- the whole business.
I realized I was way out of my depth. But finally, at the end, the
model was going to pose for thirty minutes. I worked very hard, and with
great effort I was able to draw her whole outline. This time there was half
a hope. So this time I didn't cover up my drawing, as I had done with all
the previous ones.
We went around to look at what the others had done, and I discovered
what they could really do: they draw the model, with details and shadows,
the pocketbook that's on the bench she's sitting on, the platform,
everything! They've all gone zip, zip, zip, zip, zip with the charcoal, all
over, and I figure it's hopeless -- utterly hopeless.
I go back to cover up my drawing, which consists of a few lines crowded
into the upper left-hand corner of the newsprint -- I had, until then, only
been drawing on 8 1/2 x 11 paper -- but some others in the class are
standing nearby: "Oh, look at this one," one of them says. "Every line
counts!"
I didn't know what that meant, exactly, but I felt encouraged enough to
come to the next class. In the meantime, Jerry kept telling me that drawings
that are too full aren't any good. His job was to teach me not to worry
about the others, so he'd tell me they weren't so hot.
I noticed that the teacher didn't tell people much (the only thing he
told me was my picture was too small on the page). Instead, he tried to
inspire us to experiment with new approaches. I thought of how we teach
physics: We have so many techniques -- so many mathematical methods -- that
we never stop telling the students how to do things. On the other hand, the
drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very
heavy, the teacher can't say, "Your lines are too heavy," because some
artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines. The
teacher doesn't want to push you in some particular direction. So the
drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and
not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always
teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving
physical problems.
They were always telling me to "loosen up," to become more relaxed
about drawing. I figured that made no more sense than telling someone who's
just learning to drive to "loosen up" at the wheel. It isn't going to work.
Only after you know how to do it carefully can you begin to loosen up. So I
resisted this perennial loosen-up stuff.
One exercise they had invented for loosening us up was to draw without
looking at the paper. Don't take your eyes off the model; just look at her
and make the lines on the paper without looking at what you're doing.
One of the guys says, "I can't help it. I have to cheat. I bet
everybody's cheating!"
"I'm not cheating!" I say.
"Aw, baloney!" they say.
I finish the exercise and they come over to look at what I had drawn.
They found that, indeed, I was NOT cheating; at the very beginning my pencil
point had busted, and there was nothing but impressions on the paper.
When I finally got my pencil to work, I tried it again. I found that my
drawing had a kind of strength -- a funny, semi-Picasso-like strength --
which appealed to me. The reason I felt good about that drawing was, I knew
it was impossible to draw well that way, and therefore it didn't have to be
good -- and that's really what the loosening up was all about. I had thought
that "loosen up" meant "make sloppy drawings," but it really meant to relax
and not worry about how the drawing is going to come out.
I made a lot of progress in the class, and I was feeling pretty good.
Up until the last session, all the models we had were rather heavy and out
of shape; they were rather interesting to draw. But in the last class we had
a model who was a nifty blonde, perfectly proportioned. It was then that I
discovered that I still didn't know how to draw: I couldn't make anything
come out that looked anything like this beautiful girl! With the other
models, if you draw something a little too big or bit too small, it doesn't
make any difference because it's all out of shape anyway. But when you're
trying to draw something that's so well put together, you can't fool
yourself: It's got to be just right!
During one of the breaks I overheard a guy who could really draw asking
this model whether she posed privately. She said yes. "Good. But I don't
have a studio yet. I'll have to work that out first."
I figured I could learn a lot from this guy, and I'd never get another
chance to draw this nifty model unless I did something. "Excuse me," I said
to him, "I have a room downstairs in my house that could be used as a
studio."
They both agreed. I took a few of the guy's drawings to my friend
Jerry, but he was aghast. "Those aren't so good," he said. He tried to
explain why, but I never really understood.
Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking
at art. I had very little appreciation for things artistic, and only very
rarely, such as once when I was in a museum in Japan. I saw a painting done
on brown paper of bamboo, and what was beautiful about it to me was that it
was perfectly poised between being just some brush strokes and being bamboo
-- I could make it go back and forth.
The summer after the drawing class I was in Italy for a science
conference and I thought I'd like to see the Sistine Chapel. I got there
very early in the morning, bought my ticket before anybody else, and ran up
the stairs as soon as the place opened. I therefore had the unusual pleasure
of looking at the whole chapel for a moment, in silent awe, before anybody
else came in.
Soon the tourists came, and there were crowds of people milling around,
talking different languages, pointing at this and that. I'm walking around,
looking at the ceiling for a while. Then my eye came down a little bit and I
saw some big, framed pictures, and I thought, "Gee! I never knew about
these!"
Unfortunately I'd left my guidebook at the hotel, but I thought to
myself, "I know why these panels aren't famous; they aren't any good." But
then I looked at another one, and I said, "Wow! That's a good one." I looked
at the others. "That's good too, so is that one, but that one's lousy." I
had never heard of these panels, but I decided that they were all good
except for two.
I went into a place called the Sala de Raphael -- the Raphael Room --
and I noticed the same phenomenon. I thought to myself, "Raphael is
irregular. He doesn't always succeed. Sometimes he's very good. Sometimes
it's just junk."
When I got back to my hotel, I looked at the guidebook. In the part
about the Sistine Chapel: "Below the paintings by Michelangelo there are
fourteen panels by Botticelli, Perugino" -- all these great artists -- "and
two by So-and-so, which are of no significance." This was a terrific
excitement to me, that I also could tell the difference between a beautiful
work of art and one that's not, without being able to define it. As a
scientist you always think you know what you're doing, so you tend to
distrust the artist who says, "It's great," or "It's no good," and then is
not able to explain to you why, as Jerry did with those drawings I took him.
But here I was, sunk: I could do it too!
In the Raphael Room the secret turned out to be that only some of the
paintings were made by the great master; the rest were made by students. I
had liked the ones by Raphael. This was a big jab for my self-confidence in
my ability to appreciate art.
Anyway, the guy from the art class and the nifty model came over to my
house a number of times and I tried to draw her and learn from him. After
many attempts I finally drew what I felt was a really nice picture -- it was
a portrait of her head -- and I got very excited about this first success.
I had enough confidence to ask an old friend of mine named Steve
Demitriades if his beautiful wife would pose for me, and in return I would
give him the portrait. He laughed. "If she wants to waste her time posing
for you, it's all right with me, ha, ha, ha."
I worked very hard on her portrait, and when he saw it, he turned over
to my side completely: "It's just wonderful!" he exclaimed. "Can you get a
photographer to make copies of it? I want to send one to my mother in
Greece!" His mother had never seen the girl he married. That was very
exciting to me, to think that I had improved to the point where someone
wanted one of my drawings.
A similar thing happened at a small art exhibit that some guy at
Caltech had arranged, where I contributed two drawings and a painting. He
said, "We oughta put a price on the drawings."
I thought, "That's silly! I'm not trying to sell them."
"It makes the exhibition more interesting. If you don't mind parting
with them, just put a price on."
After the show the guy told me that a girl had bought one of my
drawings and wanted to speak to me to find out more about it.
The drawing was called "The Magnetic Field of the Sun." For this
particular drawing I had borrowed one of those beautiful pictures of the
solar prominences taken at the solar laboratory in Colorado. Because I
understood how the sun's magnetic field was holding up the flames and had,
by that time, developed some technique for drawing magnetic field lines (it
was similar to a girl's flowing hair), I wanted to draw something beautiful
that no artist would think to draw: the rather complicated and twisting
lines of the magnetic field, close together here and spreading out there.
I explained all this to her, and showed her the picture that gave me
the idea.
She told me this story: She and her husband had gone to the exhibit,
and they both liked the drawing very much. "Why don't we buy it?" she
suggested.
Her husband was the kind of a man who could never do anything right
away. "Let's think about it a while," he said.
She realized his birthday was a few months ahead, so she went back the
same day and bought it herself.
That night when he came home from work, he was depressed. She finally
got it out of him: He thought it would be nice to buy her that picture, but
when he went back to the exhibit, he was told that the picture had already
been sold. So she had it to surprise him on his birthday.
What I got out of that story was something still very new to me: I
understood at last what art is really for, at least in certain respects. It
gives somebody, individually, pleasure. You can make something that somebody
likes so much that they're depressed, or they're happy, on account of that
damn thing you made! In science, it's sort of general and large: You don't
know the individuals who have appreciated it directly.
I understood that to sell a drawing is not to make money, but to be
sure that it's in the home of someone who really wants it; someone who would
feel bad if they didn't have it. This was interesting.
So I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn't want people to buy
my drawings because the professor of physics isn't supposed to be able to
draw, isn't that wonderful, so I made up a false name. My friend Dudley
Wright suggested "Au Fait," which means "It is done" in French. I spelled it
O-f-e-y, which turned out to be a name the blacks used for "whitey." But
after all, I was whitey, so it was all right.
One of my models wanted me to make a drawing for her, but she didn't
have the money. (Models don't have money; if they did, they wouldn't be
modeling.) She offered to pose three times free if I would give her a
drawing.
"On the contrary," I said. "I'll give you three drawings if you'll pose
once for nothing."
She put one of the drawings I gave her on the wall in her small room,
and soon her boyfriend noticed it. He liked it so much that he wanted to
commission a portrait of her. He would pay me sixty dollars. (The money was
getting pretty good now.)
Then she got the idea to be my agent: She could earn a little extra
money by going around selling my drawings, saying, "There's a new artist in
Altadena..." It was fun to be in a different world! She arranged to have
some of my drawings put on display at Bullock's, Pasadena's most elegant
department store. She and the lady from the art section picked out some
drawings -- drawings of plants that I had made early on (that I didn't like)
-- and had them all framed. Then I got a signed document from Bullock's
saying that they had such-and-such drawings on consignment. Of course nobody
bought any of them, but otherwise I was a big success: I had my drawings on
sale at Bullock's! It was fun to have them there, just so I could say one
day that I had reached that pinnacle of success in the art world.
Most of my models I got through Jerry, but I also tried to get models
on my own. Whenever I met a young woman who looked as if she would be
interesting to draw, I would ask her to pose for me. It always ended up that
I would draw her face, because I didn't know exactly how to bring up the
subject of posing nude.
Once when I was over at Jerry's, I said to his wife Dabney, "I can
never get the girls to pose nude: I don't know how Jerry does it!"
"Well, did you ever ask them?"
"Oh! I never thought of that."
The next girl I met that I wanted to pose for me was a Caltech student.
I asked her if she would pose nude. "Certainly," she said, and there we
were! So it was easy. I guess there was so much in the back of my mind that
I thought it was somehow wrong to ask.
I've done a lot of drawing by now, and I've gotten so I like to draw
nudes best. For all I know it's not art, exactly; it's a mixture. Who knows
the percentages?
One model I met through Jerry had been a Playboy playmate. She was tall
and gorgeous. However, she thought she was too tall. Every girl in the
world, looking at her, would have been jealous. When she would come into a
room, she'd be half stooped over. I tried to teach her, when she was posing,
to please stand up, because she was so elegant and striking. I finally
talked her into that.
Then she had another worry: she's got "dents" near her groin. I had to
get out a book of anatomy to show her that it's the attachment of the
muscles to the ilium, and to explain to her that you can't see these dents
on everybody; to see them, everything must be just right, in perfect
proportion, like she was. I learned from her that every woman is worried
about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.
I wanted to draw a picture of this model in color, in pastels, just to
experiment. I thought I would first make a sketch in charcoal, which would
be later covered with the pastel. When I got through with this charcoal
drawing that I had made without worrying how it was going to look, I
realized that it was one of the best drawings I had ever made. I decided to
leave it, and forget about the pastels for that one. My "agent" looked at it
and wanted to take it around. "You can't sell that," I said, "it's on
newsprint."
"Oh, never mind," she said.
A few weeks later she came back with this picture in a beautiful wooden
frame with a red band and a gold edge. It's a funny thing which must make
artists, generally, unhappy -- how much improved a drawing gets when you put
a frame around it. My agent told me that a particular lady got all excited
about the drawing and they took it to a picture framer. He told them that
there were special techniques for mounting drawings on newsprint: Impregnate
it with plastic, do this, do that. So this lady goes to all that trouble
over this drawing I had made, and then has my agent bring it back to me. "I
think the artist would like to see how lovely it is, framed," she said.
I certainly did. There was another example of the direct pleasure
somebody got out of one of my pictures. So it was a real kick selling the
drawings.
There was a period when there were topless restaurants in town: You
could go there for lunch or dinner, and the girls would dance without a top,
and after a while without anything. One of these places, it turned out, was
only a mile and a half away from my house, so I went there very often. I'd
sit in one of the booths and work a little physics on the paper placemats
with the scalloped edges, and sometimes I'd draw one of the dancing girls or
one of the customers, just to practice.
My wife Gweneth, who is English, had a good attitude about my going to
this place. She said, "The Englishmen have clubs they go to." So it was
something like my club.
There were pictures hanging around the place, but I didn't like them
much. They were these fluorescent colors on black velvet -- kind of ugly --
a girl taking off her sweater, or something. Well, I had a rather nice
drawing I had made of my model Kathy, so I gave it to the owner of the
restaurant to put up on the wall, and he was delighted.
Giving him the drawing turned out to produce some useful results. The
owner became very friendly to me, and would give me free drinks all the
time. Now, every time I would come in to the restaurant a waitress would
come over with my free 7-Up. I'd watch the girls dance, do a little physics,
prepare a lecture, or draw a little bit. If I got a little tired, I'd watch
the entertainment for a while, and then do a little more work. The owner
knew I didn't want to be disturbed, so if a drunk man came over and started
to talk to me, right away a waitress would come and get the guy out of
there. If a girl came over, he would do nothing. We had a very good
relationship. His name was Gianonni.
The other effect of my drawing on display was that people would ask him
about it. One day a guy came over to me and said, "Gianonni tells me you
made that picture."
"Yeah."
"Good. I'd like to commission a drawing."
"All right; what would you like?"
"I want a picture of a nude toreador girl being charged by a bull with
a man's head."
"Well, uh, it would help me a little if I had some idea of what this
drawing is for."
"I want it for my business establishment."
"What kind of business establishment?"
"It's for a massage parlor: you know, private rooms, masseuses -- get
the idea?"
"Yeah, I get the idea." I didn't want to draw a nude toreador girl
being charged by a bull with a man's head, so I tried to talk him out of it.
"How do you think that looks to the customers, and how does it make the
girls feel? The men come in there and you get 'em all excited with this
picture. Is that the way you want 'em to treat the girls?"
He's not convinced.
"Suppose the cops come in and they see this picture, and you're
claiming it's a massage parlor."
"OK, OK," he says; "You're right. I've gotta change it. What I want is
a picture that, if the cops look at it, is perfectly OK for a massage
parlor, but if a customer looks at it, it gives him ideas."
"OK," I said. We arranged it for sixty dollars, and I began to work on
the drawing. First, I had to figure out how to do it. I thought and I
thought, and I often felt I would have been better off drawing the nude
toreador girl in the first place!
Finally I figured out how to do it: I would draw a slave girl in
imaginary Rome, massaging some important Roman -- a senator, perhaps. Since
she's a slave girl, she has a certain look on her face. She knows what's
going to happen next, and she's sort of resigned to it.
I worked very hard on this picture. I used Kathy as the model. Later, I
got another model for the man. I did lots of studies, and soon the cost for
the models was already eighty dollars. I didn't care about the money; I
liked the challenge of having to do a commission. Finally I ended up with a
picture of a muscular man lying on a table with the slave girl massaging
him: she's wearing a kind of toga that covers one breast-the other one was
nude-and I got the expression of resignation on her face just right.
I was just about ready to deliver my commissioned masterpiece to the
massage parlor when Gianonni told me that the guy had been arrested and was
in jail. So I asked the girls at the topless restaurant if they knew any
good massage parlors around Pasadena that would like to hang my drawing in
the lobby.
They gave me names and locations of places in and around Pasadena and
told me things like "When you go to the Such-and-such massage parlor, ask
for Frank -- he's a pretty good guy. If he's not there, don't go in." Or
"Don't talk to Eddie. Eddie would never understand the value of a drawing."
The next day I rolled up my picture, put it in the back of my station
wagon, and my wife Gweneth wished me good luck as I set out to visit the
brothels of Pasadena to sell my drawing.
Just before I went to the first place on my list, I thought to myself,
"You know, before I go anywhere else, I oughta check at the place he used to
have. Maybe it's still open, and perhaps the new manager wants my drawing."
I went over there and knocked on the door. It opened a little bit, and I saw
a girl's eye. "Do we know you?" she asked.
"No, you don't, but how would you like to have a drawing that would be
appropriate for your entrance hall?"
"I'm sorry," she said, "but we've already contracted an artist to make
a drawing for us, and he's working on it."
"I'm the artist," I said, "and your drawing is ready!"
It turns out that the guy, as he was going to jail, told his wife about
our arrangement. So I went in and showed them the drawing.
The guy's wife and his sister, who were now running the place, were not
entirely pleased with it; they wanted the girls to see it. I hung it up on
the wall, there in the lobby, and all the girls came out from the various
rooms in the back and started to make comments.
One girl said she didn't like the expression on the slave girl's face.
"She doesn't look happy," she said. "She should be smiling."
I said to her, "Tell me -- while you're massaging a guy, and he's not
lookin' at you, are you smiling?"
"Oh, no!" she said. "I feel exactly like she looks! But it's not right
to put it in the picture."
I left it with them, but after a week of worrying about it back and
forth, they decided they didn't want it. It turned out that the real reason
that they didn't want it was the one nude breast. I tried to explain that my
drawing was a tone-down of the original request, but they said they had
different ideas about it than the guy did. I thought the irony of people
running such an establishment being prissy about one nude breast was
amusing, and I took the drawing home.
My businessman friend Dudley Wright saw the drawing and I told him the
story about it. He said, "You oughta triple its price. With art, nobody is
really sure of its value, so people often think, 'If the price is higher, it
must be more valuable!'"
I said, "You're crazy!" but, just for fun, I bought a twenty-dollar
frame and mounted the drawing so it would be ready for the next customer.
Some guy from the weather forecasting business saw the drawing I had
given Gianonni and asked if I had others. I invited him and his wife to my
"studio" downstairs in my home, and they asked about the newly framed
drawing. "That one is two hundred dollars." (I had multiplied sixty by three
and added twenty for the frame.) The next day they came back and bought it.
So the massage parlor drawing ended up in the office of a weather
forecaster.
One day there was a police raid on Gianonni's, and some of the dancers
were arrested. Someone wanted to stop Gianonni from putting on topless
dancing shows, and Gianonni didn't want to stop. So there was a big court
case about it; it was in all the local papers.
Gianonni went around to all the customers and asked them if they would
testify in support of him. Everybody had an excuse: "I run a day camp, and
if the parents see that I'm going to this place, they won't send their kids
to my camp..." Or, "I'm in the such-and-such business, and if it's
publicized that I come down here, we'll lose customers."
I think to myself, "I'm the only free man in here. I haven't any
excuse! I like this place, and I'd like to see it continue, I don't see
anything wrong with topless dancing." So I said to Gianonni, "Yes, I'll be
glad to testify."
In court the big question was, is topless dancing acceptable to the
community -- do community standards allow it?
The lawyer from the defense tried to make me into an expert on
community standards. He asked me if I went into other bars.
"Yes."
"And how many times per week would you typically go to Gianonni's?"
"Five, six times a week." (That got into the papers: The Caltech
professor of physics goes to see topless dancing six times a week.)
"What sections of the community were represented at Gianonni's?"
"Nearly every section: there were guys from the real estate business, a
guy from the city governing board, workmen from the gas station, guys from
engineering firms, a professor of physics..."
"So would you say that topless entertainment is acceptable to the
community, given that so many sections of it are watching it and enjoying
it?"
"I need to know what you mean by 'acceptable to the community.' Nothing
is accepted by everybody, so what percentage of the community must accept
something in order for it to be 'acceptable to the community'?"
The lawyer suggests a figure. The other lawyer objects. The judge calls
a recess, and they all go into chambers for 15 minutes before they can
decide that "acceptable to the community" means accepted by 50% of the
community.
In spite of the fact that I made them be precise, I had no precise
numbers as evidence, so I said, "I believe that topless dancing is accepted
by more than 50% of the community, and is therefore acceptable to the
community."
Gianonni temporarily lost the case, and his, or another one very
similar to it, went ultimately to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, his
place stayed open, and I got still more free 7-Ups.
Around that time there were some attempts to develop an interest in art
at Caltech. Somebody contributed the money to convert an old plant sciences
building into some art studios. Equipment and supplies were bought and
provided for the students, and they hired an artist from South Africa to
coordinate and support the art activities around Caltech.
Various people came in to teach classes. I got Jerry Zorthian to teach
a drawing class, and some guy came in to teach lithography, which I tried to
learn.
The South African artist came over to my house one time to look at my
drawings. He said he thought it would be fun to have a one-man show. This
time I was cheating: If I hadn't been a professor at Caltech, they would
have never thought my pictures were worth it.
"Some of my better drawings have been sold, and I feel uncomfortable
calling the people," I said.
"You don't have to worry, Mr. Feynman," he reassured me. "You won't
have to call them up. We will make all the arrangements and operate the
exhibit officially and correctly."
I gave him a list of people who had bought my drawings, and they soon
received a telephone call from him: "We understand that you have an Ofey."
"Oh, yes!"
"We are planning to have an exhibition of Ofeys, and we're wondering if
you would consider lending it to us." Of course they were delighted.
The exhibition was held in the basement of the Athenaeum, the Caltech
faculty club. Everything was like the real thing: All the pictures had
titles, and those that had been taken on consignment from their owners had
due recognition: "Lent by Mr. Gianonni," for instance.
One drawing was a portrait of the beautiful blonde model from the art
class, which I had originally intended to be a study of shading: I put a
light at the level of her legs a bit to the side and pointed it upwards. As
she sat, I tried to draw the shadows as they were -- her nose cast its
shadow rather unnaturally across her face -- so they wouldn't look so bad. I
drew her torso as well, so you could also see her breasts and the shadows
they made. I stuck it in with the other drawings in the exhibit and called
it "Madame Curie Observing the Radiations from Radium." The message I
intended to convey was, nobody thinks of Madame Curie as a woman, as
feminine, with beautiful hair, bare breasts, and all that. They only think
of the radium part.
A prominent industrial designer named Henry Dreyfuss invited various
people to a reception at his home after the exhibition -- the woman who had
contributed money to support the arts, the president of Caltech and his
wife, and so on.
One of these art-lovers came over and started up a conversation with
me: "Tell me, Professor Feynman, do you draw from photographs or from
models?"
"I always draw directly from a posed model."
"Well, how did you get Madame Curie to pose for you?"
Around that time the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a similar
idea to the one I had, that artists are far away from an understanding of
science. My idea was that artists don't understand the underlying generality
and beauty of nature and her laws (and therefore cannot portray this in
their art). The museum's idea was that artists should know more about
technology: they should become more familiar with machines and other
applications of science.
The art museum organized a scheme in which they would get some of the
really good artists of the day to go to various companies which volunteered
some time and money to the project. The artists would visit these companies
and snoop around until they saw something interesting that they could use in
their work. The museum thought it might help if someone who knew something
about technology could be a sort of liaison with the artists from time to
time as they visited the companies. Since they knew I was fairly good at
explaining things to people and I wasn't a complete jackass when it came to
art (actually, I think they knew I was trying to learn to draw) -- at any
rate, they asked me if I would do that, and I agreed.
It was lots of fun visiting the companies with the artists. What
typically happened was, some guy would show us a tube that discharged sparks
in beautiful blue, twisting patterns. The artists would get all excited and
ask me how they could use it in an exhibit. What were the necessary
conditions to make it work?
The artists were very interesting people. Some of them were absolute
fakes: they would claim to be an artist, and everybody agreed they were an
artist, but when you'd sit and talk to them, they'd make no sense
whatsoever! One guy in particular, the biggest faker, always dressed funny;
he had a big black bowler hat. He would answer your questions in an
incomprehensible way, and when you'd try to find out more about what he said
by asking him about some of the words he used, off we'd be in another
direction! The only thing he contributed, ultimately, to the exhibit for art
and technology was a portrait of himself. Other artists I talked to would
say things that made no sense at first, but they would go to great lengths
to explain their ideas to me. One time I went somewhere, as a part of this
scheme, with Robert Irwin. It was a two-day trip, and after a great effort
of discussing back and forth, I finally understood what he was trying to
explain to me, and I thought it was quite interesting and wonderful.
Then there were the artists who had absolutely no idea about the real
world. They thought that scientists were some kind of grand magicians who
could make anything, and would say things like, "I want to make a picture in
three dimensions where the figure is suspended in space and it glows and
flickers." They made up the world they wanted, and had no idea what was
reasonable or unreasonable to make.
Finally there was an exhibit, and I was asked to be on a panel which
judged the works of art. Although there was some good stuff that was
inspired by the artists' visiting the companies, I thought that most of the
good works of art were things that were turned in at the last minute out of
desperation, and didn't really have anything to do with technology. All of
the other members of the panel disagreed, and I found myself in some
difficulty. I'm no good at criticizing art, and I shouldn't have been on the
panel in the first place.
There was a guy there at the county art museum named Maurice Tuchman
who really knew what he was talking about when it came to art. He knew that
I had had this one-man show at Caltech. He said, "You know, you're never
going to draw again."
"What? That's ridiculous! Why should I never..."
"Because you've had a one-man show, and you're only an amateur."
Although I did draw after that, I never worked as hard, with the same
energy and intensity, as I did before. I never sold a drawing after that,
either. He was a smart fella, and I learned a lot from him. I could have
learned a lot more, if I weren't so stubborn!
--------
Is Electricity Fire?
In the early fifties I suffered temporarily from a disease of middle
age: I used to give philosophical talks about science -- how science
satisfies curiosity, how it gives you a new world view, how it gives man the
ability to do things, how it gives him power -- and the question is, in view
of the recent development of the atomic bomb, is it a good idea to give man
that much power? I also thought about the relation of science and religion,
and it was about this time when I was invited to a conference in New York
that was going to discuss "the ethics of equality."
There had already been a conference among the older people, somewhere
on Long Island, and this year they decided to have some younger people come
in and discuss the position papers they had worked out in the other
conference.
Before I got there, they sent around a list of "books you might find
interesting to read, and please send us any books you want others to read,
and we will store them in the library so that others may read them."
So here comes this wonderful list of books. I start down the first
page: I haven't read a single one of the books, and I feel very uneasy -- I
hardly belong. I look at the second page: I haven't read a single one. I
found out, after looking through the whole list, that I haven't read any of
the books. I must be an idiot, an illiterate! There were wonderful books
there, like Thomas Jefferson On Freedom, or something like that, and there
were a few authors I had read. There was a book by Heisenberg, one by
Schrödinger, and one by Einstein, but they were something like Einstein, My
Later Fears and Schrödinger, What Is Life -- different from what I had read.
So I had a feeling that I was out of my depth, and that I shouldn't be in
this. Maybe I could just sit quietly and listen.
I go to the first big introductory meeting, and a guy gets up and
explains that we have two problems to discuss. The first one is fogged up a
little bit -- something about ethics and equality, but I don't understand
what the problem exactly is. And the second one is, "We are going to
demonstrate by our efforts a way that we can have a dialogue among people of
different fields." There was an international lawyer, a historian, a Jesuit
priest, a rabbi, a scientist (me), and so on.
Well, right away my logical mind goes like this: The second problem I
don't have to pay any attention to, because if it works, it works; and if it
doesn't work, it doesn't work -- we don't have to prove that we can have a
dialogue, and discuss that we can have a dialogue, if we haven't got any
dialogue to talk about! So the primary problem is the first one, which I
didn't understand.
I was ready to put my hand up and say, "Would you please define the
problem better," but then I thought, "No, I'm the ignoramus; I'd better
listen. I don't want to start trouble right away."
The subgroup I was in was supposed to discuss the "ethics of equality
in education." In the meetings of our subgroup the Jesuit priest was always
talking about "the fragmentation of knowledge." He would say, "The real
problem in the ethics of equality in education is the fragmentation of
knowledge." This Jesuit was looking back into the thirteenth century when
the Catholic Church was in charge of all education, and the whole world was
simple. There was God, and everything came from God; it was all organized.
But today, it's not so easy to understand everything. So knowledge has
become fragmented. I felt that "the fragmentation of knowledge" had nothing
to do with "it," but "it" had never been defined, so there was no way for me
to prove that.
Finally I said, "What is the ethical problem associated with the
fragmentation of knowledge?" He would only answer me with great clouds of
fog, and I'd say, "I don't understand," and everybody else would say they
did understand, and they tried to explain it to me, but they couldn't
explain it to me!
So the others in the group told me to write down why I thought the
fragmentation of knowledge was not a problem of ethics. I went back to my
dormitory room and I wrote out carefully, as best I could, what I thought
the subject of "the ethics of equality in education" might be, and I gave
some examples of the kinds of problems I thought we might be talking about.
For instance, in education, you increase differences. If someone's good at
something, you try to develop his ability, which results in differences, or
inequalities. So if education increases inequality, is this ethical? Then,
after giving some more examples, I went on to say that while "the
fragmentation of knowledge" is a difficulty because the complexity of the
world makes it hard to learn things, in light of my definition of the realm
of the subject, I couldn't see how the fragmentation of knowledge had
anything to do with anything approximating what the ethics of equality in
education might more or less be.
The next day I brought my paper into the meeting, and the guy said,
"Yes, Mr. Feynman has brought up some very interesting questions we ought to
discuss, and we'll put them aside for some possible future discussion." They
completely missed the point. I was trying to define the problem, and then
show how "the fragmentation of knowledge" didn't have anything to do with
it. And the reason that nobody got anywhere in that conference was that they
hadn't clearly defined the subject of "the ethics of equality in education,"
and therefore no one knew exactly what they were supposed to talk about.
There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read --
something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing,
and my eyes were coming out: I couldn't make head nor tail of it! I figured
it was because I hadn't read any of the books on that list. I had this
uneasy feeling of "I'm not adequate," until finally I said to myself, "I'm
gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell
it means."
So I stopped -- at random -- and read the next sentence very carefully.
I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: "The
individual member of the social community often receives his information via
visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated.
You know what it means? "People read."
Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could
translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: "Sometimes
people read; sometimes people listen to the radio," and so on, but written
in such a fancy way that I couldn't understand it at first, and when I
finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.
There was only one thing that happened at that meeting that was
pleasant or amusing. At this conference, every word that every guy said at
the plenary session was so important that they had a stenotypist there,
typing every goddamn thing. Somewhere on the second day the stenotypist came
up to me and said, "What profession are you? Surely not a professor."
"I am a professor," I said.
"Of what?"
"Of physics -- science."
"Oh! That must be the reason," he said.
"Reason for what?"
He said, "You see, I'm a stenotypist, and I type everything that is
said here. Now, when the other fellas talk, I type what they say, but I
don't understand what they're saying. But every time you get up to ask a
question or to say something, I understand exactly what you mean -- what the
question is, and what you're saying -- so I thought you can't be a
professor!"
There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology
place, a very nice, very Jewish man, gave a speech. It was a good speech,
and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, when I'm
telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and
true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various
countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we
have atomic weapons, any war and we're doomed, so therefore the right way
out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences
from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we
should give up nearly everything to the other countries until we're all
even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial
feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses
on the way home.
The next day one of the guys in our group said, "I think that speech
last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the
summary of our conference."
I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is
based on a theory that there's only X amount of stuff in the world, that
somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and
therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn't take into
account the real reason for the differences between countries -- that is,
the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of
machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this
machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn't the stuff, but the
power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these
people were not in science; they didn't understand it. They didn't
understand technology; they didn't understand their time.
The conference made me so nervous that a girl I knew in New York had to
calm me down. "Look," she said, "you're shaking! You've gone absolutely
nuts! Just take it easy, and don't take it so seriously. Back away a minute
and look at what it is." So I thought about the conference, how crazy it
was, and it wasn't so bad. But if someone were to ask me to participate in
something like that again, I'd shy away from it like mad -- I mean zero! No!
Absolutely not! And I still get invitations for this kind of thing today.
When it came time to evaluate the conference at the end, the others
told how much they got out of it, how successful it was, and so on. When
they asked me, I said, "This conference was worse than a Rorschach test:
There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you
see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!"
Even worse, at the end of the conference they were going to have
another meeting, but this time the public would come, and the guy in charge
of our group has the nerve to say that since we've worked out so much, there
won't be any time for public discussion, so we'll just tell the public all
the things we've worked out. My eyes bugged out: I didn't think we had
worked out a damn thing!
Finally, when we were discussing the question of whether we had
developed a way of having a dialogue among people of different disciplines
-- our second basic "problem" -- I said that I noticed something
interesting. Each of us talked about what we thought the "ethics of
equality" was, from our own point of view, without paying any attention to
the other guy's point of view. For example, the historian proposed that the
way to understand ethical problems is to look historically at how they
evolved and how they developed; the international lawyer suggested that the
way to do it is to see how in fact people actually act in different
situations and make their arrangements; the Jesuit priest was always
referring to "the fragmentation of knowledge"; and I, as a scientist,
proposed that we should isolate the problem in a way analogous to Galileo's
techniques for experiments; and so on. "So, in my opinion," I said, "we had
no dialogue at all. Instead, we had nothing but chaos!"
Of course I was attacked, from all around. "Don't you think that order
can come from chaos?"
"Uh, well, as a general principle, or..." I didn't understand what to
do with a question like "Can order come from chaos?" Yes, no, what of it?
There were a lot of fools at that conference -- pompous fools -- and
pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can
talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools -- guys who are
fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful
they are with all this hocus pocus -- THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool
isn't a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is
terrible! And that's what I got at the conference, a bunch of pompous fools,
and I got very upset. I'm not going to get upset like that again, so I won't
participate in interdisciplinary conferences any more.
A footnote: While I was at the conference, I stayed at the Jewish
Theological Seminary, where young rabbis -- I think they were Orthodox --
were studying. Since I have a Jewish background, I knew of some of the
things they told me about the Talmud, but I had never seen the Talmud. It
was very interesting. It's got big pages, and in a little square in the
corner of the page is the original Talmud, and then in a sort of L-shaped
margin, all around this square, are commentaries written by different
people. The Talmud has evolved, and everything has been discussed again and
again, all very carefully, in a medieval kind of reasoning. I think the
commentaries were shut down around the thirteen- or fourteen- or
fifteen-hundreds -- there hasn't been any modern commentary. The Talmud is a
wonderful book, a great, big potpourri of things: trivial questions, and
difficult questions -- for example, problems of teachers, and how to teach
-- and then some trivia again, and so on. The students told me that the
Talmud was never translated, something I thought was curious, since the book
is so valuable.
One day, two or three of the young rabbis came to me and said, "We
realize that we can't study to be rabbis in the modern world without knowing
something about science, so we'd like to ask you some questions."
Of course there are thousands of places to find out about science, and
Columbia University was right near there, but I wanted to know what kinds of
questions they were interested in.
They said, "Well, for instance, is electricity fire?"
"No," I said, "but... what is the problem?"
They said, "In the Talmud it says you're not supposed to make fire on a
Saturday, so our question is, can we use electrical things on Saturdays?"
I was shocked. They weren't interested in science at all! The only way
science was influencing their lives was so they might be able to interpret
better the Talmud! They weren't interested in the world outside, in natural
phenomena; they were only interested in resolving some question brought up
in the Talmud.
And then one day -- I guess it was a Saturday -- I want to go up in the
elevator, and there's a guy standing near the elevator. The elevator comes,
I go in, and he goes in with me. I say, "Which floor?" and my hand's ready
to push one of the buttons.
"No, no!" he says, "I'm supposed to push the buttons for you."
"What?"
"Yes! The boys here can't push the buttons on Saturday, so I have to do
it for them. You see, I'm not Jewish, so it's all right for me to push the
buttons. I stand near the elevator, and they tell me what floor, and I push
the button for them."
Well, this really bothered me, so I decided to trap the students in a
logical discussion. I had been brought up in a Jewish home, so I knew the
kind of nitpicking logic to use, and I thought, "Here's fun!"
My plan went like this: I'd start off by asking, "Is the Jewish
viewpoint a viewpoint that any man can have? Because if it is not, then it's
certainly not something that is truly valuable for humanity... yak, yak,
yak." And then they would have to say, "Yes, the Jewish viewpoint is good
for any man."
Then I would steer them around a little more by asking, "Is it ethical
for a man to hire another man to do something which is unethical for him to
do? Would you hire a man to rob for you, for instance?" And I keep working
them into the channel, very slowly, and very carefully, until I've got them
-- trapped!
And do you know what happened? They're rabbinical students, right? They
were ten times better than I was! As soon as they saw I could put them in a
hole, they went twist, turn, twist -- I can't remember how -- and they were
free! I thought I had come up with an original idea -- phooey! It had been
discussed in the Talmud for ages! So they cleaned me up just as easy as pie
-- they got right out.
Finally I tried to assure the rabbinical students that the electric
spark that was bothering them when they pushed the elevator buttons was not
fire. I said, "Electricity is not fire. It's not a chemical process, as fire
is."
"Oh?" they said.
"Of course, there's electricity in amongst the atoms in a fire."
"Aha!" they said.
"And in every other phenomenon that occurs in the world."
I even proposed a practical solution for eliminating the spark. "If
that's what's bothering you, you can put a condenser across the switch, so
the electricity will go on and off without any spark whatsoever --
anywhere." But for some reason, they didn't like that idea either.
It really was a disappointment. Here they are, slowly coming to life,
only to better interpret the Talmud. Imagine! In modern times like this,
guys are studying to go into society and do something -- to be a rabbi --
and the only way they think that science might be interesting is because
their ancient, provincial, medieval problems are being confounded slightly
by some new phenomena.
Something else happened at that time which is worth mentioning here.
One of the questions the rabbinical students and I discussed at some length
was why it is that in academic things, such as theoretical physics, there is
a higher proportion of Jewish kids than their proportion in the general
population. The rabbinical students thought the reason was that the Jews
have a history of respecting learning: They respect their rabbis, who are
really teachers, and they respect education. The Jews pass on this tradition
in their families all the time, so that if a boy is a good student, it's as
good as, if not better than, being a good football player.
It was the same afternoon that I was reminded how true it is. I was
invited to one of the rabbinical students' home, and he introduced me to his
mother, who had just come back from Washington, D.C. She clapped her hands
together, in ecstasy, and said, "Oh! My day is complete. Today I met a
general, and a professor!"
I realized that there are not many people who think it's just as
important, and just as nice, to meet a professor as to meet a general. So I
guess there's something in what they said.
--------
Judging Books by Their Covers
After the war, physicists were often asked to go to Washington and give
advice to various sections of the government, especially the military. What
happened, I suppose, is that since the scientists had made these bombs that
were so important, the military felt we were useful for something.
Once I was asked to serve on a committee which was to evaluate various
weapons for the army, and I wrote a letter back which explained that I was
only a theoretical physicist, and I didn't know anything about weapons for
the army.
The army responded that they had found in their experience that
theoretical physicists were very useful to them in making decisions, so
would I please reconsider?
I wrote back again and said I didn't really know anything, and doubted
I could help them.
Finally I got a letter from the Secretary of the Army, which proposed a
compromise: I would come to the first meeting, where I could listen and see
whether I could make a contribution or not. Then I could decide whether I
should continue.
I said I would, of course. What else could I do?
I went down to Washington and the first thing that I went to was a
cocktail party to meet everybody. There were generals and other important
characters from the army, and everybody talked. It was pleasant enough.
One guy in a uniform came to me and told me that the army was glad that
physicists were advising the military because it had a lot of problems. One
of the problems was that tanks use up their fuel very quickly and thus can't
go very far. So the question was how to refuel them as they're going along.
Now this guy had the idea that, since the physicists can get energy out of
uranium, could I work out a way in which we could use silicon dioxide --
sand, dirt -- as a fuel? If that were possible, then all this tank would
have to do would be to have a little scoop underneath, and as it goes along,
it would pick up the dirt and use it for fuel! He thought that was a great
idea, and that all I had to do was to work out the details. That was the
kind of problem I thought we would be talking about in the meeting the next
day.
I went to the meeting and noticed that some guy who had introduced me
to all the people at the cocktail party was sitting next to me. He was
apparently some flunky assigned to be at my side at all times. On my other
side was some super general I had heard of before.
At the first session of the meeting they talked about some technical
matters, and I made a few comments. But later on, near the end of the
meeting, they began to discuss some problem of logistics, about which I knew
nothing. It had to do with figuring out how much stuff you should have at
different places at different times. And although I tried to keep my trap
shut, when you get into a situation like that, where you're sitting around a
table with all these "important people" discussing these "important
problems," you can't keep your mouth shut, even if you know nothing
whatsoever! So I made some comments in that discussion, too.
During the next coffee break the guy who had been assigned to shepherd
me around said, "I was very impressed by the things you said during the
discussion. They certainly were an important contribution."
I stopped and thought about my "contribution" to the logistics problem,
and realized that a man like the guy who orders the stuff for Christmas at
Macy's would be better able to figure out how to handle problems like that
than I. So I concluded: a) if I had made an important contribution, it was
sheer luck; b) anybody else could have done as well, but most people could
have done better, and c) this flattery should wake me up to the fact that I
am not capable of contributing much.
Right after that they decided, in the meeting, that they could do
better discussing the organization of scientific research (such as, should
scientific development be under the Corps of Engineers or the Quartermaster
Division?) than specific technical matters. I knew that if there was to be
any hope of my making a real contribution, it would be only on some specific
technical matter, and surely not on how to organize research in the army.
Until then I didn't let on any of my feelings about the situation to
the chairman of the meeting -- the big shot who had invited me in the first
place. As we were packing our bags to leave, he said to me, all smiles,
"You'll be joining us, then, for the next meeting..."
"No, I won't." I could see his face change suddenly. He was very
surprised that I would say no, after making those "contributions."
In the early sixties, a lot of my friends were still giving advice to
the government. Meanwhile, I was having no feeling of social responsibility
and resisting, as much as possible, offers to go to Washington, which took a
certain amount of courage in those times.
I was giving a series of freshman physics lectures at that time, and
after one of them, Tom Harvey, who assisted me in putting on the
demonstrations, said, "You oughta see what's happening to mathematics in
schoolbooks! My daughter comes home with a lot of crazy stuff!"
I didn't pay much attention to what he said.
But the next day I got a telephone call from a pretty famous lawyer
here in Pasadena, Mr. Norris, who was at that time on the State Board of
Education. He asked me if I would serve on the State Curriculum Commission,
which had to choose the new schoolbooks for the state of California. You
see, the state had a law that all of the schoolbooks used by all of the kids
in all of the public schools have to be chosen by the State Board of
Education, so they have a committee to look over the books and to give them
advice on which books to take.
It happened that a lot of the books were on a new method of teaching
arithmetic that they called "new math," and since usually the only people to
look at the books were schoolteachers or administrators in education, they
thought it would be a good idea to have somebody who uses mathematics
scientifically, who knows what the end product is and what we're trying to
teach it for, to help in the evaluation of the schoolbooks.
I must have had, by this time, a guilty feeling about not cooperating
with the government, because I agreed to get on this committee.
Immediately I began getting letters and telephone calls from book
publishers. They said things like, "We're very glad to hear you're on the
committee because we really wanted a scientific guy..." and "It's wonderful
to have a scientist on the committee, because our books are scientifically
oriented..." But they also said things like, "We'd like to explain to you
what our book is about..." and "We'll be very glad to help you in any way we
can to judge our books..." That seemed to me kind of crazy. I'm an objective
scientist, and it seemed to me that since the only thing the kids in school
are going to get is the books (and the teachers get the teacher's manual,
which I would also get), any extra explanation from the company was a
distortion. So I didn't want to speak to any of the publishers and always
replied, "You don't have to explain; I'm sure the books will speak for
themselves."
I represented a certain district, which comprised most of the Los
Angeles area except for the city of Los Angeles, which was represented by a
very nice lady from the L.A. school system named Mrs. Whitehouse. Mr. Norris
suggested that I meet her and find out what the committee did and how it
worked.
Mrs. Whitehouse started out telling me about the stuff they were going
to talk about in the next meeting (they had already had one meeting; I was
appointed late). "They're going to talk about the counting numbers." I
didn't know what that was, but it turned out they were what I used to call
integers. They had different names for everything, so I had a lot of trouble
right from the start.
She told me how the members of the commission normally rated the new
schoolbooks. They would get a relatively large number of copies of each book
and would give them to various teachers and administrators in their
district. Then they would get reports back on what these people thought
about the books. Since I didn't know a lot of teachers or administrators,
and since I felt that I could, by reading the books myself, make up my mind
as to how they looked to me, I chose to read all the books myself. (There
were some people in my district who had expected to look at the books and
wanted a chance to give their opinion. Mrs. Whitehouse offered to put their
reports in with hers so they would feel better and I wouldn't have to worry
about their complaints. They were satisfied, and I didn't get much trouble.)
A few days later a guy from the book depository called me up and said,
"We're ready to send you the books, Mr. Feynman; there are three hundred
pounds."
I was overwhelmed.
"It's all right, Mr. Feynman; we'll get someone to help you read them."
I couldn't figure out how you do that: you either read them or you
don't read them. I had a special bookshelf put in my study downstairs (the
books took up seventeen feet), and began reading all the books that were
going to be discussed in the next meeting. We were going to start out with
the elementary schoolbooks.
It was a pretty big job, and I worked all the time at it down in the
basement. My wife says that during this period it was like living over a
volcano. It would be quiet for a while, but then all of a sudden,
"BLLLLLOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!" -- there would be a big explosion from the "volcano"
below. The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They
were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples
(like automobiles in the street for "sets") which were almost OK, but in
which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate.
Everything was a little bit ambiguous -- they weren't smart enough to
understand what was meant by "rigor." They were faking it. They were
teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in fact, useless,
at that time, for the child.
I understood what they were trying to do. Many people thought we were
behind the Russians after Sputnik, and some mathematicians were asked to
give advice on how to teach math by using some of the rather interesting
modern concepts of mathematics. The purpose was to enhance mathematics for
the children who found it dull.
I'll give you an example: They would talk about different bases of
numbers -- five, six, and so on -- to show the possibilities. That would be
interesting for a kid who could understand base ten -- something to
entertain his mind. But what they had turned it into, in these books, was
that every child had to learn another base! And then the usual horror would
come: "Translate these numbers, which are written in base seven, to base
five." Translating from one base to another is an utterly useless thing. If
you can do it, maybe it's entertaining; if you can't do it, forget it.
There's no point to it.
Anyhow, I'm looking at all these books, all these books, and none of
them has said anything about using arithmetic in science. If there are any
examples on the use of arithmetic at all (most of the time it's this
abstract new modern nonsense), they are about things like buying stamps.
Finally I come to a book that says, "Mathematics is used in science in
many ways. We will give you an example from astronomy, which is the science
of stars." I turn the page, and it says, "Red stars have a temperature of
four thousand degrees, yellow stars have a temperature of five thousand
degrees..." -- so far, so good. It continues: "Green stars have a
temperature of seven thousand degrees, blue stars have a temperature of ten
thousand degrees, and violet stars have a temperature of... (some big
number)." There are no green or violet stars, but the figures for the others
are roughly correct. It's vaguely right -- but already, trouble! That's the
way everything was: Everything was written by somebody who didn't know what
the hell he was talking about, so it was a little bit wrong, always! And how
we are going to teach well by using books written by people who don't quite
understand what they're talking about, I cannot understand. I don't know
why, but the books are lousy; UNIVERSALLY LOUSY!
Anyway, I'm happy with this book, because it's the first example of
applying arithmetic to science. I'm a bit unhappy when I read about the
stars' temperatures, but I'm not very unhappy because it's more or less
right -- it's just an example of error. Then comes the list of problems. It
says, "John and his father go out to look at the stars. John sees two blue
stars and a red star. His father sees a green star, a violet star, and two
yellow stars. What is the total temperature of the stars seen by John and
his father?" -- and I would explode in horror.
My wife would talk about the volcano downstairs. That's only an
example: it was perpetually like that. Perpetual absurdity! There's no
purpose whatsoever in adding the temperature of two stars. Nobody ever does
that except, maybe, to then take the average temperature of the stars, but
not to find out the total temperature of all the stars! It was awful! All it
was was a game to get you to add, and they didn't understand what they were
talking about. It was like reading sentences with a few typographical
errors, and then suddenly a whole sentence is written backwards. The
mathematics was like that. Just hopeless!
Then I came to my first meeting. The other members had given some kind
of ratings to some of the books, and they asked me what my ratings were. My
rating was often different from theirs, and they would ask, "Why did you
rate that book low?"
I would say the trouble with that book was this and this on page
so-and-so -- I had my notes.
They discovered that I was kind of a goldmine: I would tell them, in
detail, what was good and bad in all the books; I had a reason for every
rating.
I would ask them why they had rated this book so high, and they would
say, "Let us hear what you thought about such and such a book." I would
never find out why they rated anything the way they did. Instead, they kept
asking me what I thought.
We came to a certain book, part of a set of three supplementary books
published by the same company, and they asked me what I thought about it.
I said, "The book depository didn't send me that book, but the other
two were nice."
Someone tried repeating the question: "What do you think about that
book?"
"I said they didn't send me that one, so I don't have any judgment on
it."
The man from the book depository was there, and he said, "Excuse me; I
can explain that. I didn't send it to you because that book hadn't been
completed yet. There's a rule that you have to have every entry in by a
certain time, and the publisher was a few days late with it. So it was sent
to us with just the covers, and it's blank in between. The company sent a
note excusing themselves and hoping they could have their set of three books
considered, even though the third one would be late."
It turned out that the blank book had a rating by some of the other
members! They couldn't believe it was blank, because they had a rating. In
fact, the rating for the missing book was a little bit higher than for the
two others. The fact that there was nothing in the book had nothing to do
with the rating.
I believe the reason for all this is that the system works this way.
When you give books all over the place to people, they're busy; they're
careless; they think, "Well, a lot of people are reading this book, so it
doesn't make any difference." And they put in some kind of number -- some of
them, at least; not all of them, but some of them. Then when you receive
your reports, you don't know why this particular book has fewer reports than
the other books -- that is, perhaps one book has ten, and this one only has
six people reporting -- so you average the rating of those who reported; you
don't average the ones who didn't report, so you get a reasonable number.
This process of averaging all the time misses the fact that there is
absolutely nothing between the covers of the book!
I made that theory up because I saw what happened in the curriculum
commission: For the blank book, only six out of the ten members were
reporting, whereas with the other books, eight or nine out of the ten were
reporting. And when they averaged the six, they got as good an average as
when they averaged with eight or nine. They were very embarrassed to
discover they were giving ratings to that book, and it gave me a little bit
more confidence. It turned out the other members of the committee had done a
lot of work in giving out the books and collecting reports, and had gone to
sessions in which the book publishers would explain the books before they
read them; I was the only guy on that commission who read all the books and
didn't get any information from the book publishers except what was in the
books themselves, the things that would ultimately go to the schools.
This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by
looking at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who
looked at it carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was
permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the
length of the Emperor of China's nose? To find out, you go all over the
country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China's
nose is, and you average it. And that would be very "accurate" because you
averaged so many people. But it's no way to find anything out; when you have
a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it,
you don't improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging.
At first we weren't supposed to talk about the cost of the books. We
were told how many books we could choose, so we designed a program which
used a lot of supplementary books, because all the new textbooks had
failures of one kind or another. The most serious failures were in the "new
math" books: there were no applications; not enough word problems. There was
no talk of selling stamps; instead there was too much talk about commutation
and abstract things and not enough translation to situations in the world.
What do you do: add, subtract, multiply, or divide? So we suggested some
books which had some of that as supplementary -- one or two for each
classroom -- in addition to a textbook for each student. We had it all
worked out to balance everything, after much discussion.
When we took our recommendations to the Board of Education, they told
us they didn't have as much money as they had thought, so we'd have to go
over the whole thing and cut out this and that, now taking the cost into
consideration, and ruining what was a fairly balanced program, in which
there was a chance for a teacher to find examples of the things (s)he
needed.
Now that they changed the rules about how many books we could recommend
and we had no more chance to balance, it was a pretty lousy program. When
the senate budget committee got to it, the program was emasculated still
further. Now it was really lousy! I was asked to appear before the state
senators when the issue was being discussed, but I declined: By that time,
having argued this stuff so much, I was tired. We had prepared our
recommendations for the Board of Education, and I figured it was their job
to present it to the state -- which was legally right, but not politically
sound. I shouldn't have given up so soon, but to have worked so hard and
discussed so much about all these books to make a fairly balanced program,
and then to have the whole thing scrapped at the end -- that was
discouraging! The whole thing was an unnecessary effort that could have been
turned around and done the opposite way: start with the cost of the books,
and buy what you can afford.
What finally clinched it, and made me ultimately resign, was that the
following year we were going to discuss science books. I thought maybe the
science would be different, so I looked at a few of them.
The same thing happened: something would look good at first and then
turn out to be horrifying. For example, there was a book that started out
with four pictures: first there was a wind-up toy; then there was an
automobile; then there was a boy riding a bicycle; then there was something
else. And underneath each picture it said, "What makes it go?"
I thought, "I know what it is: They're going to talk about mechanics,
how the springs work inside the toy; about chemistry, how the engine of the
automobile works; and biology, about how the muscles work."
It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: "What makes
it go? Everything goes because the sun is shining." And then we would have
fun discussing it:
"No, the toy goes because the spring is wound up," I would say.
"How did the spring get wound up?" he would ask.
"I wound it up."
"And how did you get moving?"
"From eating."
"And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it's because the
sun is shining that all these things are moving." That would get the concept
across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun's power.
I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, "Energy makes
it go." And for the boy on the bicycle, "Energy makes it go." For
everything, "Energy makes it go."
Now that doesn't mean anything. Suppose it's "Wakalixes." That's the
general principle: "Wakalixes makes it go." There's no knowledge coming in.
The child doesn't learn anything; it's just a word!
What they should have done is to look at the wind-up toy, see that
there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never
mind "energy." Later on, when the children know something about how the toy
actually works, they can discuss the more general principles of energy.
It's also not even true that "energy makes it go," because if it stops,
you could say, "energy makes it stop" just as well. What they're talking
about is concentrated energy being transformed into more dilute forms, which
is a very subtle aspect of energy. Energy is neither increased nor decreased
in these examples; it's just changed from one form to another. And when the
things stop, the energy is changed into heat, into general chaos.
But that's the way all the books were: They said things that were
useless, mixed-up, ambiguous, confusing, and partially incorrect. How
anybody can learn science from these books, I don't know, because it's not
science.
So when I saw all these horrifying books with the same kind of trouble
as the math books had, I saw my volcano process starting again. Since I was
exhausted from reading all the math books, and discouraged from its all
being a wasted effort, I couldn't face another year of that, and had to
resign. Sometime later I heard that the energy-makes-it-go book was going to
be recommended by the curriculum commission to the Board of Education, so I
made one last effort. At each meeting of the commission the public was
allowed to make comments, so I got up and said why I thought the book was
bad.
The man who replaced me on the commission said, "That book was approved
by sixty-five engineers at the Such-and-such Aircraft Company!"
I didn't doubt that the company had some pretty good engineers, but to
take sixty-five engineers is to take a wide range of ability -- and to
necessarily include some pretty poor guys! It was once again the problem of
averaging the length of the emperor's nose, or the ratings on a book with
nothing between the covers. It would have been far better to have the
company decide who their better engineers were, and to have them look at the
book. I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys -- but
the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!
I couldn't get through to him, and the book was approved by the board.
When I was still on the commission, I had to go to San Francisco a few
times for some of the meetings, and when I returned to Los Angeles from the
first trip, I stopped in the commission office to get reimbursed for my
expenses.
"How much did it cost, Mr. Feynman?"
"Well, I flew to San Francisco, so it's the airfare, plus the parking
at the airport while I was away."
"Do you have your ticket?"
I happened to have the ticket.
"Do you have a receipt for the parking?"
"No, but it cost $2.35 to park my car."
"But we have to have a receipt."
"I told you how much it cost. If you don't trust me, why do you let me
tell you what I think is good and bad about the schoolbooks?".
There was a big stew about that. Unfortunately, I had been used to
giving lectures for some company or university or for ordinary people, not
for the government. I was used to, "What were your expenses?" -- "So-and-so
much." -- "Here you are, Mr. Feynman."
I then decided I wasn't going to give them a receipt for anything.
After the second trip to San Francisco they again asked me for my
ticket and receipts.
"I haven't got any."
"This can't go on, Mr. Feynman."
"When I accepted to serve on the commission, I was told you were going
to pay my expenses."
"But we expected to have some receipts to prove the expenses."
"I have nothing to prove it, but you know I live in Los Angeles and I
go to these other towns; how the hell do you think I get there?"
They didn't give in, and neither did I. I feel when you're in a
position like that, where you choose not to buckle down to the System, you
must pay the consequences if it doesn't work. So I'm perfectly satisfied,
but I never did get compensation for the trips.
It's one of those games I play. They want a receipt? I'm not giving
them a receipt. Then you're not going to get the money. OK, then I'm not
taking the money. They don't trust me? The hell with it; they don't have to
pay me. Of course it's absurd! I know that's the way the government works;
well, screw the government! I feel that human beings should treat human
beings like human beings. And unless I'm going to be treated like one, I'm
not going to have anything to do with them! They feel bad? They feel bad. I
feel bad, too. We'll just let it go. I know they're "protecting the
taxpayer," but see how well you think the taxpayer was being protected in
the following situation.
There were two books that we were unable to come to a decision about
after much discussion; they were extremely close. So we left it open to the
Board of Education to decide. Since the board was now taking the cost into
consideration, and since the two books were so evenly matched, the board
decided to open the bids and take the lower one.
Then the question came up, "Will the schools be getting the books at
the regular time, or could they, perhaps, get them a little earlier, in time
for the coming term?"
One publisher's representative got up and said, "We are happy that you
accepted our bid; we can get it out in time for the next term."
A representative of the publisher that lost out was also there, and he
got up and said, "Since our bids were submitted based on the later deadline,
I think we should have a chance to bid again for the earlier deadline,
because we too can meet the earlier deadline."
Mr. Norris, the Pasadena lawyer on the board, asked the guy from the
other publisher, "And how much would it cost for us to get your books at the
earlier date?"
And he gave a number: It was less!
The first guy got up: "If he changes his bid, I have the right to
change my bid!" -- and his bid is still less!
Norris asked, "Well how is that -- we get the books earlier and it's
cheaper?"
"Yes," one guy says. "We can use a special offset method we wouldn't
normally use..." -- some excuse why it came out cheaper.
The other guy agreed: "When you do it quicker, it costs less!"
That was really a shock. It ended up two million dollars cheaper.
Norris was really incensed by this sudden change.
What happened, of course, was that the uncertainty about the date had
opened the possibility that these guys could bid against each other.
Normally, when books were supposed to be chosen without taking the cost into
consideration, there was no reason to lower the price; the book publishers
could put the prices at any place they wanted to. There was no advantage in
competing by lowering the price; the way you competed was to impress the
members of the curriculum commission.
By the way, whenever our commission had a meeting, there were book
publishers entertaining curriculum commission members by taking them to
lunch and talking to them about their books. I never went.
It seems obvious now, but I didn't know what was happening the time I
got a package of dri