ed fruit and whatnot delivered by Western Union with a
message that read, "From our family to yours, Happy Thanksgiving -- The
Families."
It was from a family I had never heard of in Long Beach, obviously
someone wanting to send this to his friend's family who got the name and
address wrong, so I thought I'd better straighten it out. I called up
Western Union, got the telephone number of the people who sent the stuff,
and I called them.
"Hello, my name is Mr. Feynman. I received a package..."
"Oh, hello, Mr. Feynman, this is Pete Pamilio" and he says it in such a
friendly way that I think I'm supposed to know who he is! I'm normally such
a dunce that I can't remember who anyone is.
So I said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Pamilio, but I don't quite remember who you
are..."
It turned out he was a representative of one of the publishers whose
books I had to judge on the curriculum commission.
"I see. But this could be misunderstood."
"It's only family to family."
"Yes, but I'm judging a book that you're publishing, and maybe someone
might misinterpret your kindness!" I knew what was happening, but I made it
sound like I was a complete idiot.
Another thing like this happened when one of the publishers sent me a
leather briefcase with my name nicely written in gold on it. I gave them the
same stuff: "I can't accept it; I'm judging some of the books you're
publishing. I don't think you understand that!"
One commissioner, who had been there for the greatest length of time,
said, "I never accept the stuff; it makes me very upset. But it just goes
on."
But I really missed one opportunity. If I had only thought fast enough,
I could have had a very good time on that commission. I got to the hotel in
San Francisco in the evening to attend my very first meeting the next day,
and I decided to go out to wander in the town and eat something. I came out
of the elevator, and sitting on a bench in the hotel lobby were two guys who
jumped up and said, "Good evening, Mr. Feynman. Where are you going? Is
there something we can show you in San Francisco?" They were from a
publishing company, and I didn't want to have anything to do with them.
"I'm going out to eat."
"We can take you out to dinner."
"No, I want to be alone."
"Well, whatever you want, we can help you."
I couldn't resist. I said, "Well, I'm going out to get myself in
trouble."
"I think we can help you in that, too."
"No, I think I'll take care of that myself." Then I thought, "What an
error! I should have let all that stuff operate and keep a diary, so the
people of the state of California could find out how far the publishers will
go!" And when I found out about the two-million-dollar difference, God knows
what the pressures are!
--------
Alfred Nobel's Other Mistake
In Canada they have a big association of physics students. They have
meetings; they give papers, and so on. One time the Vancouver chapter wanted
to have me come and talk to them. The girl in charge of it arranged with my
secretary to fly all the way to Los Angeles without telling me. She just
walked into my office. She was really cute, a beautiful blonde. (That
helped; it's not supposed to, but it did.) And I was impressed that the
students in Vancouver had financed the whole thing. They treated me so
nicely in Vancouver that now I know the secret of how to really be
entertained and give talks: Wait for the students to ask you.
One time, a few years after I had won the Nobel Prize, some kids from
the Irvine students' physics club came around and wanted me to talk. I said,
"I'd love to do it. What I want to do is talk just to the physics club. But
-- I don't want to be immodest -- I've learned from experience that there'll
be trouble."
I told them how I used to go over to a local high school every year to
talk to the physics club about relativity, or whatever they asked about.
Then, after I got the Prize, I went over there again, as usual, with no
preparation, and they stuck me in front of an assembly of three hundred
kids.
It was a mess!
I got that shock about three or four times, being an idiot and not
catching on right away. When I was invited to Berkeley to give a talk on
something in physics, I prepared something rather technical, expecting to
give it to the usual physics department group. But when I got there, this
tremendous lecture hall is full of people! And I know there's not that many
people in Berkeley who know the level at which I prepared my talk. My
problem is, I like to please the people who come to hear me, and I can't do
it if everybody and his brother wants to hear: I don't know my audience
then.
After the students understood that I can't just easily go over
somewhere and give a talk to the physics club, I said, "Let's cook up a
dull-sounding title and a dull-sounding professor's name, and then only the
kids who are really interested in physics will bother to come, and those are
the ones we want, OK? You don't have to sell anything."
A few posters appeared on the Irvine campus: Professor Henry Warren
from the University of Washington is going to talk about the structure of
the proton on May 17th at 3:00 in Room D102.
Then I came and said, "Professor Warren had some personal difficulties
and was unable to come and speak to you today, so he telephoned me and asked
me if I would talk to you about the subject, since I've been doing some work
in the field. So here I am." It worked great.
But then, somehow or other, the faculty adviser of the club found out
about the trick, and he got very angry at them. He said, "You know, if it
were known that Professor Feynman was coming down here, a lot of people
would like to have listened to him."
The students explained, "That's just it!" But the adviser was mad that
he hadn't been allowed in on the joke.
Hearing that the students were in real trouble, I decided to write a
letter to the adviser and explained that it was all my fault, that I
wouldn't have given the talk unless this arrangement had been made; that I
had told the students not to tell anyone; I'm very sorry; please excuse me,
blah, blah, blah... That's the kind of stuff I have to go through on account
of that damn prize!
Just last year I was invited by the students at the University of
Alaska in Fairbanks to talk, and had a wonderful time, except for the
interviews on local television. I don't need interviews; there's no point to
it. I came to talk to the physics students, and that's it. If everybody in
town wants to know that, let the school newspaper tell them. It's on account
of the Nobel Prize that I've got to have an interview -- I'm a big shot,
right?
A friend of mine who's a rich man -- he invented some kind of simple
digital switch -- tells me about these people who contribute money to make
prizes or give lectures: "You always look at them carefully to find out what
crockery they're trying to absolve their conscience of."
My friend Matt Sands was once going to write a book to be called Alfred
Nobel's Other Mistake.
For many years I would look, when the time was coming around to give
out the Prize, at who might get it. But after a while I wasn't even aware of
when it was the right "season." I therefore had no idea why someone would be
calling me at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. "Professor Feynman?"
"Hey! Why are you bothering me at this time in the morning?"
"I thought you'd like to know that you've won the Nobel Prize."
"Yeah, but I'm sleeping! It would have been better if you had called me
in the morning."-- and I hung up.
My wife said, "Who was that?"
"They told me I won the Nobel Prize."
"Oh, Richard, who was it?" I often kid around and she is so smart that
she never gets fooled, but this time I caught her.
The phone rings again: "Professor Feynman, have you heard..."
(In a disappointed voice) "Yeah."
Then I began to think, "How can I turn this all off? I don't want any
of this!" So the first thing was to take the telephone off the hook, because
calls were coming one right after the other. I tried to go back to sleep,
but found it was impossible.
I went down to the study to think: What am I going to do? Maybe I won't
accept the Prize. What would happen then? Maybe that's impossible.
I put the receiver back on the hook and the phone rang right away. It
was a guy from Time magazine. I said to him, "Listen, I've got a problem, so
I want this off the record. I don't know how to get out of this thing. Is
there some way not to accept the Prize?"
He said, "I'm afraid, sir, that there isn't any way you can do it
without making more of a fuss than if you leave it alone." It was obvious.
We had quite a conversation, about fifteen or twenty minutes, and the Time
guy never published anything about it.
I said thank you very much to the Time guy and hung up. The phone rang
immediately: it was the newspaper.
"Yes, you can come up to the house. Yes, it's all right. Yes, Yes,
Yes..."
One of the phone calls was a guy from the Swedish consulate. He was
going to have a reception in Los Angeles. I figured that since I decided to
accept the Prize, I've got to go through with all this stuff.
The consul said, "Make a list of the people you would like to invite,
and we'll make a list of the people we are inviting. Then I'll come to your
office and we'll compare the lists to see if there are any duplicates, and
we'll make up the invitations..."
So I made up my list. It had about eight people -- my neighbor from
across the street, my artist friend Zorthian, and so on.
The consul came over to my office with his list: the Governor of the
State of California, the This, the That; Getty, the oilman; some actress --
it had three hundred people! And, needless to say, there was no duplication
whatsoever!
Then I began to get a little bit nervous. The idea of meeting all these
dignitaries frightened me.
The consul saw I was worried. "Oh, don't worry," he said. "Most of them
don't come."
Well, I had never arranged a party that I invited people to, and knew
to expect them not to come! I don't have to kowtow to anybody and give them
the delight of being honored with this invitation that they can refuse; it's
stupid! By the time I got home I was really upset with the whole thing. I
called the consul back and said, "I've thought it over, and I realize that I
just can't go through with the reception." He was delighted. He said,
"You're perfectly right." I think he was in the same position -- having to
set up a party for this jerk was just a pain in the ass. It turned out, in
the end, everybody was happy. Nobody wanted to come, including the guest of
honor! The host was much better off, too!
I had a certain psychological difficulty all the way through this
period. You see, I had been brought up by my father against royalty and pomp
(he was in the uniforms business, so he knew the difference between a man
with a uniform on, and with the uniform off -- it's the same man). I had
actually learned to ridicule this stuff all my life, and it was so strong
and deeply cut into me that I couldn't go up to a king without some strain.
It was childish, I know, but I was brought up that way, so it was a problem.
People told me that there was a rule in Sweden that after you accept
the Prize, you have to back away from the king without turning around. You
come down some steps, accept the Prize, and then go back up the steps. So I
said to myself, "All right, I'm gonna fix them!" -- and I practiced jumping
up stairs, backwards, to show how ridiculous their custom was. I was in a
terrible mood! That was stupid and silly, of course. I found out this wasn't
a rule any more; you could turn around when you left the king, and walk like
a normal human being, in the direction you were intending to go, with your
nose in front.
I was pleased to find that not all the people in Sweden take the royal
ceremonies as seriously as you might think. When you get there, you discover
that they're on your side. The students had, for example, a special ceremony
in which they granted each Nobel-Prize-winner the special "Order of the
Frog." When you get this little frog, you have to make a frog noise.
When I was younger I was anti-culture, but my father had some good
books around. One was a book with the old Greek play The Frogs in it, and I
glanced at it one time and I saw in there that a frog talks. It was written
as "brek, kek, kek." I thought, "No frog ever made a sound like that; that's
a crazy way to describe it!" so I tried it, and after practicing it awhile,
I realized that it's very accurately what a frog says.
So my chance glance into a book by Aristophanes turned out to be
useful, later on: I could make a good frog noise at the students' ceremony
for the Nobel-Prize-winners! And jumping backwards fit right in, too. So I
liked that part of it; that ceremony went well.
While I had a lot of fun, I did still have this psychological
difficulty all the way through. My greatest problem was the Thank-You speech
that you give at the King's Dinner. When they give you the Prize they give
you some nicely bound books about the years before, and they have all the
Thank-You speeches written out as if they're some big deal. So you begin to
think it's of some importance what you say in this Thank-You speech, because
it's going to be published. What I didn't realize was that hardly anyone was
going to listen to it carefully, and nobody was going to read it! I had lost
my sense of proportion: I couldn't just say thank you very much,
blah-blah-blah-blah-blah; it would have been so easy to do that, but no, I
have to make it honest. And the truth was, I didn't really want this Prize,
so how do I say thank you when I don't want it?
My wife says I was a nervous wreck, worrying about what I was going to
say in the speech, but I finally figured out a way to make a perfectly
satisfactory-sounding speech that was nevertheless completely honest. I'm
sure those who heard the speech had no idea what this guy had gone through
in preparing it.
I started out by saying that I had already received my prize in the
pleasure I got in discovering what I did, from the fact that others used my
work, and so on. I tried to explain that I had already received everything I
expected to get, and the rest was nothing compared to it. I had already
received my prize.
But then I said I received, all at once, a big pile of letters -- I
said it much better in the speech -- reminding me of all these people that I
knew: letters from childhood friends who jumped up when they read the
morning newspaper and cried out, "I know him! He's that kid we used to play
with!" and so on; letters like that, which were very supportive and
expressed what I interpreted as a kind of love. For that I thanked them.
The speech went fine, but I was always getting into slight difficulties
with royalty. During the King's Dinner I was sitting next to a princess who
had gone to college in the United States. I assumed, incorrectly, that she
had the same attitudes as I did. I figured she was just a kid like everybody
else. I remarked on how the king and all the royalty had to stand for such a
long time, shaking hands with all the guests at the reception before the
dinner. "In America," I said, "we could make this more efficient. We would
design a machine to shake hands."
"Yes, but there wouldn't be very much of a market for it here," she
said, uneasily. "There's not that much royalty."
"On the contrary, there'd be a very big market. At first, only the king
would have a machine, and we could give it to him free. Then, of course,
other people would want a machine, too. The question now becomes, who will
be allowed to have a machine? The prime minister is permitted to buy one;
then the president of the senate is allowed to buy one, and then the most
important senior deputies. So there's a very big, expanding market, and
pretty soon, you wouldn't have to go through the reception line to shake
hands with the machines; you'd send your machine!"
I also sat next to the lady who was in charge of organizing the dinner.
A waitress came by to fill my wineglass, and I said, "No, thank you. I don't
drink."
The lady said, "No, no. Let her pour the drink."
"But I don't drink."
She said, "It's all right. Just look. You see, she has two bottles. We
know that number eighty-eight doesn't drink." (Number eighty-eight was on
the back of my chair.) "They look exactly the same, but one has no alcohol."
"But how do you know?" I exclaimed.
She smiled. "Now watch the king," she said. "He doesn't drink either."
She told me some of the problems they had had this particular year. One
of them was, where should the Russian ambassador sit? The problem always is,
at dinners like this, who sits nearer to the king. The Prize-winners
normally sit closer to the king than the diplomatic corps does. And the
order in which the diplomats sit is determined according to the length of
time they have been in Sweden. Now at that time, the United States
ambassador had been in Sweden longer than the Russian ambassador. But that
year, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Mr. Sholokhov, a
Russian, and the Russian ambassador wanted to be Mr. Sholokhov's translator
-- and therefore to sit next to him. So the problem was how to let the
Russian ambassador sit closer to the king without offending the United
States ambassador and the rest of the diplomatic corps.
She said, "You should have seen what a fuss they went through --
letters back and forth, telephone calls, and so on -- before I ever got
permission to have the ambassador sit next to Mr. Sholokhov. It was finally
agreed that the ambassador wouldn't officially represent the embassy of the
Soviet Union that evening; rather, he was to be only the translator for Mr.
Sholokhov."
After the dinner we went off into another room, where there were
different conversations going on. There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark
sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty
chair at their table and sat down.
She turned to me and said, "Oh! You're one of the Nobel-Prize-winners.
In what field did you do your work?"
"In physics," I said.
"Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can't talk
about it."
"On the contrary," I answered. "It's because somebody knows something
about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows
anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can
talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about
international finance -- gold transfers we can't talk about, because those
are understood -- so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that
we can all talk about!"
I don't know how they do it. There's a way of forming ice on the
surface of the face, and she did it! She turned to talk to somebody else.
After a while I could tell I was completely cut out of the
conversation, so I got up and started away. The Japanese ambassador, who was
also sitting at that table, jumped up and walked after me. "Professor
Feynman," he said, "there is something I should like to tell you about
diplomacy."
He went into a long story about how a young man in Japan goes to the
university and studies international relations because he thinks he can make
a contribution to his country. As a sophomore he begins to have slight
twinges of doubt about what he is learning. After college he takes his first
post in an embassy and has still more doubts about his understanding of
diplomacy, until he finally realizes that nobody knows anything about
international relations. At that point, he can become an ambassador! "So
Professor Feynman," he said, "next time you give examples of things that
everybody talks about that nobody knows about, please include international
relations!"
He was a very interesting man, and we got to talking. I had always been
interested in how it is the different countries and different peoples
develop differently. I told the ambassador that there was one thing that
always seemed to me to be a remarkable phenomenon: how Japan had developed
itself so rapidly to become such a modern and important country in the
world. "What is the aspect and character of the Japanese people that made it
possible for the Japanese to do that?" I asked.
The ambassador answered in a way I like to hear: "I don't know," he
said. "I might suppose something, but I don't know if it's true. The people
of Japan believed they had only one way of moving up: to have their children
educated more than they were; that it was very important for them to move
out of their peasantry to become educated. So there has been a great energy
in the family to encourage the children to do well in school, and to be
pushed forward. Because of this tendency to learn things all the time, new
ideas from the outside would spread through the educational system very
easily. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Japan has advanced so
rapidly."
All in all, I must say I enjoyed the visit to Sweden, in the end.
Instead of coming home immediately, I went to CERN, the European center for
nuclear research in Switzerland, to give a talk. I appeared before my
colleagues in the suit that I had worn to the King's Dinner -- I had never
given a talk in a suit before -- and I began by saying, "Funny thing, you
know; in Sweden we were sitting around, talking about whether there are any
changes as a result of our having won the Nobel Prize, and as a matter of
fact, I think I already see a change: I rather like this suit."
Everybody says "Booooo!" and Weisskopf jumps up and tears off his coat
and says, "We're not gonna wear suits at lectures!"
I took my coat off, loosened my tie, and said, "By the time I had been
through Sweden, I was beginning to like this stuff, but now that I'm back in
the world, everything's all right again. Thanks for straightening me out!"
They didn't want me to change. So it was very quick: at CERN they undid
everything that they had done in Sweden.
It's nice that I got some money -- I was able to buy a beach house --
but altogether, I think it would have been much nicer not to have had the
Prize -- because you never, any longer, can be taken straightforwardly in
any public situation.
In a way, the Nobel Prize has been something of a pain in the neck,
though there was at least one time that I got some fun out of it. Shortly
after I won the Prize, Gweneth and I received an invitation from the
Brazilian government to be the guests of honor at the Carnaval celebrations
in Rio. We gladly accepted and had a great time. We went from one dance to
another and reviewed the big street parade that featured the famous samba
schools playing their wonderful rhythms and music. Photographers from
newspapers and magazines were taking pictures all the time -- "Here, the
Professor from America is dancing with Miss Brazil."
It was fun to be a "celebrity," but we were obviously the wrong
celebrities. Nobody was very excited about the guests of honor that year. I
found out later how our invitation had come about. Gina Lollobrigida was
supposed to be the guest of honor, but just before Carnaval, she said no.
The Minister of Tourism, who was in charge of organizing Carnaval, had some
friends at the Center for Physical Research who knew I had played in a samba
band, and since I had recently won the Nobel Prize, I was briefly in the
news. In a moment of panic the Minister and his friends got this crazy idea
to replace Gina Lollobrigida with the professor of physics!
Needless to say, the Minister did such a bad job on that Carnaval that
he lost his position in the government.
--------
Bringing Culture to the Physicists
Nina Byers, a professor at UCLA, became in charge of the physics
colloquium sometime in the early seventies. The colloquia are normally a
place where physicists from other universities come and talk pure technical
stuff. But partly as a result of the atmosphere of that particular period of
time, she got the idea that the physicists needed more culture, so she
thought she would arrange something along those lines: Since Los Angeles is
near Mexico, she would have a colloquium on the mathematics and astronomy of
the Mayans -- the old civilization of Mexico.
(Remember my attitude to culture: This kind of thing would have driven
me crazy if it were in my university!)
She started looking for a professor to lecture on the subject, and
couldn't find anybody at UCLA who was quite an expert. She telephoned
various places and still couldn't find anybody.
Then she remembered Professor Otto Neugebauer, of Brown University, the
great expert on Babylonian mathematics.* She telephoned him in Rhode Island
and asked if he knew someone on the West Coast who could lecture on Mayan
mathematics and astronomy.
* When I was a young professor at Cornell, Professor Neugebauer had
come one year to give a sequence of lectures, called the Messenger Lectures,
on Babylonian mathematics. They were wonderful. Oppenheimer lectured the
next year. I remember thinking to myself, "Wouldn't it be nice to come,
someday, and be able to give lectures like that!" Some years later, when I
was refusing invitations to lecture at various places, I was invited to give
the Messenger Lectures at Cornell. Of course I couldn't refuse, because I
had put that in my mind so I accepted an invitation to go over to Bob
Wilson's house for a weekend and we discussed various ideas. The result was
a series of lectures called "The Character of Physical Law."
"Yes," he said. "I do. He's not a professional anthropologist or a
historian; he's an amateur. But he certainly knows a lot about it. His name
is Richard Feynman."
She nearly died! She's trying to bring some culture to the physicists,
and the only way to do it is to get a physicist!
The only reason I knew anything about Mayan mathematics was that I was
getting exhausted on my honeymoon in Mexico with my second wife, Mary Lou.
She was greatly interested in art history, particularly that of Mexico. So
we went to Mexico for our honeymoon and we climbed up pyramids and down
pyramids; she had me following her all over the place. She showed me many
interesting things, such as certain relationships in the designs of various
figures, but after a few days (and nights) of going up and down in hot and
steamy jungles, I was exhausted.
In some little Guatemalan town in the middle of nowhere we went into a
museum that had a case displaying a manuscript full of strange symbols,
pictures, and bars and dots. It was a copy (made by a man named Villacorta)
of the Dresden Codex, an original book made by the Mayans found in a museum
in Dresden. I knew the bars and dots were numbers. My father had taken me to
the New York World's Fair when I was a little kid, and there they had
reconstructed a Mayan temple. I remembered him telling me how the Mayans had
invented the zero and had done many interesting things.
The museum had copies of the codex for sale, so I bought one. On each
page at the left was the codex copy, and on the right a description and
partial translation in Spanish.
I love puzzles and codes, so when I saw the bars and dots, I thought,
"I'm gonna have some fun!" I covered up the Spanish with a piece of yellow
paper and began playing this game of deciphering the Mayan bars and dots,
sitting in the hotel room, while my wife climbed up and down the pyramids
all day.
I quickly figured out that a bar was equal to five dots, what the
symbol for zero was, and so on. It took me a little longer to figure out
that the bars and dots always carried at twenty the first time, but they
carried at eighteen the second time (making cycles of 360). I also worked
out all kinds of things about various faces: they had surely meant certain
days and weeks.
After we got back home I continued to work on it. Altogether, it's a
lot of fun to try to decipher something like that, because when you start
out you don't know anything -- you have no clue to go by. But then you
notice certain numbers that appear often, and add up to other numbers, and
so on.
There was one place in the codex where the number 584 was very
prominent. This 584 was divided into periods of 236, 90, 250, and 8. Another
prominent number was 2920, or 584 x 5 (also 365 x 8). There was a table of
multiples of 2920 up to 13 x 2920, then there were multiples of 13 x 2920
for a while, and then -- funny numbers! They were errors, as far as I could
tell. Only many years later did I figure out what they were.
Because figures denoting days were associated with this 584 which was
divided up so peculiarly, I figured if it wasn't some mythical period of
some sort, it might be something astronomical. Finally I went down to the
astronomy library and looked it up, and found that 583.92 days is the period
of Venus as it appears from the earth. Then the 236, 90, 250, 8 became
apparent: it must be the phases that Venus goes through. It's a morning
star, then it can't be seen (it's on the far side of the sun); then it's an
evening star, and finally it disappears again (it's between the earth and
the sun). The 90 and the 8 are different because Venus moves more slowly
through the sky when it is on the far side of the sun compared to when it
passes between the earth and the sun. The difference between the 236 and the
250 might indicate a difference between the eastern and western horizons in
Maya land.
I discovered another table nearby that had periods of 11,959 days. This
turned out to be a table for predicting lunar eclipses. Still another table
had multiples of 91 in descending order. I never did figure that one out
(nor has anyone else).
When I had worked out as much as I could, I finally decided to look at
the Spanish commentary to see how much I was able to figure out. It was
complete nonsense. This symbol was Saturn, this symbol was a god -- it
didn't make the slightest bit of sense. So I didn't have to have covered the
commentary; I wouldn't have learned anything from it anyway.
After that I began to read a lot about the Mayans, and found that the
great man in this business was Eric Thompson, some of whose books I now
have.
When Nina Byers called me up I realized that I had lost my copy of the
Dresden Codex. (I had lent it to Mrs. H. E. Robertson, who had found a Mayan
codex in an old trunk of an antique dealer in Paris. She had brought it back
to Pasadena for me to look at -- I still remember driving home with it on
the front seat of my car, thinking, "I've gotta be careful driving: I've got
the new codex" -- but as soon as I looked at it carefully, I could see
immediately that it was a complete fake. After a little bit of work I could
find where each picture in the new codex had come from in the Dresden Codex.
So I lent her my book to show her, and I eventually forgot she had it.) So
the librarians at UCLA worked very hard to find another copy of Villacorta's
rendition of the Dresden Codex, and lent it to me.
I did all the calculations all over again, and in fact I got a little
bit further than I did before: I figured out that those "funny numbers"
which I thought before were errors were really integer multiples of
something closer to the correct period (583.923) -- the Mayans had realized
that 584 wasn't exactly right!*
* While I was studying this table of corrections for the period of
Venus, I discovered a rare exaggeration by Mr. Thompson. He wrote that by
looking at the table, you can deduce how the Mayans calculated the correct
period of Venus -- use this number four times and that difference once and
you get an accuracy of one day in 4000 years, which is really quite
remarkable, especially since the Mayans observed for only a few hundred
years.
Thompson happened to pick a combination which fit what he thought was
the right period for Venus, 583.92. But when you put in a more exact figure,
something like 583.923, you find the Mayans were off by more. Of course, by
choosing a different combination you can get the numbers in the table to
give you 583.923 with the same remarkable accuracy!
After the colloquium at UCLA Professor Byers presented me with some
beautiful color reproductions of the Dresden Codex. A few months later
Caltech wanted me to give the same lecture to the public in Pasadena. Robert
Rowan, a real estate man, lent me some very valuable stone carvings of Mayan
gods and ceramic figures for the Caltech lecture. It was probably highly
illegal to take something like that out of Mexico, and they were so valuable
that we hired security guards to protect them.
A few days before the Caltech lecture there was a big splurge in the
New York Times, which reported that a new codex had been discovered. There
were only three codices (two of which are hard to get anything out of) known
to exist at the time -- hundreds of thousands had been burned by Spanish
priests as "works of the Devil." My cousin was working for the AP, so she
got me a glossy picture copy of what the New York Times had published and I
made a slide of it to include in my talk.
This new codex was a fake. In my lecture I pointed out that the numbers
were in the style of the Madrid codex, but were 236, 90, 250, 8 -- rather a
coincidence! Out of the hundred thousand books originally made we get
another fragment, and it has the same thing on it as the other fragments! It
was obviously, again, one of these put-together things which had nothing
original in it.
These people who copy things never have the courage to make up
something really different. If you find something that is really new, it's
got to have something different. A real hoax would be to take something like
the period of Mars, invent a mythology to go with it, and then draw pictures
associated with this mythology with numbers appropriate to Mars -- not in an
obvious fashion; rather, have tables of multiples of the period with some
mysterious "errors," and so on. The numbers should have to be worked out a
little bit. Then people would say, "Geez! This has to do with Mars!" In
addition, there should be a number of things in it that are not
understandable, and are not exactly like what has been seen before. That
would make a good fake.
I got a big kick out of giving my talk on "Deciphering Mayan
Hieroglyphics." There I was, being something I'm not, again. People filed
into the auditorium past these glass cases, admiring the color reproductions
of the Dresden Codex and the authentic Mayan artifacts watched over by an
armed guard in uniform; they heard a two-hour lecture on Mayan mathematics
and astronomy from an amateur expert in the field (who even told them how to
spot a fake codex), and then they went out, admiring the cases again. Murray
Gell-Mann countered in the following weeks by giving a beautiful set of six
lectures concerning the linguistic relations of all the languages of the
world.
--------
Found Out in Paris
I gave a series of lectures in physics that the Addison-Wesley Company
made into a book, and one time at lunch we were discussing what the cover of
the book should look like. I thought that since the lectures were a
combination of the real world and mathematics, it would be a good idea to
have a picture of a drum, and on top of it some mathematical diagrams --
circles and lines for the nodes of the oscillating drumheads, which were
discussed in the book.
The book came out with a plain, red cover, but for some reason, in the
preface, there's a picture of me playing a drum. I think they put it in
there to satisfy this idea they got that "the author wants a drum
somewhere." Anyway, everybody wonders why that picture of me playing drums
is in the preface of the Feynman Lectures, because it doesn't have any
diagrams on it, or any other things which would make it clear. (It's true
that I like drumming, but that's another story.)
At Los Alamos things were pretty tense from all the work, and there
wasn't any way to amuse yourself: there weren't any movies, or anything like
that. But I discovered some drums that the boys' school, which had been
there previously, had collected: Los Alamos was in the middle of New Mexico,
where there are lots of Indian villages. So I amused myself -- sometimes
alone, sometimes with another guy -- just making noise, playing on these
drums. I didn't know any particular rhythm, but the rhythms of the Indians
were rather simple, the drums were good, and I had fun.
Sometimes I would take the drums with me into the woods at some
distance, so I wouldn't disturb anybody, and would beat them with a stick,
and sing. I remember one night walking around a tree, looking at the moon,
and beating the drum, making believe I was an Indian.
One day a guy came up to me and said, "Around Thanksgiving you weren't
out in the woods beating a drum, were you?"
"Yes, I was," I said.
"Oh! Then my wife was right!" Then he told me this story:
One night he heard some drum music in the distance, and went upstairs
to the other guy in the duplex house that they live in, and the other guy
heard it too. Remember, all these guys were from the East. They didn't know
anything about Indians, and they were very interested: the Indians must have
been having some kind of ceremony, or something exciting, and the two men
decided to go out to see what it was.
As they walked along, the music got louder as they came nearer, and
they began to get nervous. They realized that the Indians probably had
scouts out watching so that nobody would disturb their ceremony. So they got
down on their bellies and crawled along the trail until the sound was just
over the next hill, apparently. They crawled up over the hill and discovered
to their surprise that it was only one Indian, doing the ceremony all by
himself -- dancing around a tree, beating the drum with a stick, chanting.
The two guys backed away from him slowly, because they didn't want to
disturb him: He was probably setting up some kind of spell, or something.
They told their wives what they saw, and the wives said, "Oh, it must
have been Feynman -- he likes to beat drums."
"Don't be ridiculous!" the men said. "Even Feynman wouldn't be that
crazy!"
So the next week they set about trying to figure out who the Indian
was. There were Indians from the nearby reservation working at Los Alamos,
so they asked one Indian, who was a technician in the technical area, who it
could be. The Indian asked around, but none of the other Indians knew who it
might be, except there was one Indian whom nobody could talk to. He was an
Indian who knew his race: He had two big braids down his back and held his
head high; whenever he walked anywhere he walked with dignity, alone; and
nobody could talk to him. You would be afraid to go up to him and ask him
anything; he had too much dignity. He was a furnace man. So nobody ever had
the nerve to ask this Indian, and they decided it must have been him. (I was
pleased to find that they had discovered such a typical Indian, such a
wonderful Indian, that I might have been. It was quite an honor to be
mistaken for this man.)
So the fella who'd been talking to me was just checking at the last
minute -- husbands always like to prove their wives wrong -- and he found
out, as husbands often do, that his wife was quite right.
I got pretty good at playing the drums, and would play them when we had
parties. I didn't know what I was doing; I just made rhythms -- and I got a
reputation: Everybody at Los Alamos knew I liked to play drums.
When the war was over, and we were going back to "civilization," the
people there at Los Alamos teased me that I wouldn't be able to play drums
any more because they made too much noise. And since I was trying to become
a dignified professor in Ithaca, I sold the drum that I had bought sometime
during my stay at Los Alamos.
The following summer I went back out to New Mexico to work on some
report, and when I saw the drums again, I couldn't stand it. I bought myself
another drum, and thought, "I'll just bring it back with me this time so I
can look at it."
That year at Cornell I had a small apartment inside a bigger house. I
had the drum in there, just to look at, but one day I couldn't quite resist:
I said, "Well, I'll just be very quiet..."
I sat on a chair and put the drum between my legs and played it with my
fingers a little bit: hup, bup, bup, huddle hup. Then a little bit louder --
after all, it was tempting me! I got a little bit louder and BOOM! -- the
telephone rang.
"Hello?"
"This is your landlady. Are you beating drums down there?"
"Yes; I'm sor --"
"It sounds so good. I wonder if I could come down and listen to it more
directly?"
So from that time on the landlady would always come down when I'd start
to drum. That was freedom, all right. I had a very good time from then on,
beating the drums.
Around that time I met a lady from the Belgian Congo who gave me some
ethnological records. In those days, records like that were rare, with drum
music from the Watusi and other tribes of Africa. I really admired the
Watusi drummers very, very much, and I used to try to imitate them -- not
very accurately, but just to sound something like them -- and I developed a
larger number of rhythms as a result of that.
One time I was in the recreation hall, late at night, when there
weren't many people, and I picked up a wastebasket and started to beat the
back end of it. Some guy from way downstairs came running all the way up and
said, "Hey! You play drums!" It turned out he really knew how to play drums,
and he taught me how to play bongos.
There was some guy in the music department who had a collection of
African music, and I'd come to his house and play drums. He'd make
recordings of me, and then at his parties, he had a game that he called
"Africa or Ithaca?" in which he'd play some recordings of drum music, and
the idea was to guess whether what you were hearing was manufactured in the
continent of Africa, or locally. So I must have been fairly good at
imitating African music by that time.
When I came to Caltech, I used to go down to the Sunset Strip a lot.
One time there was a group of drummers led by a big fella from Nigeria
called Ukonu, playing this wonderful drum music -- just percussion -- at one
of the nightclubs. The second-in-command, who was especially nice to me,
invited me to come up on the stage with them and play a little. So I got up
there with the other guys and played along with them on the drums for a
little while.
I asked the second guy if Ukonu ever gave lessons, and he said yes. So
I used to go down to Ukonu's place, near Century Boulevard (where the Watts
riots later occurred) to get lessons in drumming. The lessons weren't very
efficient: he would stall around, talk to other people, and be interrupted
by all kinds of things. But when they worked they were very exciting, and I
learned a lot from him.
At dances near Ukonu's place, there would be only a few whites, but it
was much more relaxed than it is today. One time they had a drumming
contest, and I didn't do very well: They said my drumming was "too
intellectual"; theirs was much more pulsing.
One day when I was at Caltech I got a very serious telephone call.
"This is Mr. Trowbridge, Mahster of the Polytechnic School." The
Polytechnic School was a small, private school which was across the street
diagonally from Caltech. Mr. Trowbridge continued in a very formal voice: "I
have a friend of yours here, who would like to speak to you."
"OK."
"Hello, Dick!" It was Ukonu! It turned out the Master of the
Polytechnic School was not as formal as he was making himself out to be, and
had a great sense of humor. Ukonu was visiting the school to play for the
kids, so he invited me to come over and be on the stage with him, and play
along. So we played for the kids together: I played bongos (which I had in
my office) against his big tumba drum.
Ukonu had a regular thing: He went to various schools and talked about
the African drums and what they meant, and told about the music. He had a
terrific personality and a grand smile; he was a very, very nice man. He was
just sensational on the drums -- he had records out -- and was here studying
medicine. He went back to Nigeria at the beginning of the war there -- or
before the war -- and I don't know what happened to him.
After Ukonu left I didn't do very much drumming, except at parties once
in a while, entertaining a little bit. One time I was at a dinner party at
the Leightons' house, and Bob's son Ralph and a friend asked me if I wanted
to drum. Thinking that they were asking me to do a solo, I said no. But then
they started drumming on some little wooden tables, and I couldn't resist: I
grabbed a table too, and the three of us played on these little wooden
tables, which made lots of interesting sounds.
Ralph and his friend Tom Rutishauser liked playing drums, and we began
meeting every week to just ad lib, develop rhythms and work stuff out. These
two guys were real musicians: Ralph played piano, and Tom played the cello.
All I had done was rhythms, and I didn't know anything about music, which,
as far as I could tell, was just drumming with notes. But we worked out a
lot of good rhythms and played a few times at some of the schools to
entertain the kids. We also played rhythms for a dance class at a local
college -- something I learned was fun to do when I was working at
Brookhaven for a while -- and called ourselves The Three Quarks, so you can
figure out when that was.
One time I went to Vancouver to talk to the students there, and they
had a party with a real hot rock-type band playing down in the basement. The
band was very nice: they had an extra cowbell lying around, and they
encouraged me to play it. So I started to play a little bit, and since their
music was very rhythmic (and the cowbell is just an accompaniment -- you
can't screw it up) I really got hot.
After the party was over, the guy who organized the party told me that
the bandleader said, "Geez! Who was that guy who came down and played on the
cowbell! He can really knock out a rhythm on that thing! And by the way,
that big shot this party was supposed to be for -- you know, he never came
down here; I never did see who it was!"
Anyhow, at Caltech there's a group that puts on plays. Some of the
actors are Caltech students; others are from the outside. When there's a
small part, such as a policeman who's supposed to arrest somebody, they get
one of the professors to do it. It's always a big joke -- the professor
comes on and arrests somebody, and goes off again.
A few years ago the group was doing Guys and Dolls, and there was a
scene where the main guy takes the girl to Havana, and they're in a
nightclub. The director thought it would be a good idea to have the bongo
player on the stage in the nightclub be me.
I went to the first rehearsal, and the lady directing the show pointed
to the orchestra conductor and said, "Jack will show you the music."
Well, that petrified me. I don't know how to read music; I thought all
I had to do was get up there on the stage and make some noise.
Jack was sitting by the piano, and he pointed to the music and said,
"OK, you start here, you see, and you do this. Then I play plonk, plonk,
plonk" -- he played a few notes on the piano. He turned the page. "Then you
play this, and now we both pause for a speech, you see, here" -- and he
turned some more pages and said, "Finally, you play this."
He showed me this "music" that was written in some kind of crazy
pattern of little x's in the bars and lines. He kept telling me all this
stuff, thinking I was a musician, and it was completely impossible for me to
remember any of it.
Fortunately, I got ill the next day, and couldn't come to the next
rehearsal. I asked my friend Ralph to go for me, and since he's a musician,
he should know what it's all about. Ralph came back and said, "It's not so
bad. First, at the very beginning, you have to do something exactly right
because you're starting the rhythm out for the rest of the orchestra, which
will mesh in with it. But after the orchestra comes in, it's a matter of
ad-libbing, and there will be times when we have to pause for speeches, but
I think we'll be able to figure that out from the cues the orchestra
conductor gives."
In the meantime I had gotten the director to accept Ralph too, so the
two of us would be on the stage. He'd play the tumba and I'd play the bongos
-- so that made it a helluva lot easier for me.
So Ralph showed me what the rhythm was. It must have been only about
twenty or thirty beats, but it had to be just so. I'd never had to play
anything just so, and it was very hard for me to get it right. Ralph would
patiently explain, "left hand, and right hand, and two left hands, then
right..." I worked very hard, and finally, very slowly, I began to get the
rhythm just right. It took me a helluva long time -- many days -- to get it.
A week later we went to the rehearsal and found there was a new drummer
there -- the regular drummer had quit the band to do something else -- and
we introduced ourselves to him:
"Hi. We're the guys who are going to be on stage for the Havana scene."
"Oh, hi. Let me find the scene here..." and he turned to the page where
our scene was, took out his drumming stick, and said, "Oh, you start off the
scene with..." and with his stick against the side of his drum he goes bing,
bong, bang-a-bang, bing-a-bing, bang, bang at full speed, while he was
looking at the music! What a shock that was to me. I had worked for four
days to try to get that damn rhythm, and he could just patter it right out!
Anyway, after practicing again and again I finally got it straight and
played it in the show. It was pretty successful: Everybody was amused to see
the professor on stage playing the bongos, and the music wasn't so bad; but
that part at the beginning, that had to be the same: that was hard.
In the Havana nightclub scene some of the students had to do some sort
of dance that had to be choreographed. So the director had gotten the wife
of one of the guys at Caltech, who was a choreographer working at that time
for Universal Studios, to teach the boys how to dance. She liked our
drumming, and when the shows were over, she asked us if we would like to
drum in San Francisco for a ballet.
"WHAT?"
Yes. She was moving to San Francisco, and was choreographing a ballet
for a small ballet school there. She had the idea of creating a ballet in
which the music was nothing but percussion. She wanted Ralph and me to come
over to her house before she moved and play the different rhythms that we
knew, and from those she would make up a story that went with the rhythms.
Ralph had some misgivings, but I encouraged him to go along with this
adventure. I did insist, however, that she not tell anybody there that I was
a professor of physics, Nobel-Prize-winner, or any other baloney. I didn't
want to do the drumming if I was doing it because, as Samuel Johnson said,
If you see a dog walking on his hind legs, it's not so much that he does it
well, as that he does it at all. I didn't want to do it if I was a physics
professor doing it at all; we were just some musicians she had found in Los
Angeles, who were going to come up and play this drum music that they had
composed.
So we went over to her house and played various rhythms we had worked
out. She took some notes, and soon after, that same night, she got this
story cooked up in her mind and said, "OK, I want fifty-two repetitions of
this; forty bars of that; whatever of this, that, this, that..."
We went home, and the next night we made a tape at Ralph's house. We
played all the rhythms for a few minutes, and then Ralph made some cuts and
splices with his tape recorder to get the various lengths right. She took a
copy of our tape with her when she moved, and began training the dancers
with it in San Francisco.
Meanwhile we had to practice what was on that tape: fifty-two cycles of
this, forty cycles of that, and so on. What we had done spontaneously (and
spliced) earlier, we now had to learn exactly. We had to imitate our own
damn tape!
The big problem was counting. I thought Ralph would know how to do that
because he's a musician, but we both discovered something funny. The
"playing department" in our minds was also the "talking department" for
counting -- we couldn't play and count at the same time!
When we got to our first rehearsal in San Francisco, we discovered that
by watching the dancers we didn't have to count because the dancers went
through certain motions.
There were a number of things that happened to us because we were
supposed to be professional musicians and I wasn't. For example, one of the
scenes was about a beggar woman who sifts through the sand on a Caribbean
beach where the society ladies, who had come out at the beginning of the
ballet, had been. The music that the choreographer had used to create this
scene was made on a special drum that Ralph and his father had made rather
amateurishly some years before, and out of which we had never had much luck
in getting a good tone. But we discovered that if we sat opposite each other
on chairs and put this "crazy drum" between us on our knees, with one guy
beating bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda rapidly with his two fingers,
constantly, the other fella could push on the drum in different places with
his two hands and change the pitch. Now it would go
booda-booda-booda-bidda-beeda-beeda-beeda-bidda-booda-booda-booda-badda-bidda-bidda-bidda-badda,
creating a lot of interesting sounds.
Well, the dancer who played the beggar woman wanted the rises and falls
to coincide with her dance (our tape had been made arbitrarily for this
scene), so she proceeded to explain to us what she was going to do: "First,
I do four of these movements this way; then I bend down and sift through the
sand this way for eight counts; then I stand and turn this way." I knew damn
well I couldn't keep track of this, so I interrupted her:
"Just go ahead and do the dance, and I'll play along."
"But don't you want to know how the dance goes? You see, after I've
finished the second sifting part, I go for eight counts over this way." It
was no use; I couldn't remember anything, and I wanted to interrupt her
again, but then there was this problem: I would look like I was not a real
musician!
Well, Ralph covered for me very smoothly by explaining, "Mr. Feynman
has a special technique for this type of situation: He prefers to develop
the dynamics directly and intuitively, as he sees you dance. Let's try it
once that way, and if you're not satisfied, we can correct it."
Well, she was a first-rate dancer, and you could anticipate what she
was going to do. If she was going to dig into the sand, she would get ready
to go down into the sand; every motion was smooth and expected, so it was
rather easy to make the bzzzzs and bshshs and boodas and biddas with my
hands quite appropriate to what she was doing, and she was very satisfied
with it. So we got past that moment where we might have had our cover blown.
The ballet was kind of a success. Although there weren't many people in
the audience, the people who came to see the performances liked it very
much.
Before we went to San Francisco for the rehearsals and the
performances, we weren't sure of the whole idea. I mean, we thought the
choreographer was insane: first, the ballet has only percussion; second,
that we're good enough to make music for a ballet and get paid for it was
surely crazy! For me, who had never had any "culture," to end up as a
professional musician for a ballet was the height of achievement, as it
were.
We didn't think that she'd be able to find ballet dancers who would be
willing to dance to our drum music. (As a matter of fact, there was one
prima donna from Brazil, the wife of the Portuguese consul, who decided it
was beneath her to dance to it.) But the other dancers seemed to like it
very much, and my heart felt good when we played for them for the first time
in rehearsal. The delight they felt when they heard how our rhythms really
sounded (they had until then been using our tape played on a small cassette
recorder) was genuine, and I had much more confidence when I saw how they
reacted to our actual playing. And from the comments of the people who had
come to the performances, we realized that we were a success.
The choreographer wanted to do another ballet to our drumming the
following spring, so we went through the same procedure. We made a tape of
some more rhythms, and she made up another story, this time set in Africa. I
talked to Professor Munger at Caltech and got some real African phrases to
sing at the beginning (GAwa baNYUma GAwa WO, or something like that), and I
practiced them until I had them just so.
Later, we went up to San Francisco for a few rehearsals. When we first
got there, we found they had a problem. They couldn't figure out how to make
elephant tusks that looked good on stage. The ones they had made out of
papier mache were so bad that some of the dancers were embarrassed to dance
in front of them.
We didn't offer any solution, but rather waited to see what would
happen when the performances came the following weekend. Meanwhile, I
arranged to visit Werner Erhard, whom I had known from participating in some
conferences he had organized. I was sitting in his beautiful home, listening
to some philosophy or idea he was trying to explain to me, when all of a
sudden I was hypnotized.
"What's the matter?" he said.
My eyes popped out as I exclaimed, "Tusks!" Behind him, on the floor,
were these enormous, massive, beautiful ivory tusks!
He lent us the tusks. They looked very good on stage (to the great
relief of the dancers): real elephant tusks, super size, courtesy of Werner
Erhard.
The choreographer moved to the East Coast, and put on her Caribbean
ballet there. We heard later that she entered that ballet in a contest for
choreographers from all over the United States, and she finished first or
second. Encouraged by this success, she entered another competition, this
time in Paris, for choreographers from all over the world. She brought a
high-quality tape we had made in San Francisco and trained some dancers
there in France to do a small section of the ballet -- that's how she
entered the contest.
She did very well. She got into the final round, where there were only
two left -- a Latvian group that was doing a standard ballet with their
regular dancers to beautiful classical music, and a maverick from America,
with only the two dancers that she had trained in France, dancing to a
ballet which had nothing but our drum music.
She was the favorite of the audience, but it wasn't a popularity
contest, and the judges decided that the Latvians had won. She went to the
judges afterwards to find out the weakness in her ballet.
"Well, Madame, the music was not really satisfactory. It was not subtle
enough. Controlled crescendoes were missing..."
And so we were at last found out: When we came to some really cultured
people in Paris, who knew music from drums, we flunked out.
--------
Altered States
I used to give a lecture every Wednesday over at the Hughes Aircraft
Company, and one day I got there a little ahead of time, and was flirting
around with the receptionist, as usual, when about half a dozen people came
in -- a man, a woman, and a few others. I had never seen them before. The
man said, "Is this where Professor Feynman is giving some lectures?"
"This is the place," the receptionist replied.
The man asks if his group can come to the lectures.
"I don't think you'd like 'em much," I say. "They're kind of
technical."
Pretty soon the woman, who was rather clever, figured it out: "I bet
you're Professor Feynman!"
It turned out the man was John Lilly, who had earlier done some work
with dolphins. He and his wife were doing some research into sense
deprivation, and had built some tanks.
"Isn't it true that you're supposed to get hallucinations under those
circumstances?" I asked, excitedly.
"That is true indeed."
I had always had this fascination with the images from dreams and other
images that come to the mind that haven't got a direct sensory source, and
how it works in the head, and I wanted to see hallucinations. I had once
thought to take drugs, but I got kind of scared of that: I love to think,
and I don't want to screw up the machine. But it seemed to me that just
lying around in a sense-deprivation tank had no physiological danger, so I
was very anxious to try it.
I quickly accepted the Lillys' invitation to use the tanks, a very kind
invitation on their part, and they came to listen to the lecture with their
group.
So the following week I went to try the tanks. Mr. Lilly introduced me
to the tanks as he must have done with other people. There were lots of
bulbs, like neon lights, with different gases in them. He showed me the
Periodic Table and made up a lot of mystic hokey-poke about different kinds
of lights that have different kinds of influences. He told me how you get
ready to go into the tank by looking at yourself in the mirror with your
nose up against it -- all kinds of wicky-wack things, all kinds of gorp. I
didn't pay any attention to the gorp, but I did everything because I wanted
to get into the tanks, and I also thought that perhaps such preparations
might make it easier to have hallucinations. So I went through everything
according to the way he said. The only thing that proved difficult was
choosing what color light I wanted, especially as the tank was supposed to
be dark inside.
A sense-deprivation tank is like a big bathtub, but with a cover that
comes down. It's completely dark inside, and because the cover is thick,
there's no sound. There's a little pump that pumps air in, but it turns out
you don't need to worry about air because the volume of air is rather large,
and you're only in there for two or three hours, and you don't really
consume a lot of air when you breathe normally. Mr. Lilly said that the
pumps were there to put people at ease, so I figured it's just
psychological, and asked him to turn the pump off, because it made a little
bit of noise.
The water in the tank has Epsom salts in it to make it denser than
normal water, so you float in it rather easily. The temperature is kept at
body temperature, or 94, or something -- he had it all figured out. There
wasn't supposed to be any light, any sound, any temperature sensation, no
nothing! Once in a while you might drift over to the side and bump slightly,
or because of condensation on the ceiling of the tank a drop of water might
fall, but these slight disturbances were very rare.
I must have gone about a dozen times, each time spending about two and
a half hours in the tank. The first time I didn't get any hallucinations,
but after I had been in the tank, the Lillys introduced me to a man billed
as a medical doctor, who told me about a drug called ketamine, which was
used as an anesthetic. I've always been interested in questions related to
what happens when you go to sleep, or what happens when you get conked out,
so they showed me the papers that came with the medicine and gave me one
tenth of the normal dose.
I got this strange kind of feeling which I've never been able to figure
out whenever I tried to characterize what the effect was. For instance, the
drug had quite an effect on my vision; I felt I couldn't see clearly. But
when I'd look hard at something, it would be OK. It was sort of as if you
didn't care to look at things; you're sloppily doing this and that, feeling
kind of woozy, but as soon as you look, and concentrate, everything is, for
a moment at least, all right. I took a book they had on organic chemistry
and looked at a table full of complicated substances, and to my surprise was
able to read them.
I did all kinds of other things, like moving my hands toward each other
from a distance to see if my fingers would touch each other, and although I
had a feeling of complete disorientation, a feeling of an inability to do
practically anything, I never found a specific thing that I couldn't do.
As I said before, the first time in the tank I didn't get any
hallucinations, and the second time I didn't get any hallucinations. But the
Lillys were very interesting people; I enjoyed them very, very much. They
often gave me lunch, and so on, and after a while we discussed things on a
different level than the early stuff with the lights. I realized that other
people had found the sense-deprivation tank somewhat frightening, but to me
it was a pretty interesting invention. I wasn't afraid because I knew what
it was: it was just a tank of Epsom salts.
The third time there was a man visiting -- I met many interesting
people there -- who went by the name Baba Ram Das. He was a fella from
Harvard who had gone to India and had written a popular book called Be Here
Now. He related how his guru in India told him how to have an "out-of-body
experience" (words I had often seen written on the bulletin board):
Concentrate on your breath, on how it goes in and out of your nose as you
breathe.
I figured I'd try anything to get a hallucination, and went into the
tank. At some stage of the game I suddenly realized that -- it's hard to
explain -- I'm an inch to one side. In other words, where my breath is
going, in and out, in and out, is not centered: My ego is off to one side a
little bit, by about an inch.
I thought: "Now where is the ego located? I know everybody thinks the
seat of thinking is in the brain, but how do they know that?" I knew already
from reading things that it wasn't so obvious to people before a lot of
psychological studies were made. The Greeks thought the seat of thinking was
in the liver, for instance. I wondered, "Is it possible that where the ego
is located is learned by children looking at people putting their hand to
their head when they say, 'Let me think'? Therefore the idea that the ego is
located up there, behind the eyes, might be conventional!" I figured that if
I could move my ego an inch to one side, I could move it further. This was
the beginning of my hallucinations.
I tried and after a while I got my ego to go down through my neck into
the middle of my chest. When a drop of water came down and hit me on the
shoulder, I felt it "up there," above where "I" was. Every time a drop came
I was startled a little bit, and my ego would jump back up through the neck
to the usual place. Then I would have to work my way down again. At first it
took a lot of work to go down each time, but gradually it got easier. I was
able to get myself all the way down to the loins, to one side, but that was
about as far as I could go for quite a while.
It was another time I was in the tank when I decided that if I could
move myself to my loins, I should be able to get completely outside of my
body. So I was able to "sit to one side." It's hard to explain -- I'd move
my hands and shake the water, and although I couldn't see them, I knew where
they were. But unlike in real life, where the hands are to each side, part
way down, they were both to one side! The feeling in my fingers and
everything else was exactly the same as normal, only my ego was sitting
outside, "observing" all this.
From then on I had hallucinations almost every time, and was able to
move further and further outside of my body. It developed that when I would
move my hands I would see them as sort of mechanical things that were going
up and down -- they weren't flesh; they were mechanical. But I was still
able to feel everything. The feelings would be exactly consistent with the
motion, but I also had this feeling of "he is that." "I" even got out of the
room, ultimately, and wandered about, going some distance to locations where
things happened that I had seen earlier another day.
I had many types of out-of-the-body experiences. One time, for example,
I could "see" the back of my head, with my hands resting against it. When I
moved my fingers, I saw them move, but between the fingers and the thumb I
saw the blue sky. Of course that wasn't right; it was a hallucination. But
the point is that as I moved my fingers, their movement was exactly
consistent with the motion that I was imagining that I was seeing. The
entire imagery would appear, and be consistent with what you feel and are
doing, much like when you slowly wake up in the morning and are touching
something (and you don't know what it is), and suddenly it becomes clear
what it is. So the entire imagery would suddenly appear, except it's
unusual, in the sense that you usually would imagine the ego to be located
in front of the back of the head, but instead you have it behind the back of
the head.
One of the things that perpetually bothered me, psychologically, while
I was having a hallucination, was that I might have fallen asleep and would
therefore be only dreaming. I had already had some experience with dreams,
and I wanted a new experience. It was kind of dopey, because when you're
having hallucinations, and things like that, you're not very sharp, so you
do these dumb things that you set your mind to do, such as checking that
you're not dreaming. So I perpetually was checking that I wasn't dreaming by
-- since my hands were often behind my head -- rubbing my thumbs together,
back and forth, feeling them. Of course I could have been dreaming that, but
I wasn't: I knew it was real.
After the very beginning, when the excitement of having a hallucination
made them "jump out," or stop happening, I was able to relax and have long
hallucinations.
A week or two after, I was thinking a great deal about how the brain
works compared to how a computing machine works -- especially how
information is stored. One of the interesting problems in this area is how
memories are stored in the brain: You can get at them from so many
directions compared to a machine -- you don't have to come directly with the
correct address to the memory. If I want to get at the word "rent," for
example, I can be filling in a crossword puzzle, looking for a four-letter
word that begins with r and ends in t; I can be thinking of types of income,
or activities such as borrowing and lending; this in turn can lead to all
sorts of other related memories or information. I was thinking about how to
make an "imitating machine," which would learn language as a child does: you
would talk to the machine. But I couldn't figure out how to store the stuff
in an organized way so the machine could get it out for its own purposes.
When I went into the tank that week, and had my hallucination, I tried
to think of very early memories. I kept saying to myself, "It's gotta be
earlier; it's gotta be earlier" -- I was never satisfied that the memories
were early enough. When I got a very early memory -- let's say from my home
town of Far Rockaway -- then immediately would come a whole sequence of
memories, all from the town of Far Rockaway. If I then would think of
something from another city -- Cedarhurst, or something -- then a whole lot
of stuff that was associated with Cedarhurst would come. And so I realized
that things are stored according to the location where you had the
experience.
I felt pretty good about this discovery, and came out of the tank, had
a shower, got dressed, and so forth, and started driving to Hughes Aircraft
to give my weekly lecture. It was therefore about forty-five minutes after I
came out of the tank that I suddenly realized for the first time that I
hadn't the slightest idea of how memories are stored in the brain; all I had
was a hallucination as to how memories are stored in the brain! What I had
"discovered" had nothing to do with the way memories are stored in the
brain; it had to do with the way I was playing games with myself.
In our numerous discussions about hallucinations on my earlier visits,
I had been trying to explain to Lilly and others that the imagination that
things are real does not represent true reality. If you see golden globes,
or something, several times, and they talk to you during your hallucination
and tell you they are another intelligence, it doesn't mean they're another
intelligence; it just means that you have had this particular hallucination.
So here I had this tremendous feeling of discovering how memories are
stored, and it's surprising that it took forty-five minutes before I
realized the error that I had been trying to explain to everyone else.
One of the questions I thought about was whether hallucinations, like
dreams, are influenced by what you already have in your mind -- from other
experiences during the day or before, or from things you are expecting to
see. The reason, I believe, that I had an out-of-body experience was that we
were discussing out-of-body experiences just before I went into the tank.
And the reason I had a hallucination about how memories are stored in the
brain was, I think, that I had been thinking about that problem all week.
I had considerable discussion with the various people there about the
reality of experiences. They argued that something is considered real, in
experimental science, if the experience can be reproduced. Thus when many
people see golden globes that talk to them, time after time, the globes must
be real. My claim was that in such situations there was a bit of discussion
previous to going into the tank about the golden globes, so when the person
hallucinating, with his mind already thinking about golden globes when he
went into the tank, sees some approximation of the globes -- maybe they're
blue, or something -- he thinks he's reproducing the experience. I felt that
I could understand the difference between the type of agreement among people
whose minds are set to agree, and the kind of agreement that you get in
experimental work. It's rather amusing that it's so easy to tell the
difference -- but so hard to define it!
I believe there's nothing in hallucinations that has anything to do
with anything external to the internal psychological state of the person
who's got the hallucination. But there are nevertheless a lot of experiences
by a lot of people who believe there's reality in hallucinations. The same
general idea may account for a certain amount of success that interpreters
of dreams have. For example, some psychoanalysts interpret dreams by talking
about the meanings of various symbols. And then, it's not completely
impossible that these symbols do appear in dreams that follow. So I think
that, perhaps, the interpretation of hallucinations and dreams is a
self-propagating process: you'll have a general, more or less, success at
it, especially if you discuss it carefully ahead of time.
Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a
hallucination going, but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana
beforehand, it came very quickly. But fifteen minutes was fast enough for
me.
One thing that often happened was that as the hallucination was coming
on, what you might describe as "garbage" would come: there were simply
chaotic images -- complete, random junk. I tried to remember some of the
items of the junk in order to be able to characterize it again, but it was
particularly difficult to remember. I think I was getting close to the kind
of thing that happens when you begin to fall asleep: There are apparent
logical connections, but when you try to remember what made you think of
what you're thinking about, you can't remember. As a matter of fact, you
soon forget what it is that you're trying to remember. I can only remember
things like a white sign with a pimple on it, in Chicago, and then it
disappears. That kind of stuff all the time.
Mr. Lilly had a number of different tanks, and we tried a number of
different experiments. It didn't seem to make much difference as far as
hallucinations were concerned, and I became convinced that the tank was
unnecessary. Now that I saw what to do, I realized that all you have to do
is sit quietly -- why was it necessary that you had to have everything
absolutely super duper?
So when I'd come home I'd turn out the lights and sit in the living
room in a comfortable chair, and try and try -- it never worked. I've never
been able to have a hallucination outside of the tanks. Of course I would
like to have done it at home, and I don't doubt that you could meditate and
do it if you practice, but I didn't practice.
--------
Cargo Cult Science*
* Adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974.
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as
that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was
discovered for separating the ideas -- which was to try one to see if it
worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became
organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we
are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we
have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed,
when nothing that they proposed ever really worked -- or very little of it
did.
But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a
conversation about UFOs, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded
consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded
that it's not a scientific world.
Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to
investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for
investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that
I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of
mysticism, and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many
hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to
Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place;
you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how
much there was.
At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a
ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable
experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves
crashing onto the rocky shore below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above,
and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the
bath with me.
One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl sitting
with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee!
How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude babe?"
I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm,
uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?"
"Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a
massage table nearby.
I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything
like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it," he says. "I
feel a kind of dent -- is that the pituitary?"
I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!"
They looked at me, horrified -- I had blown my cover -- and said, "It's
reflexology!"
I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also
looked into extrasensory perception and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze
there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by
rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his
invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He
didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess.
And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he
told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us
standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and
him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to
investigate that phenomenon.
But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I
thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to
check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things
that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to
educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods,
and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going
down -- or hardly going up -- in spite of the fact that we continually use
these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that
doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method
should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have
made no progress -- lots of theory, but no progress -- in decreasing the
amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think
ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this
pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children
to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way -- or is even
fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily
a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or
another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the
right thing," according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science
that isn't science.
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are
examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas
there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with
lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So
they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides
of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden
pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like
antennas -- he's the controller -- and they wait for the airplanes to land.
They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the
way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call
these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent
precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing
something essential, because the planes don't land.
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it
would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how
they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It
is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the
earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in
cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in
studying science in school -- we never explicitly say what this is, but just
hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It
is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly.
It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that
corresponds to a kind of utter honesty -- a kind of leaning over backwards.
For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything
that you think might make it invalid -- not only what you think is right
about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things
you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they
worked -- to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if
you know them. You must do the best you can -- if you know anything at all
wrong, or possibly wrong -- to explain it. If you make a theory, for
example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all
the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There
is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to
make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it
fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the
idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come
out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help
others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information
that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example,
with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn't soak through
food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest; but the thing I'm talking about
is not just a matter of not being dishonest, it's a matter of scientific
integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that
advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a
certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will --
including Wesson oil. So it's the implication which has been conveyed, not
the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.
We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other
experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were
wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your
theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you
will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be
very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this
kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much
of the research in cargo cult science.
A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the
subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject.
Nevertheless, it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty.
That's why the planes don't land -- but they don't land.
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the
ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an
electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we
now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the
incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the
history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If
you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger
than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the
next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to
a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away?
It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of -- this history -- because it's
apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was
too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong -- and they
would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got
a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they
eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like
that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind
of a disease.
But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves -- of
having utter scientific integrity -- is, I'm sorry to say, something that we
haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We
just hope you've caught on by osmosis.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are
the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After
you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just
have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but
something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman
when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do
about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like
that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an
ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi.
I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but
bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to
have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as
scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend
who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy,
and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work
were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't
get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of
dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should
explain to the layman what you're doing -- and if they don't want to support
you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to
test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to
publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a
certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds
of results.
I say that's also important in giving certain types of government
advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a
hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some
other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not
giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come
out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it
as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't
publish it at all. That's not giving scientific advice.
Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I
was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department.
One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went
something like this -- it had been found by others that under certain
circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if
she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal
was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.
I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her
laboratory the experiment of the other person -- to do it under condition X
to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A
changed. Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she
thought she had under control.
She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor.
And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has
already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or
so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat
psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what
happens.
Nowadays there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in
the famous field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an experiment done at
the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person
used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might
happen with light hydrogen, he had to use data from someone else's
experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When
asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program
(because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the
experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn't be
any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious
for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for
public relations purposes, they are destroying -- possibly -- the value of
the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is
often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their
scientific integrity demands.
All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For
example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of
mazes, and so on -- with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young
did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one
side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food
was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door
down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the
door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so
beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before?
Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the
other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures
on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then
he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to
change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized
the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in
the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and
still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when
they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in
sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was
able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If
he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment.
That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because
it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using -- not what you think
it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions
you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an
experiment with rat-running.
I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next
experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never
used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very
careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid
no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not
referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he
discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats.
But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of
cargo cult science.
Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other people.
As various people have made criticisms -- and they themselves have made
criticisms of their own experiments -- they improve the techniques so that
the effects are smaller, and smaller, and smaller until they gradually
disappear. All the parapsychologists are looking for some experiment that
can be repeated -- that you can do again and get the same effect --
statistically, even. They run a million rats -- no, it's people this time --
they do a lot of things and get a certain statistical effect. Next time they
try it they don't get it any more. And now you find a man saying that it is
an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is science?
This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which he was
resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology. And, in telling
people what to do next, he says that one of the things they have to do is be
sure they only train students who have shown their ability to get PSI
results to an acceptable extent -- not to waste their time on those
ambitious and interested students who get only chance results. It is very
dangerous to have such a policy in teaching -- to teach students only how to
get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific
integrity.
So I have just one wish for you -- the good luck to be somewhere where
you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where
you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the
organization or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you
have that freedom.