“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

The Dignified Professor

I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere I can say to myself, “At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something; I’m making some contribution”—it’s just psychological.

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.

Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!

In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you’ve got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it’s the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer periods of time when not much is coming to you. You’re not getting any ideas, and if you’re doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can’t even say “I’m teaching my class.”

If you’re teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn’t do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can’t think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you’re rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.

The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.

But once I was offered such a position.

During the war, when I was still in Los Alamos, Hans Bethe got me this job at Cornell, for $3700 a year. I got an offer from some other place for more, but I like Bethe, and I had decided to go to Cornell and wasn’t worried about the money. But Bethe was always watching out for me, and when he found out that others were offering more, he got Cornell to give me a raise to $4000 even before I started.

Cornell told me that I would be teaching a course in mathematical methods of physics, and they told me what day I should come—November 6, I think, but it sounds funny that it could be so late in the year. I took the train from Los Alamos to Ithaca, and spent most of my time writing final reports for the Manhattan Project. I still remember that it was on the night train from Buffalo to Ithaca that I began to work on my course.

You have to understand the pressures at Los Alamos. You did everything as fast as you could; everybody worked very, very hard; and everything was finished at the last minute. So, working out my course on the train a day or two before the first lecture seemed natural to me.

Mathematical methods of physics was an ideal course for me to teach. It was what I had done during the war—apply mathematics to physics. I knew which methods were really useful, and which were not. I had lots of experience by that time, working so hard for four years using mathematical tricks. So I laid out the different subjects in mathematics and how to deal with them, and I still have the papers—the notes I made on the train.

I got off the train in Ithaca, carrying my heavy suitcase on my shoulder, as usual. A guy called out, “Want a taxi, sir?”

I had never wanted to take a taxi: I was always a young fella, short on money, wanting to be my own man. But I thought to myself, “I’m a professor–I must be dignified.” So I took my suitcase down from my shoulder and carried it in my hand, and said, “Yes.”

“Where to?”

“The hotel.”

“Which hotel?”

“One of the hotels you’ve got in Ithaca.”

“Have you got a reservation?”

“No.”

“It’s not so easy to get a room.”

“We’ll just go from one hotel to another. Stay and wait for me.”

I try the Hotel Ithaca: no room. We go over to the Traveller’s Hotel: they don’t have any room either. I say to the taxi guy, “No use driving around town with me; it’s gonna cost a lot of money, I’ll walk from hotel to hotel.” I leave my suitcase in the Traveller’s Hotel and I start to wander around, looking for a room. That shows you how much preparation I had, a new professor.

I found some other guy wandering around looking for a room too. It turned out that the hotel room situation was utterly impossible. After a while we wandered up some sort of a hill, and gradually realized we were coming near the campus of the university.

We saw something that looked like a rooming house, with an open window, and you could see bunk beds in there. By this time it was night, so we decided to ask if we could sleep there. The door was open, but there was nobody in the whole place. We walked up into one of the rooms, and the other guy said, “Come on, let’s just sleep here!”

I didn’t think that was so good. It seemed like stealing to me. Somebody had made the beds; they might come home and find us sleeping in their beds, and we’d get into trouble.

So we go out. We walk a little further, and we see, under a streetlight, an enormous mass of leaves that had been collected—it was autumn—from the lawns. I say, “Hey! We could crawl in these leaves and sleep here!” I tried it; they were rather soft, I was tired of walking around, it would have been perfectly all right. But I didn’t want to get into trouble right away. Back at Los Alamos people had teased me (when I played drums and so on) about what kind of “professor” Cornell was going to get. They said I’d get a reputation right off by doing something silly, so I was trying to be a little dignified. I reluctantly gave up the idea of sleeping in the pile of leaves.

We wandered around a little more, and came to a big building, some important building of the campus. We went in, and there were two couches in the hallway. The other guy said, “I’m sleeping here!” and collapsed onto the couch.

I didn’t want to get into trouble, so I found a janitor down in the basement and asked him whether I could sleep on the couch, and he said “Sure.”

The next morning I woke up, found a place to eat breakfast, and started rushing around as fast as I could to find out when my first class was going to be. I ran into the physics department: “What time is my first class? Did I miss it?”

The guy said, “You have nothing to worry about. Classes don’t start for eight days.”

That was a shock to me! The first thing I said was, “Well, why did you tell me to be here a week ahead?”

“I thought you’d like to come and get acquainted, find a place to stay and settle down before you begin your classes.”

I was back to civilization, and I didn’t know what it was!

Professor Gibbs sent me to the Student Union to find a place to stay. It’s a big place, with lots of students milling around. I go up to a big desk that says HOUSING and I say, “I’m new, and I’m looking for a room.”

The guy says, “Buddy, the housing situation in Ithaca is tough. In fact, it’s so tough that, believe it or not, a professor had to sleep on a couch in this lobby last night!”

I look around, and it’s the same lobby! I turn to him and I say, “Well, I’m that professor, and the professor doesn’t want to do it again!”

My early days at Cornell as a new professor were interesting and sometimes amusing. A few days after I got there, professor Gibbs came into my office and explained to me that ordinarily we don’t accept students this late in the term, but in a few cases, when the applicant is very, very good, we can accept him. He handed me an application and asked me to look it over.

He comes back: “Well, what do you think?”

“I think he’s first rate, and I think we ought to accept him. I think we’re lucky to get him here.”

“Yes, but did you look at his picture?”

“What possible difference could that make? ” I exclaimed.

“Absolutely none, sir! Glad to hear you say that. I wanted to see what kind of a man we had for our new professor.” Gibbs liked the way I came right back at him without thinking to myself, “He’s the head of the department, and I’m new here, so I’d better be careful what I say.” I haven’t got the speed to think like that; my first reaction is immediate, and I say the first thing that comes into my mind.

Then another guy came into my office. He wanted to talk to me about philosophy, and I can’t really quite remember what he said, but he wanted me to join some kind of a club of professors. The club was some sort of anti-Semitic club that thought the Nazis weren’t so bad. He tried to explain to me how there were too many Jews doing this and that—some crazy thing. So I waited until he got all finished, and said to him, “You know, you made a big mistake: I was brought up in a Jewish family.” He went out, and that was the beginning of my loss of respect for some of the professors in the humanities, and other areas, at Cornell University.

I was starting over, after my wife’s death, and I wanted to meet some girls. In those days there was a lot of social dancing. So there were a lot of dances at Cornell, mixers to get people together, especially for the freshmen and others returning to school.

I remember the first dance that I went to. I hadn’t been dancing for three or four years while I was at Los Alamos; I hadn’t even been in society. So I went to this dance and danced as best I could, which I thought was reasonably all right. You can usually tell somebody’s dancing with you and they feel pretty good about it.

As we danced I would talk with the girl a little bit; she would ask me some questions about myself, and I would ask some about her. But when I wanted to dance with a girl I had danced with before, I had to look for her.

“Would you like to dance again?”

“No, I’m sorry; I need some air.” Or, “Well, I have to go to the ladies’ room”—this and that excuse, from two or three girls in a row! What was the matter with me? Was my dancing lousy? Was my personality lousy?

I danced with another girl, and again came the usual questions: “Are you a student, or a graduate student?” (There were a lot of students who looked old then because they had been in the army.)

“No, I’m a professor.”

“Oh? A professor of what?”

“Theoretical physics.”

“I suppose you worked on the atomic bomb.”

“Yes, I was at Los Alamos during the war.”

She said, “You’re a damn liar!”—and walked off.

That relieved me a great deal. It explained everything. I had been telling all the girls the simple-minded, stupid truth, and I never knew what the trouble was. It was perfectly obvious that I was being shunned by one girl after another when I did everything perfectly nice and natural and was polite, and answered the questions. Everything would look very pleasant, and then thwoop—it wouldn’t work. I didn’t understand it until this woman fortunately called me a damn liar.

So then I tried to avoid all the questions, and it had the opposite effect: “Are you a freshman?”

“Well, no.”

“Are you a graduate student?”

“No.”

“What are you?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“Why won’t you tell us what you are?”

“I don’t want to …—and they’d keep talking to me!

I ended up with two girls over at my house and one of them told me that I really shouldn’t feel uncomfortable about being a freshman; there were plenty of guys my age who were starting out in college, and it was really all right. They were sophomores, and were being quite motherly, the two of them. They worked very hard on my psychology, but I didn’t want the situation to get so distorted and so misunderstood, so I let them know I was a professor. They were very upset that I had fooled them. I had a lot of trouble being a young professor at Cornell.

Anyway, I began to teach the course in mathematical methods in physics, and I think I also taught another course—electricity and magnetism, perhaps. I also intended to do research. Before the war, while I was getting my degree, I had many ideas: I had invented new methods of doing quantum mechanics with path integrals, and I had a lot of stuff I wanted to do.

At Cornell, I’d work on preparing my courses, and I’d go over to the library a lot and read through the Arabian Nights and ogle the girls that would go by. But when it came time to do some research, I couldn’t get to work. I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn’t do research! This went on for what I felt was a few years, but when I go back and calculate the timing, it couldn’t have been that long. Perhaps nowadays I wouldn’t think it was such a long time, but then, it seemed to go on for a very long time. I simply couldn’t get started on any problem: I remember writing one or two sentences about some problem in gamma rays and then I couldn’t go any further. I was convinced that from the war and everything else (the death of my wife) I had simply burned myself out.

I now understand it much better. First of all, a young man doesn’t realize how much time it takes to prepare good lectures, for the first time, especially—and to give the lectures, and to make up exam problems, and to check that they’re sensible ones. I was giving good courses, the kind of courses where I put a lot of thought into each lecture. But I didn’t realize that that’s a lot of work! So here I was, “burned out,” reading the Arabian Nights and feeling depressed about myself.

During this period I would get offers from different places—universities and industry—with salaries higher than my own. And each time I got something like that I would get a little more depressed. I would say to myself, “Look, they’re giving me these wonderful offers, but they don’t realize that I’m burned out! Of course I can’t accept them. They expect me to accomplish something, and I can’t accomplish anything! I have no ideas …”

Finally there came in the mail an invitation from the Institute for Advanced Study: Einstein … von Neumann … Wyl … all these great minds! They write to me, and invite me to be a professor there! And not just a regular professor. Somehow they knew my feelings about the Institute: how it’s too theoretical; how there’s not enough real activity and challenge. So they write, “We appreciate that you have a considerable interest in experiments and in teaching, so we have made arrangements to create a special type of professorship, if you wish: half professor at Princeton University, and half at the Institute.”

Institute for Advanced Study! Special exception! A position better than Einstein, even! It was ideal; it was perfect; it was absurd!

It was absurd. The other offers had made me feel worse, up to a point. They were expecting me to accomplish something. But this offer was so ridiculous, so impossible for me ever to live up to, so ridiculously out of proportion. The other ones were just mistakes; this was an absurdity! I laughed at it while I was shaving, thinking about it.

And then I thought to myself, “You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it’s impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!”

It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.

It wasn’t a failure on my part that the Institute for Advanced Study expected me to be that good; it was impossible. It was clearly a mistake—and the moment I appreciated the possibility that they might be wrong, I realized that it was also true of all the other places, including my own university. I am what I am, and if they expected me to be good and they’re offering me some money for it, it’s their hard luck.

Then, within the day, by some strange miracle—perhaps he overheard me talking about it, or maybe he just understood me—Bob Wilson, who was head of the laboratory there at Cornell, called me in to see him. He said, in a serious tone, “Feynman, you’re teaching your classes well; you’re doing a good job, and we’re very satisfied. Any other expectations we might have are a matter of luck. When we hire a professor, we’re taking all the risks. If it comes out good, all right. If it doesn’t, too bad. But you shouldn’t worry about what you’re doing or not doing.” He said it much better than that, and it released me from the feeling of guilt.

Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing—it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference: I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.

So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?”

I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.

I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, “Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is …” and I showed him the accelerations.

He says, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?”

“Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.

I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was “playing”—working, really—with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

Any Questions?

When I was at Cornell I was asked to give a series of lectures once a week at an aeronautics laboratory in Buffalo. Cornell had made an arrangement with the laboratory which included evening lectures in physics to be given by somebody from the university. There was some guy already doing it, but there were complaints, so the physics department came to me. I was a young professor at the time and I couldn’t say no very easily, so I agreed to do it.

To get to Buffalo they had me go on a little airline which consisted of one airplane. It was called Robinson Airlines (it later became Mohawk Airlines) and I remember the first time I flew to Buffalo, Mr. Robinson was the pilot. He knocked the ice off the wings and we flew away.

All in all, I didn’t enjoy the idea of going to Buffalo every Thursday night. The university was paying me $35 in addition to my expenses. I was a Depression kid, and I figured I’d save the $35, which was a sizable amount of money in those days.

Suddenly I got an idea: I realized that the purpose of the $35 was to make the trip to Buffalo more attractive, and the way to do that is to spend the money. So I decided to spend the $35 to entertain myself each time I went to Buffalo, and see if I could make the trip worthwhile.

I didn’t have much experience with the rest of the world. Not knowing how to get started, I asked the taxi driver who picked me up at the airport to guide me through the ins and outs of entertaining myself in Buffalo. He was very helpful, and I still remember his name—Marcuso, who drove car number 169. I would always ask for him when I came into the airport on Thursday nights.

As I was going to give my first lecture I asked Marcuso, “Where’s an interesting bar where lots of things are going on?” I thought that things went on in bars.

“The Alibi Room,” he said. “It’s a lively place where you can meet lots of people. I’ll take you there after your lecture.”

After the lecture Marcuso picked me up and drove me to the Alibi Room. On the way, I say, “Listen, I’m gonna have to ask for some kind of drink. What’s the name of a good whiskey?”

“Ask for Black and White, water on the side,” he counseled.

The Alibi Room was an elegant place with lots of people and lots of activity. The women were dressed in furs, everybody was friendly, and the phones were ringing all the time.

I walked up to the bar and ordered my Black and White, water on the side. The bartender was very friendly quickly found a beautiful woman to sit next to me, and introduced her. I bought her drinks. I liked the place and decided to come back the following week.

Every Thursday night I’d come to Buffalo and be driven in car number 169 to my lecture and then to the Alibi Room. I’d walk into the bar and order my Black and White, water on the side. After a few weeks of this it got to the point where as soon as I would come in, before I reached the bar, there would be a Black and White, water on the side, waiting for me. “Your regular, sir” was the bartender’s greeting.

I’d take the whole shot glass down at once, to show I was a tough guy, like I had seen in the movies, and then I’d sit around for about twenty seconds before I drank the water. After a while I didn’t even need the water.

The bartender always saw to it that the empty chair next to mine was quickly filled by a beautiful woman, and everything would start off all right, but just before the bar closed, they all had to go off somewhere. I thought it was possibly because I was getting pretty drunk by that time.

One time, as the Alibi Room was closing, the girl I was buying drinks for that night suggested we go to another place where she knew a lot of people. It was on the second floor of some other building which gave no hint that there was a bar upstairs. All the bars in Buffalo had to close at two o’clock, and all the people in the bars would get sucked into this big hall on the second floor, and keep right on going—illegally, of course.

I tried to figure out a way that I could stay in bars and watch what was going on without getting drunk. One night I noticed a guy who had been there a lot go up to the bar and order a glass of milk. Everybody knew what his problem was: he had an ulcer, the poor fella. That gave me an idea.

The next time I come into the Alibi Room the bartender says, “The usual, sir?”

“No. Coke. Just plain Coke,” I say, with a disappointed look on my face.

The other guys gather around and sympathize: “Yeah, I was on the wagon three weeks ago,” one says. “It’s really tough, Dick, it’s really tough,” says another.

They all honored me. I was “on the wagon” now, and had the guts to enter that bar, with all its “temptations,” and just order Coke—because, of course, I had to see my friends. And I maintained that for a month! I was a real tough bastard.

One time I was in the men’s room of the bar and there was a guy at the urinal. He was kind of drunk, and said to me in a mean-sounding voice, “I don’t like your face. I think I’ll push it in.”

I was scared green. I replied in an equally mean voice, “Get out of my way, or I’ll pee right through ya!”

He said something else, and I figured it was getting pretty close to a fight now. I had never been in a fight. I didn’t know what to do, exactly, and I was afraid of getting hurt. I did think of one thing: I moved away from the wall, because I figured if I got hit, I’d get hit from the back, too.

Then I felt a sort of funny crunching in my eye—it didn’t hurt much—and the next thing I know, I’m slamming the son of a gun right back, automatically. It was remarkable for me to discover that I didn’t have to think; the “machinery” knew what to do.

“OK. That’s one for one,” I said. “Ya wanna keep on goin’?”

The other guy backed off and left. We would have killed each other if the other guy was as dumb as I was.

I went to wash up, my hands are shaking, blood is leaking out of my gums—I’ve got a weak place in my gums—and my eye hurt. After I calmed down I went back into the bar and swaggered up to the bartender: “Black and White, water on the side,” I said. I figured it would calm my nerves.

I didn’t realize it, but the guy I socked in the men’s room was over in another part of the bar, talking with three other guys. Soon these three guys—big, tough guys—came over to where I was sitting and leaned over me. They looked down threateningly, and said, “What’s the idea of pickin’ a fight with our friend?”

Well I’m so dumb I don’t realize I’m being intimidated; all I know is right and wrong. I simply whip around and snap at them, “Why don’t ya find out who started what first, before ya start makin’ trouble?”

The big guys were so taken aback by the fact that their intimidation didn’t work that they backed away and left.

After a while one of the guys came back and said to me, “You’re right, Curly’s always doin’ that. He’s always gettin’ into fights and askin’ us to straighten it out.”

“You’re damn tootin’ I’m right!” I said, and the guy sat down next to me.

Curly and the other two fellas came over and sat down on the other side of me, two seats away. Curly said something about my eye not looking too good, and I said his didn’t look to be in the best of shape either.

I continue talking tough, because I figure that’s the way a real man is supposed to act in a bar.

The situation’s getting tighter and tighter, and people in the bar are worrying about what’s going to happen. The bartender says, “No fighting in here, boys! Calm down!”

Curly hisses, “That’s OK; we’ll get ‘im when he goes out.”

Then a genius comes by. Every field has its first-rate experts. This fella comes over to me and says, “Hey, Dan! I didn’t know you were in town! It’s good to see you!”

Then he says to Curly, “Say, Paul! I’d like you to meet a good friend of mine, Dan, here. I think you two guys would like each other. Why don’t you shake?”

We shake hands. Curly says, “Uh, pleased to meet you.”

Then the genius leans over to me and very quietly whispers, “Now get out of here fast!”

“But they said they would …”

“Just go!” he says.

I got my coat and went out quickly. I walked along near the walls of the buildings, in case they went looking for me. Nobody came out, and I went to my hotel. It happened to be the night of the last lecture, so I never went back to the Alibi Room, at least for a few years.

(I did go back to the Alibi Room about ten years later, and it was all different. It wasn’t nice and polished like it was before; it was sleazy and had seedy-looking people in it. I talked to the bartender, who was a different man, and told him about the old days. “Oh, yes!” he said. “This was the bar where all the bookmakers and their girls used to hang out.” I understood then why there were so many friendly and elegant-looking people there, and why the phones were ringing all the time.)

The next morning, when I got up and looked in the mirror, I discovered that a black eye takes a few hours to develop fully. When I got back to Ithaca that day, I went to deliver some stuff over to the dean’s office. A professor of philosophy saw my black eye and exclaimed, “Oh, Mr. Feynman! Don’t tell me you got that walking into a door?”

“Not at all,” I said. “I got it in a fight in the men’s room of a bar in Buffalo.”

“Ha, ha, ha!” he laughed.

Then there was the problem of giving the lecture to my regular class. I walked into the lecture hall with my head down, studying my notes. When I was ready to start, I lifted my head and looked straight at them, and said what I always said before I began my lecture—but this time, in a tougher tone of voice: “Any questions?”

I Want My Dollar!

When I was at Cornell I would often come back home to Far Rockaway to visit. One time when I happened to be home, the telephone rings: it’s LONG DISTANCE, from California. In those days, a long distance call meant it was something very important, especially a long distance call from this marvelous place, California, a million miles away.

The guy on the other end says, “Is this Professor Feynman, of Cornell University?”

“That’s right.”

“This is Mr. So-and-so from the Such-and-such Aircraft Company.” It was one of the big airplane companies in California, but unfortunately I can’t remember which one. The guy continues: “We’re planning to start a laboratory on nuclear-propelled rocket airplanes. It will have an annual budget of so-and-so-many million dollars …” Big numbers.

I said, “Just a moment, sir; I don’t know why you’re telling me all this.”

“Just let me speak to you,” he says; “just let me explain everything. Please let me do it my way.” So he goes on a little more, and says how many people are going to be in the laboratory, so-and-so-many people at this level, and so-and-so-many Ph.D’s at that level …

“Excuse me, sir,” I say, “but I think you have the wrong fella.”

“Am I talking to Richard Feynman, Richard P. Feynman?”

“Yes, but you’re …”

“Would you please let me present what I have to say, sir, and then we’ll discuss it.”

“All right!” I sit down and sort of close my eyes to listen to all this stuff, all these details about this big project, and I still haven’t the slightest idea why he’s giving me all this information,

Finally, when he’s all finished, he says, “I’m telling you about our plans because we want to know if you would like to be the director of the laboratory.”

“Have you really got the right fella?” I say. “I’m a professor of theoretical physics. I’m not a rocket engineer, or an airplane engineer, or anything like that.”

“We’re sure we have the right fellow.’

“Where did you get my name then? Why did you decide to call me?”

“Sir, your name is on the patent for nuclear-powered, rocket-propelled airplanes.”

“Oh,” I said, and I realized why my name was on the patent, and I’ll have to tell you the story. I told the man, “I’m sorry, but I would like to continue as a professor at Cornell University.”

What had happened was, during the war, at Los Alamos, there was a very nice fella in charge of the patent office for the government, named Captain Smith. Smith sent around a notice to everybody that said something like, “We in the patent office would like to patent every idea you have for the United States government, for which you are working now. Any idea you have on nuclear energy or its application that you may think everybody knows about, everybody doesn’t know about: Just come to my office and tell me the idea.”

I see Smith at lunch, and as we’re walking back to the technical area, I say to him, “That note you sent around: That’s kind of crazy to have us come in and tell you every idea.”

We discussed it back and forth—by this time we’re in his office—and I say, “There are so many ideas about nuclear energy that are so perfectly obvious, that I’d be here all day telling you stuff.”

“LIKE WHAT?”

“Nothin’ to it!” I say. “Example: nuclear reactor … under water … water goes in … steam goes out the other side … Pshshshsht–it’s a submarine. Or: nuclear reactor … air comes rushing in the front… heated up by nuclear reaction … out the back it goes … Boom! Through the air—it’s an airplane. Or: nuclear reactor … you have hydrogen go through the thing … Zoom!—it’s a rocket. Or: nuclear reactor … only instead of using ordinary uranium, you use enriched uranium with beryllium oxide at high temperature to make it more efficient … It’s an electrical power plant. There’s a million ideas!” I said, as I went out the door.

Nothing happened.

About three months later, Smith calls me in the office and says, “Feynman, the submarine has already been taken. But the other three are yours.” So when the guys at the airplane company in California are planning their laboratory, and try to find out who’s an expert in rocket-propelled whatnots, there’s nothing to it: They look at who’s got the patent on it!

Anyway, Smith told me to sign some papers for the three ideas I was giving to the government to patent. Now, it’s some dopey legal thing, but when you give the patent to the government, the document you sign is not a legal document unless there’s some exchange, so the paper I signed said, “For the sum of one dollar, I, Richard P. Feynman, give this idea to the government …”

I sign the paper.

“Where’s my dollar?”

“That’s just a formality,” he says. “We haven’t got any funds set up to give a dollar.”

“You’ve got it all set up that I’m signing for the dollar,” I say. “I want my dollar!”

“This is silly,” Smith protests.

“No, it’s not,” I say. “It’s a legal document, You made me sign it, and I’m an honest man. There’s no fooling around about it.”

“All right, all right!” he says, exasperated. “I’ll give you a dollar, from my pocket!”

“OK.”

I take the dollar, and I realize what I’m going to do. I go down to the grocery store, and I buy a dollar’s worth—which was pretty good, then—of cookies and goodies, those chocolate goodies with marshmallow inside, a whole lot of stuff.

I come back to the theoretical laboratory, and I give them out: “I got a prize, everybody! Have a cookie! I got a prize! A dollar for my patent! I got a dollar for my patent!”

Everybody who had one of those patents—a lot of people had been sending them in—everybody comes down to Captain Smith: they want their dollar!

He starts shelling them out of his pocket, but soon realizes that it’s going to be a hemorrhage! He went crazy trying to set up a fund where he could get the dollars these guys were insisting on. I don’t know how he settled up.

You Just Ask Them?

When I was first at Cornell I corresponded with a girl I had met in New Mexico while I was working on the bomb. I got to thinking, when she mentioned some other fella she knew, that I had better go out there quickly at the end of the school year and try to save the situation. But when I got out there, I found it was too late, so I ended up in a motel in Albuquerque with a free summer and nothing to do.

The Casa Grande Motel was on Route 66, the main highway through town. About three places further down the road there was a little nightclub that had entertainment. Since I had nothing to do, and since I enjoyed watching and meeting people in bars, I very often went to this nightclub.

When I first went there I was talking with some guy at the bar, and we noticed a wholetable full of nice young ladies—TWA hostesses, I think they were—who were having some sort of birthday party. The other guy said, “Come on, let’s get up our nerve and ask them to dance.”

So we asked two of them to dance, and afterwards they invited us to sit with the other girls at the table. After a few drinks, the waiter came around: “Anybody want anything?”

I liked to imitate being drunk, so although I was completely sober, I turned to the girl I’d been dancing with and asked her in a drunken voice, “YaWANanything?”

“What can we have?” she asks.

“Annnnnnnnnnnnything you want—ANYTHING!”

“All right! We’ll have champagne!” she says happily.

So I say in a loud voice that everybody in the bar can hear, “OK! Ch-ch-champagne for evvverybody!”

Then I hear my friend talking to my girl, saying what a dirty trick it is to “take all that dough from him because he’s drunk,” and I’m beginning to think maybe I made a mistake.

Well, nicely enough, the waiter comes over to me, leans down, and says in a low voice, “Sir, that’s sixteen dollars a bottle.”

I decide to drop the idea of champagne for everybody, so I say in an even louder voice than before, “NEVER MIND!”

I was therefore quite surprised when, a few moments later, the waiter came back to the table with all his fancy stuff—a white towel over his arm, a tray full of glasses, an ice bucket full of ice, and a bottle of champagne. He thought I meant, “Never mind the price,” when I meant, “Never mind the champagne!”

The waiter served champagne to everybody, I paid out the sixteen dollars, and my friend was mad at my girl because he thought she had got me to pay all this dough. But as far as I was concerned, that was the end of it—though it turned out later to be the beginning of a new adventure.

I went to that nightclub quite often and as the weeks went by, the entertainment changed. The performers were on a circuit that went through Amarillo and a lot of other places in Texas, and God knows where else. There was also a permanent singer who was at the nightclub, whose name was Tamara. Every time a new group of performers came to the club, Tamara would introduce me to one of the girls from the group. The girl would come and sit down with me at my table, I would buy her a drink, and we’d talk. Of course I would have liked to do more than just talk, but there was always something the matter at the last minute. So I could never understand why Tamara always went to the trouble of introducing me to all these nice girls, and then, even though things would start out all right, I would always end up buying drinks, spending the evening talking, but that was it. My friend, who didn’t have the advantage of Tamara’s introductions, wasn’t getting anywhere either—we were both clunks.

After a few weeks of different shows and different girls, a new show came, and as usual Tamara introduced me to a girl from the group, and we went through the usual thing—I’m buying her drinks, we’re talking, and she’s being very nice. She went and did her show, and afterwards she came back to me at my table, and I felt pretty good. People would look around and think, “What’s he got that makes this girl come to him?”

But then, at some stage near the close of the evening, she said something that by this time I had heard many times before: “I’d like to have you come over to my room tonight, but we’re having a party, so perhaps tomorrow night …”—and I knew what this “perhaps tomorrow night” meant: NOTHING.

Well, I noticed throughout the evening that this girl—her name was Gloria—talked quite often with the master of ceremonies, during the show, and on her way to and from the ladies’ room. So one time, when she was in the ladies’ room and the master of ceremonies happened to be walking near my table, I impulsively took a guess and said to him, “Your wife is a very nice woman.”

He said, “Yes, thank you,” and we started to talk a little. He figured she had told me. And when Gloria returned, she figured he had told me. So they both talked to me a little bit, and invited me to go over to their place that night after the bar closed.

At two o’clock in the morning I went over to their motel with them. There wasn’t any party, of course, and we talked a long time. They showed me a photo album with pictures of Gloria when her husband first met her in Iowa, a cornfed, rather fattish-looking woman; then other pictures of her as she reduced, and now she looked really nifty! He had taught her all kinds of stuff, but he couldn’t read or write, which was especially interesting because he had the job, as master of ceremonies, of reading the names of the acts and the performers who were in the amateur contest, and I hadn’t even noticed that he couldn’t read what he was “reading”! (The next night I saw what they did. While she was bringing a person on or off the stage, she glanced at the slip of paper in his hand and whispered the names of the next performers and the title of the act to him as she went by.)

They were a very interesting, friendly couple, and we had many interesting conversations. I recalled how we had met, and I asked them why Tamara was always introducing the new girls to me.

Gloria replied, “When Tamara was about to introduce me to you, she said, ‘Now I’m going to introduce you to the real spender around here!’

I had to think a moment before I realized that the sixteen-dollar bottle of champagne bought with such a vigorous and misunderstood “never mind! ” turned out to be a good investment. I apparently had the reputation of being some kind of eccentric who always came in not dressed up, not in a neat suit, but always ready to spend lots of money on the girls.

Eventually I told them that I was struck by something: “I’m fairly intelligent,” I said, “but probably only about physics. But in that bar there are lots of intelligent guys—oil guys, mineral guys, important businessmen, and so forth—and all the time they’re buying the girls drinks, and they get nothin’ for it!” (By this time I had decided that nobody else was getting anything out of all those drinks either.) “How is it possible,” I asked, “that an ‘intelligent’ guy can be such a goddamn fool when he gets into a bar?”

The master said, “This I know all about. I know exactly how it all works. I will give you lessons, so that hereafter you can get something from a girl in a bar like this. But before I give you the lessons, I must demonstrate that I really know what I’m talking about. So to do that, Gloria will get a man to buy you a champagne cocktail.”

I say, “OK,” though I’m thinking, “How the hell are they gonna do it?”

The master continued: “Now you must do exactly as we tell you. Tomorrow night you should sit some distance from Gloria in the bar, and when she gives you a sign, all you have to do is walk by.”

“Yes,” says Gloria. “It’ll be easy.”

The next night I go to the bar and sit in the corner, where I can keep my eye on Gloria from a distance. After a while, sure enough, there’s some guy sitting with her, and after a little while longer the guy’s happy and Gloria gives me a wink. I get up and nonchalantly saunter by. Just as I’m passing, Gloria turns around and says in a real friendly and bright voice, “Oh, hi, Dick! When did you get back into town? Where have you been?”

At this moment the guy turns around to see who this “Dick” is, and I can see in his eyes something I understand completely, since I have been in that position so often myself.

First look: “Oh-oh, competition coming up. He’s gonna take her away from me after I bought her a drink! What’s gonna happen?”

Next look: “No, it’s just a casual friend. They seem to know each other from some time back.” I could see all this. I could read it on his face. I knew exactly what he was going through.

Gloria turns to him and says, “Jim, I’d like you to meet an old friend of mine, Dick Feynman.”

Next look: “I know what I’ll do; I’ll be kind to this guy so that she’ll like me more.”

Jim turns to me and says, “Hi, Dick. How about a drink?”

“Fine!” I say.

“What’ll ya have?”

“Whatever she’s having.”

“Bartender, another champagne cocktail, please.”

So it was easy; there was nothing to it. That night after the bar closed I went again over to the master and Gloria’s motel. They were laughing and smiling, happy with how it worked out. “All right,” I said, “I’m absolutely convinced that you two know exactly what you’re talking about. Now, what about the lessons?”

“OK,” he says. “The whole principle is this: The guy wants to be a gentleman. He doesn’t want to be thought of as impolite, crude, or especially a cheapskate. As long as the girl knows the guy’s motives so well, it’s easy to steer him in the direction she wants him to go.

“Therefore,” he continued, “under no circumstances be a gentleman! You must disrespect the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl anything–not even a package of cigarettes—until you’ve asked her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she will, and that she’s not lying.”

“Uh … you mean … you don’t … uh … you just ask them?”

“OK,” he says, “I know this is your first lesson, and it may be hard for you to be so blunt. So you might buy her one thing—just one little something—before you ask. But on the other hand, it will only make it more difficult.”

Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.

Then that night I was ready to try it out. I go into the bar as usual, and right away my friend says, “Hey, Dick! Wait’ll you see the girl I got tonight! She had to go change her clothes, but she’s coming right back.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say, unimpressed, and I sit at another table to watch the show. My friend’s girl comes in just as the show starts, and I’m thinking, “I don’t give a damn how pretty she is; all she’s doing is getting him to buy her drinks, and she’s going to give him nothing!”

After the first act my friend says, “Hey, Dick! I want you to meet Ann. Ann, this is a good friend of mine, Dick Feynman.”

I say “Hi” and keep looking at the show.

A few moments later Ann says to me, “Why don’t you come and sit at the table here with us?”

I think to myself, “Typical bitch: he’s buying her drinks, and she’s inviting somebody else to the table.” I say, “I can see fine from here.”

A little while later a lieutenant from the military base nearby comes in, dressed in a nice uniform. It isn’t long before we notice that Ann is sitting over on the other side of the bar with the lieutenant!

Later that evening I’m sitting at the bar, Ann is dancing with the lieutenant, and when the lieutenant’s back is toward me and she’s facing me, she smiles very pleasantly to me. I think again, “Some bitch! Now she’s doing this trick on the lieutenant even!”

Then I get a good idea: I don’t look at her until the lieutenant can also see me, and then I smile back at her, so the lieutenant will know what’s going on. So her trick didn’t work for long.

A few minutes later she’s not with the lieutenant any more, but asking the bartender for her coat and handbag, saying in a loud, obvious voice, “I’d like to go for a walk. Does anybody want to go for a walk with me?”

I think to myself, “You can keep saying no and pushing them off, but you can’t do it permanently, or you won’t get anywhere. There comes a time when you have to go along.” So I say coolly, “I’ll walk with you.” So we go out. We walk down the street a few blocks and see a café, and she says, “I’ve got an idea—let’s get some coffee and sandwiches, and go over to my place and eat them.”

The idea sounds pretty good, so we go into the café and she orders three coffees and three sandwiches and I pay for them.

As we’re going out of the café, I think to myself, “Something’s wrong: too many sandwiches!”

On the way to her motel she says, “You know, I won’t have time to eat these sandwiches with you, because a lieutenant is coming over …”

I think to myself, “See, I flunked. The master gave me a lesson on what to do, and I flunked. I bought her $1.10 worth of sandwiches, and hadn’t asked her anything, and now I know I’m gonna get nothing! I have to recover, if only for the pride of my teacher.”

I stop suddenly and I say to her, “You … are worse than a WHORE!”

“Whaddya mean?”

“You got me to buy these sandwiches, and what am I going to get for it? Nothing!”

“Well, you cheapskate!” she says. “If that’s the way you feel, I’ll pay you back for the sandwiches!”

I called her bluff: “Pay me back, then.”

She was astonished. She reached into her pocketbook, took out the little bit of money that she had and gave it to me. I took my sandwich and coffee and went off.

After I was through eating, I went back to the bar to report to the master. I explained everything, and told him I was sorry that I flunked, but I tried to recover.

He said very calmly, “It’s OK, Dick; it’s all right. Since you ended up not buying her anything, she’s gonna sleep with you tonight.”

“What?”

“That’s right,” he said confidently; “she’s gonna sleep with you. I know that.”

“But she isn’t even here! She’s at her place with the lieu—”

“It’s all right.”

Two o’clock comes around, the bar closes, and Ann hasn’t appeared. I ask the master and his wife if I can come over to their place again. They say sure.

Just as we’re coming out of the bar, here comes Ann, running across Route 66 toward me. She puts her arm in mine, and says, “Come on, let’s go over to my place.

The master was right. So the lesson was terrific!

When I was back at Cornell in the fall, I was dancing with the sister of a grad student, who was visiting from Virginia. She was very nice, and suddenly I got this idea: “Let’s go to a bar and have a drink,” I said.

On the way to the bar I was working up nerve to try the master’s lesson on an ordinary girl. After all, you don’t feel so bad disrespecting a bar girl who’s trying to get you to buy her drinks—but a nice, ordinary, Southern girl?

We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, “Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?”

“Yes.”

So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn’t enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up.

Lucky Numbers

One day at Princeton I was sitting in the lounge and overheard some mathematicians talking about the series for e^x, which is 1 + x + x^2/2! + x^3/3! Each term you get by multiplying the preceding term by x and dividing by the next number. For example, to get the next term after x^4/4! you multiply that term by x and divide by 5. It’s very simple.

When I was a kid I was excited by series, and had played with this thing. I had computed e using that series, and had seen how quickly the new terms became very small.

I mumbled something about how it was easy to calculate e to any power using that series (you just substitute the power for x).

“Oh yeah?” they said. “Well, then what’s e to the 3.3?” said some joker—I think it was Tukey.

I say, “That’s easy. It’s 27.11.”

Tukey knows it isn’t so easy to compute all that in your head. “Hey! How’d you do that?”

Another guy says, “You know Feynman, he’s just faking it. It’s not really right.”

They go to get a table, and while they’re doing that, I put on a few more figures.: “27.1126,” I say.

They find it in the table. “It’s right! But how’d you do it!”

“I just summed the series.”

“Nobody can sum the series that fast. You must just happen to know that one. How about e to the 3?”

“Look,” I say. “It’s hard work! Only one a day!”

“Hah! It’s a fake!” they say, happily.

“All right,” I say, “It’s 20.085.”

They look in the book as I put a few more figures on. They’re all excited now, because I got another one right.

Here are these great mathematicians of the day, puzzled at how I can compute e to any power! One of them says, “He just can’t be substituting and summing—it’s too hard. There’s some trick. You couldn’t do just any old number like e to the 1.4.”

I say, “It’s hard work, but for you, OK. It’s 4.05.”

As they’re looking it up, I put on a few more digits and say, “And that’s the last one for the day!” and walk out.

What happened was this: I happened to know three numbers—the logarithm of 10 to the base e (needed to convert numbers from base 10 to base e), which is 2.3026 (so I knew that e to the 2.3 is very close to 10), and because of radioactivity (mean-life and half-life), I knew the log of 2 to the base e, which is.69315 (so I also knew that e to the.7 is nearly equal to 2). I also knew e (to the 1), which is 2. 71828.

The first number they gave me was e to the 3.3, which is e to the 2.3—ten—times e, or 27.18. While they were sweating about how I was doing it, I was correcting for the extra.0026—2.3026 is a little high.

I knew I couldn’t do another one; that was sheer luck. But then the guy said e to the 3: that’s e to the 2.3 times e to the.7, or ten times two. So I knew it was 20. something, and while they were worrying how I did it, I adjusted for the .693.

Now I was sure I couldn’t do another one, because the last one was again by sheer luck. But the guy said e to the 1.4, which is e to the.7 times itself. So all I had to do is fix up 4 a little bit!

They never did figure out how I did it.

When I was at Los Alamos I found out that Hans Bethe was absolutely topnotch at calculating. For example, one time we were putting some numbers into a formula, and got to 48 squared. I reach for the Marchant calculator, and he says, “That’s 2300.” I begin to push the buttons, and he says, “If you want it exactly, it’s 2304.”

The machine says 2304. “Gee! That’s pretty remarkable!” I say.

“Don’t you know how to square numbers near 50?” he says. “You square 50—that’s 2500—and subtract 100 times the difference of your number from 50 (in this case it’s 2), so you have 2300. If you want the correction, square the difference and add it on. That makes 2304.”

A few minutes later we need to take the cube root of 2½. Now to take cube roots on the Marchant you had to use a table for the first approximation. I open the drawer to get the table—it takes a little longer this time—and he says, “It’s about 1.35.”

I try it out on the Marchant and it’s right. “How did you do that one?” I ask. “Do you have a secret for taking cube roots of numbers?”

“Oh,” he says, “the log of 2½ is so-and-so. Now one third of that log is between the logs of 1.3, which is this, and 1.4, which is that, so I interpolated.”

So I found out something: first, he knows the log tables; second, the amount of arithmetic he did to make the interpolation alone would have taken me longer to do than reach for the table and punch the buttons on the calculator. I was very impressed.

After that, I tried to do those things. I memorized a few logs, and began to notice things. For instance, if somebody says, “What is 28 squared?” you notice that the square root of 2 is 1.4, and 28 is 20 times 1.4, so the square of 28 must be around 400 times 2, or 800.

If somebody comes along and wants to divide 1 by 1.73, you can tell them immediately that it’s .577, because you notice that 1.73 is nearly the square root of 3, so 1/1.73 must be one-third of the square root of 3. And if it’s 1/1.75, that’s equal to the inverse of 7/4, and you’ve memorized the repeating decimals for sevenths: .571428 …

I had a lot of fun trying to do arithmetic fast, by tricks, with Hans. It was very rare that I’d see something he didn’t see and beat him to the answer, and he’d laugh his hearty laugh when I’d get one. He was nearly always able to get the answer to any problem within a percent. It was easy for him—every number was near something he knew.

One day I was feeling my oats. It was lunch time in the technical area, and I don’t know how I got the idea, but I announced, “I can work out in sixty seconds the answer to any problem that anybody can state in ten seconds, to 10 percent!”

People started giving me problems they thought were difficult, such as integrating a function like 1/(1 + x), which hardly changed over the range they gave me. The hardest one somebody gave me was the binomial coefficient of x^10 in (1 + x)^20; I got that just in time.

They were all giving me problems and I was feeling great, when Paul Olum walked by in the hall. Paul had worked with me for a while at Princeton before coming out to Los Alamos, and he was always cleverer than I was. For instance, one day I was absent-mindedly playing with one of those measuring tapes that snap back into your hand when you push a button. The tape would always slap over and hit my hand, and it hurt a little bit. “Geez!” I exclaimed. “What a dope I am. I keep playing with this thing, and it hurts me every time.”

He said, “You don’t hold it right,” and took the damn thing, pulled out the tape, pushed the button, and it came right back. No hurt.

“Wow! How do you do that?” I exclaimed.

“Figure it out!”

For the next two weeks I’m walking all around Princeton, snapping this tape back until my hand is absolutely raw. Finally I can’t take it any longer. “Paul! I give up! How the hell do you hold it so it doesn’t hurt?”

“Who says it doesn’t hurt? It hurts me too!”

I felt so stupid. He had gotten me to go around and hurt my hand for two weeks!

So Paul is walking past the lunch place and these guys are all excited. “Hey, Paul!” they call out. “Feynman’s terrific! We give him a problem that can be stated in ten seconds, and in a minute he gets the answer to 10 percent. Why don’t you give him one?”

Without hardly stopping, he says, “The tangent of 10 to the 100th.”

I was sunk: you have to divide by pi to 100 decimal places! It was hopeless.

One time I boasted, “I can do by other methods any integral anybody else needs contour integration to do.”

So Paul puts up this tremendous damn integral he had obtained by starting out with a complex function that he knew the answer to, taking out the real part of it and leaving only the complex part. He had unwrapped it so it was only possible by contour integration! He was always deflating me like that. He was a very smart fellow.

The first time I was in Brazil I was eating a noon meal at I don’t know what time—I was always in the restaurants at the wrong time—and I was the only customer in the place. I was eating rice with steak (which I loved), and there were about four waiters standing around.

A Japanese man came into the restaurant. I had seen him before, wandering around; he was trying to sell abacuses. He started to talk to the waiters, and challenged them: He said he could add numbers faster than any of them could do.

The waiters didn’t want to lose face, so they said, “Yeah, yeah. Why don’t you go over and challenge the customer over there?”

The man came over. I protested, “But I don’t speak Portuguese well!”

The waiters laughed. “The numbers are easy,” they said.

They brought me a pencil and paper.

The man asked a waiter to call out some numbers to add. He beat me hollow, because while I was writing the numbers down, he was already adding them as he went along.

I suggested that the waiter write down two identical lists of numbers and hand them to us at the same time. It didn’t make much difference. He still beat me by quite a bit.

However, the man got a little bit excited: he wanted to prove himself some more. “Multiplicao!” he said.

Somebody wrote down a problem. He beat me again, but not by much, because I’m pretty good at products.

The man then made a mistake: he proposed we go on to division. What he didn’t realize was, the harder the problem, the better chance I had.

We both did a long division problem. It was a tie.

This bothered the hell out of the Japanese man, because he was apparently very well trained on the abacus, and here he was almost beaten by this customer in a restaurant.

“Raios cubicos!” he says, with a vengeance. Cube roots! He wants to do cube roots by arithmetic! It’s hard to find a more difficult fundamental problem in arithmetic. It must have been his topnotch exercise in abacus-land.

He writes a number on some paper—any old number—and I still remember it: 1729.03. He starts working on it, mumbling and grumbling: “Mmmmmmagmmmmbrrr ”—he’s working like a demon! He’s poring away, doing this cube root.

Meanwhile I’m just sitting there.

One of the waiters says, “What are you doing?”

I point to my head. “Thinking!” I say. I write down 12 on the paper. After a little while I’ve got 12.002.

The man with the abacus wipes the sweat off his forehead: “Twelve!” he says.

“Oh, no!” I say. “More digits! More digits!” I know that in taking a cube root by arithmetic, each new digit is even more work than the one before. It’s a hard job.

He buries himself again, grunting, “Rrrrgrrrrmmmmmm …”

while I add on two more digits. He finally lifts his head to say, “12.0!”

The waiters are all excited and happy. They tell the man, “Look! He does it only by thinking, and you need an abacus! He’s got more digits!”

He was completely washed out, and left, humiliated. The waiters congratulated each other.

How did the customer beat the abacus? The number was 1729.03. I happened to know that a cubic foot contains 1728 cubic inches, so the answer is a tiny bit more than 12. The excess, 1.03, is only one part in nearly 2000, and I had learned in calculus that for small fractions, the cube root’s excess is one-third of the number’s excess. So all I had to do is find the fraction 1/1728, and multiply by 4 (divide by 3 and multiply by 12). So I was able to pull out a whole lot of digits that way.

A few weeks later the man came into the cocktail lounge of the hotel I was staying at. He recognized me and came over. “Tell me,” he said, “how were you able to do that cube-root problem so fast?”

I started to explain that it was an approximate method, and had to do with the percentage of error. “Suppose you had given me 28. Now, the cube root of 27 is 3 …”

He picks up his abacus: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz–

“Oh yes,” he says.

I realized something: he doesn’t know numbers. With the abacus, you don’t have to memorize a lot of arithmetic combinations; all you have to do is learn how to push the little beads up and down. You don’t have to memorize 9 + 7 = 16; you just know that when you add 9 you push a ten’s bead up and pull a one’s bead down. So we’re slower at basic arithmetic, but we know numbers.

Furthermore, the whole idea of an approximate method was beyond him, even though a cube root often cannot be computed exactly by any method. So I never could teach him how I did cube roots or explain how lucky I was that he happened to choose 1729.03.

O Americano, Outra Vez!

One time I picked up a hitchhiker who told me how interesting South America was, and that I ought to go there. I complained that the language is different, but he said just go ahead and learn it—it’s no big problem. So I thought, that’s a good idea: I’ll go to South America.

Cornell had some foreign language classes which followed a method used during the war, in which small groups of about ten students and one native speaker speak only the foreign language-nothing else. Since I was a rather young-looking professor there at Cornell, I decided to take the class as if I were a regular student. And since I didn’t know yet where I was going to end up in South America, I decided to take Spanish, because the great majority of the countries there speak Spanish.

So when it was time to register for the class, we were standing outside, ready to go into the classroom, when this pneumatic blonde came along. You know how once in a while you get this feeling, WOW? She looked terrific. I said to myself, “Maybe she’s going to be in the Spanish class—that’ll be great!” But no, she walked into the Portuguese class. So I figured, What the hell—I might as well learn Portuguese.

I started walking right after her when this Anglo-Saxon attitude that I have said, “No, that’s not a good reason to decide which language to speak.” So I went back and signed up for the Spanish class, to my utter regret.

Some time later I was at a Physics Society meeting in New York, and I found myself sitting next to Jaime Tiomno, from Brazil, and he asked, “What are you going to do next summer?”

“I’m thinking of visiting South America.”

“Oh! Why don’t you come to Brazil? I’ll get a position for you at the Center for Physical Research.”

So now I had to convert all that Spanish into Portuguese! I found a Portuguese graduate student at Cornell, and twice a week he gave me lessons, so I was able to alter what I had learned. On the plane to Brazil I started out sitting next to a guy from Colombia who spoke only Spanish: so I wouldn’t talk to him because I didn’t want to get confused again. But sitting in front of me were two guys who were talking Portuguese. I had never heard real Portuguese; I had only had this teacher who had talked very slowly and clearly. So here are these two guys talking a blue streak, brrrrrrr-a-ta brrrrrrr-a-ta, and I can’t even hear the word for “I,” or the word for “the,” or anything.

Finally, when we made a refueling stop in Trinidad, I went up to the two fellas and said very slowly in Portuguese, or what I thought was Portuguese, “Excuse me … can you understand … what I am saying to you now?”

“Pues não, porque não? ”—” Sure, why not?” they replied.

So I explained as best I could that I had been learning Portuguese for some months now, but I had never heard it spoken in conversation, and I was listening to them on the airplane, but couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

“Oh,” they said with a laugh, “Nao e Portugues! E Ladão! Judeo!” What they were speaking was to Portuguese as Yiddish is to German, so you can imagine a guy who’s been studying German sitting behind two guys talking Yiddish, trying to figure out what’s the matter. It’s obviously German, but it doesn’t work. He must not have learned German very well.

When we got back on the plane, they pointed out another man who did speak Portuguese, so I sat next to him. He had been studying neurosurgery in Maryland, so it was very easy to talk with him—as long as it was about cirugia neural, o cerebreu, and other such “complicated” things. The long words are actually quite easy to translate into Portuguese because the only difference is their endings: “-tion” in English is “-ção” in Portuguese; “-ly” is “-mente,” and so on. But when he looked out the window and said something simple, I was lost: I couldn’t decipher “the sky is blue.”

I got off the plane in Recife (the Brazilian government was going to pay the part from Recife to Rio) and was met by the father-in-law of Cesar Lattes, who was the director of the Center for Physical Research in Rio, his wife, and another man. As the men were off getting my luggage, the lady started talking to me in Portuguese: “You speak Portuguese? How nice! How was it that you learned Portuguese?”

I replied slowly, with great effort. “First, I started to learn Spanish… then I discovered I was going to Brazil.

Now I wanted to say, “So, I learned Portuguese,” but I couldn’t think of the word for “so.” I knew how to make BIG words, though, so I finished the sentence like this: “CONSEQUENTEMENTE, apprendi Portugues!”

When the two men came back with the baggage, she said, “Oh, he speaks Portuguese! And with such wonderful words: CONSEQUENTEMENTE!”

Then an announcement came over the loudspeaker. The flight to Rio was canceled, and there wouldn’t be another one till next Tuesday—and I had to be in Rio on Monday, at the latest.

I got all upset. “Maybe there’s a cargo plane. I’ll travel in a cargo plane,” I said.

“Professor!” they said, “It’s really quite nice here in Recife. We’ll show you around. Why don’t you relax—you’re in Brazil.”

That evening I went for a walk in town, and came upon a small crowd of people standing around a great big rectangular hole in the road—it had been dug for sewer pipes, or something—and there, sitting exactly in the hole, was a car. It was marvelous: it fitted absolutely perfectly, with its roof level with the road. The workmen hadn’t bothered to put up any signs at the end of the day, and the guy had simply driven into it. I noticed a difference: When we’d dig a hole, there’d be all kinds of detour signs and flashing lights to protect us. There, they dig the hole, and when they’re finished for the day, they just leave.

Anyway, Recife was a nice town, and I did wait until next Tuesday to fly to Rio.

When I got to Rio I met Cesar Lattes. The national TV network wanted to make some pictures of our meeting, so they started filming, but without any sound. The cameramen said, “Act as if you’re talking. Say something—anything.”

So Lattes asked me, “Have you found a sleeping dictionary yet?”

That night, Brazilian TV audiences saw the director of the Center for Physical Research welcome the Visiting Professor from the United States, but little did they know that the subject of their conversation was finding a girl to spend the night with!

When I got to the center, we had to decide when I would give my lectures—in the morning, or afternoon.

Lattes said, “The students prefer the afternoon.”

“So let’s have them in the afternoon.”

“But the beach is nice in the afternoon, so why don’t you give the lectures in the morning, so you can enjoy the beach in the afternoon.”

“But you said the students prefer to have them in the afternoon.”

“Don’t worry about that. Do what’s most convenient for you! Enjoy the beach in the afternoon.”

So I learned how to look at life in a way that’s different from the way it is where I come from. First, they weren’t in the same hurry that I was. And second, if it’s better for you, never mind! So I gave the lectures in the morning and enjoyed the beach in the afternoon. And had I learned that lesson earlier, I would have learned Portuguese in the first place, instead of Spanish.

I thought at first that I would give my lectures in English, but I noticed something: When the students were explaining something to me in Portuguese, I couldn’t understand it very well, even though I knew a certain amount of Portuguese. It was not exactly clear to me whether they had said “increase,” or “decrease,” or “not increase,” or “not decrease,” or “decrease slowly.” But when they struggled with English, they’d say “ahp” or “doon,” and I knew which way it was, even though the pronunciation was lousy and the grammar was all screwed up. So I realized that if I was going to talk to them and try to teach them, it would be better for me to talk in Portuguese, poor as it was. It would be easier for them to understand.

During that first time in Brazil, which lasted six weeks, I was invited to give a talk at the Brazilian Academy of Sciences about some work in quantum electrodynamics that I had just done. I thought I would give the talk in Portuguese, and two students at the center said they would help me with it. I began by writing out my talk in absolutely lousy Portuguese. I wrote it myself, because if they had written it, there would be too many words I didn’t know and couldn’t pronounce correctly. So I wrote it, and they fixed up all the grammar, fixed up the words and made it nice, but it was still at the level that I could read easily and know more or less what I was saying. They practiced with me to get the pronunciations absolutely right: the “de” should be in between “deh” and “day”—it had to be just so.

I got to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences meeting, and the first speaker, a chemist, got up and gave his talk—in English. Was he trying to be polite, or what? I couldn’t understand what he was saying because his pronunciation was so bad, but maybe everybody else had the same accent so they could understand him; I don’t know. Then the next guy gets up, and gives his talk in English!

When it was my turn, I got up and said, “I’m sorry; I hadn’t realized that the official language of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences was English, and therefore I did not prepare my talk in English. So please excuse me, but I’m going to have to give it in Portuguese.”

So I read the thing, and everybody was very pleased with it.

The next guy to get up said, “Following the example of my colleague from the United States, I also will give my talk in Portuguese.” So, for all I know, I changed the tradition of what language is used in the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Some years later, I met a man from Brazil who quoted to me the exact sentences I had used at the beginning of my talk to the Academy. So apparently it made quite an impression on them.

But the language was always difficult for me, and I kept working on it all the time, reading the newspaper, and so on. I kept on giving my lectures in Portuguese—what I call “Feynman’s Portuguese,” which I knew couldn’t be the same as real Portuguese, because I could understand what I was saying, while I couldn’t understand what the people in the street were saying.

Because I liked it so much that first time in Brazil, I went again a year later, this time for ten months. This time I lectured at the University of Rio, which was supposed to pay me, but they never did, so the center kept giving me the money I was supposed to get from the university.

I finally ended up staying in a hotel right on the beach at Copacabana, called the Miramar. For a while I had a room on the thirteenth floor, where I could look out the window at the ocean and watch the girls on the beach.

It turned out that this hotel was the one that the airline pilots and the stewardesses from Pan American Airlines stayed at when they would “lay over”—a term that always bothered me a little bit. Their rooms were always on the fourth floor, and late at night there would often be a certain amount of sheepish sneaking up and down in the elevator.

One time I went away for a few weeks on a trip, and when I came back the manager told me he had to book my room to somebody else, since it was the last available empty room, and that he had moved my stuff to a new room.

It was a room right over the kitchen, that people usually didn’t stay in very long. The manager must have figured that I was the only guy who could see the advantages of that room sufficiently clearly that I would tolerate the smells and not complain. I didn’t complain: It was on the fourth floor, near the stewardesses. It saved a lot of problems.

The people from the airlines were somewhat bored with their lives, strangely enough, and at night they would often go to bars to drink. I liked them all, and in order to be sociable, I would go with them to the bar to have a few drinks, several nights a week.

One day, about 3:30 in the afternoon, I was walking along the sidewalk opposite the beach at Copacabana past a bar. I suddenly got this treMENdous, strong feeling: “That’s just what I want; that’ll fit just right. I’d just love to have a drink right now!”

I started to walk into the bar, and I suddenly thought to myself, “Wait a minute! It’s the middle of the afternoon. There’s nobody here, There’s no social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you have to have a drink?”—and I got scared.

I never drank ever again, since then. I suppose I really wasn’t in any danger, because I found it very easy to stop. But that strong feeling that I didn’t understand frightened me. You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I don’t want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick. It’s the same reason that, later on, I was reluctant to try experiments with LSD in spite of my curiosity about hallucinations.

Near the end of that year in Brazil I took one of the air hostesses—a very lovely girl with braids—to the museum. As we went through the Egyptian section, I found myself telling her things like, “The wings on the sarcophagus mean such-and-such, and in these vases they used to put the entrails, and around the corner there oughta be a so-and-so …” and I thought to myself, “You know where you learned all that stuff? From Mary Lou”—and I got lonely for her.

I met Mary Lou at Cornell and later, when I came to Pasadena, I found that she had come to Westwood, nearby. I liked her for a while, but we used to argue a bit; finally we decided it was hopeless, and we separated. But after a year of taking out these air hostesses and not really getting anywhere, I was frustrated. So when I was telling this girl all these things, I thought Mary Lou really was quite wonderful, and we shouldn’t have had all those arguments.

I wrote a letter to her and proposed. Somebody who’s wise could have told me that was dangerous: When you’re away and you’ve got nothing but paper, and you’re feeling lonely, you remember all the good things and you can’t remember the reasons you had the arguments. And it didn’t work out. The arguments started again right away, and the marriage lasted for only two years.

There was a man at the U.S. Embassy who knew I liked samba music. I think I told him that when I had been in Brazil the first time, I had heard a samba band practicing in the street, and I wanted to learn more about Brazilian music.

He said a small group, called a regional, practiced at his apartment every week, and I could come over and listen to them play.

There were three or four people—one was the janitor from the apartment house—and they played rather quiet music up in his apartment; they had no other place to play. One guy had a tambourine that they called a pandeiro, and another guy had a small guitar. I kept hearing the beat of a drum somewhere, but there was no drum! Finally I figured out that it was the tambourine, which the guy was playing in a complicated way, twisting his wrist and hitting the skin with his thumb. I found that interesting, and learned how to play the pandeiro, more or less.

Then the season for Carnaval began to come around. That’s the season when new music is presented. They don’t put out new music and records all the time; they put them all out during Carnaval time, and it’s very exciting.

It turned out that the janitor was the composer for a small samba “school”—not a school in the sense of education, but in the sense of fish—from Copacabana Beach, called Farçãntes deCopa cabana, which means “Fakers from Copacabana,” which was just right for me, and he invited me to be in it.

Now this samba school was a thing where guys from the favelas—the poor sections of the city—would come down, and meet behind a construction lot where some apartment houses were being built, and practice the new music for the Carnaval.

I chose to play a thing called a “frigideira,” which is a toy frying pan made of metal, about six inches in diameter, with a little metal stick to beat it with. It’s an accompanying instrument which makes a tinkly, rapid noise that goes with the main samba music and rhythm and fills it out. So I tried to play this thing and everything was going all right. We were practicing, the music was roaring along and we were going like sixty, when all of a sudden the head of the batteria section, a great big black man, yelled out, “STOP! Hold it, hold it—wait a minute!” And everybody stopped. “Something’s wrong with the frigideiras!” he boomed out. “0 Americano, outra vez! ” (“The American again!”)

So I felt uncomfortable. I practiced all the time. I’d walk along the beach holding two sticks that I had picked up, getting the twisty motion of the wrists, practicing, practicing, practicing. I kept working on it, but I always felt inferior, that I was some kind of trouble, and wasn’t really up to it.

Well, it was getting closer to Carnaval time, and one evening there was a conversation between the leader of the band and another guy, and then the leader started coming around, picking people out: “You!” he said to a trumpeter. “You!” he said to a singer. “You!”—and he pointed to me. I figured we were finished. He said, “Go out in front!”

We went out to the front of the construction site—the five or six of us—and there was an old Cadillac Convertible, with its top down. “Get in!” the leader said.

There wasn’t enough room for us all, so some of us had to sit up on the back. I said to the guy next to me, “What’s he doing—is he putting us out?”

“Não sé, não sé.” (“I don’t know.”)

We drove off way up high on a road which ended near the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. The car stopped and the leader said, “Get out!”—and they walked us right up to the edge of the cliff!

And sure enough, he said, “Now line up! You first, you next, you next! Start playing! Now march!”

We would have marched off the edge of the cliff—except for a steep trail that went down. So our little group goes down the trail—the trumpet, the singer, the guitar, the pandeiro, and the frigideira—to an outdoor party in the woods. We weren’t picked out because the leader wanted to get rid of us; he was sending us to this private party that wanted some samba music! And afterwards he collected money to pay for some costumes for our band.

After that I felt a little better, because I realized that when he picked the frigideira player, he picked me!

Another thing happened to increase my confidence. Some time later, a guy came from another samba school, in Leblon, a beach further on. He wanted to join our school.

The boss said, “Where’re you from?”

“Leblon.”

“What do you play?”

“Frigideira.”

“OK. Let me hear you play the frigideira.”

So this guy picked up his frigideira and his metal stick and … “brrra-dup-dup; chick-a-chick.” Gee whiz! It was wonderful!

The boss said to him, “You go over there and stand next to O Americano, and you’ll learn how to play the frigideira!”

My theory is that it’s like a person who speaks French who comes to America. At first they’re making all kinds of mistakes, and you can hardly understand them. Then they keep on practicing until they speak rather well, and you find there’s a delightful twist to their way of speaking—their accent is rather nice, and you love to listen to it. So I must have had some sort of accent playing the frigideira, because I couldn’t compete with those guys who had been playing it all their lives; it must have been some kind of dumb accent. But whatever it was, I became a rather successful frigideira player.

One day, shortly before Carnaval time, the leader of the samba school said, “OK, we’re going to practice marching in the street.”

We all went out from the construction site to the street, and it was full of traffic. The streets of Copacabana were always a big mess. Believe it or not, there was a trolley line in which the trolley cars went one way, and the automobiles went the other way. Here it was rush hour in Copacabana, and we were going to march down the middle of Avenida Atlantica.

I said to myself, “Jesus! The boss didn’t get a license, he didn’t OK it with the police, he didn’t do anything. He’s decided we’re just going to go out.”

So we started to go out into the street, and everybody, all around, was excited. Some volunteers from a group of bystanders took a rope and formed a big square around our band, so the pedestrians wouldn’t walk through our lines. People started to lean out of the windows. Everybody wanted to hear the new samba music. It was very exciting!

As soon as we started to march, I saw a policeman, way down at the other end of the road. He looked, saw what was happening, and started diverting traffic! Everything was informal. Nobody made any arrangements, but it worked fine. The people were holding the ropes around us, the policeman was diverting the traffic, the pedestrians were crowded and the traffic was jammed, but we were going along great! We walked down the street, around the corners, and all over the damn Copacabana, at random!

Finally we ended up in a little square in front of the apartment where the boss’s mother lived. We stood there in this place, playing, and the guy’s mother, and aunt, and so on, came down. They had aprons on; they had been working in the kitchen, and you could see their excitement—they were almost crying. It was really nice to do that human stuff. And all the people leaning out of the windows—that was terrific! And I remembered the time I had been in Brazil before, and had seen one of these samba bands—how I loved the music and nearly went crazy over it—and now I was in it!

By the way, when we were marching around the streets of Copacabana that day, I saw in a group on the sidewalk two young ladies from the embassy. Next week I got a note from the embassy saying, “It’s a great thing you are doing, yak, yak, yak …” as if my purpose was to improve relations between the United States and Brazil! So it was a “great” thing I was doing.

Well, in order to go to these rehearsals, I didn’t want to go dressed in my regular clothes that I wore to the university. The people in the band were very poor, and had only old, tattered clothes. So I put on an old undershirt, some old pants, and so forth, so I wouldn’t look too peculiar. But then I couldn’t walk out of my luxury hotel on Avenida Atlantica in Copacabana Beach through the lobby. So I always took the elevator down to the bottom and went out through the basement.

A short time before Carnaval, there was going to be a special competition between the samba schools of the beaches—Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon; there were three or four schools, and we were one. We were going to march in costume down Avenida Atlantica. I felt a little uncomfortable about marching in one of those fancy Carnaval costumes, since I wasn’t a Brazilian. But we were supposed to be dressed as Greeks, so I figured I’m as good a Greek as they are.

On the day of the competition, I was eating at the hotel restaurant, and the head waiter, who had often seen me tapping on the table when there was samba music playing, came over to me and said, “Mr. Feynman, this evening there’s going to be something you will love! It’s tipico Brasileiro—typical Brazilian: There’s going to be a march of the samba schools right in front of the hotel! And the music is so good—you must hear it.”

I said, “Well, I’m kind of busy tonight. I don’t know if I can make it.”

“Oh! But you’d love it so much! You must not miss it! It’s tipico Brasileiro!”

He was very insistent, and as I kept telling him I didn’t think I’d be there to see it, he became disappointed.

That evening I put on my old clothes and went down through the basement, as usual. We put on the costumes at the construction lot and began marching down Avenida Atlantica, a hundred Brazilian Greeks in paper costumes, and I was in the back, playing away on the frigideira.

Big crowds were along both sides of the Avenida; everybody was leaning out of the windows, and we were coming up to the Miramar Hotel, where I was staying. People were standing on the tables and chairs, and there were crowds and crowds of people. We were playing along, going like sixty, as our band started to pass in front of the hotel. Suddenly I saw one of the waiters shoot up in the air, pointing with his arm, and through all this noise I can hear him scream, “O PROFESSOR!” So the head waiter found out why I wasn’t able to be there that evening to see the competition—I was in it!

The next day I saw a lady I knew from meeting her on the beach all the time, who had an apartment overlooking the Avenida. She had some friends over to watch the parade of the samba schools, and when we went by, one of her friends exclaimed, “Listen to that guy play the frigideira—he is good!” I had succeeded. I got a kick out of succeeding at something I wasn’t supposed to be able to do.

When the time came for Carnaval, not very many people from our school showed up. There were some special costumes that were made just for the occasion, but not enough people. Maybe they had the attitude that we couldn’t win against the really big samba schools from the city; I don’t know. I thought we were working day after day, practicing and marching for the Carnaval, but when Carnaval came, a lot of the band didn’t show up, and we didn’t compete very well. Even as we were marching around in the street, some of the band wandered off. Funny result! I never did understand it very well, but maybe the main excitement and fun was tryjng to win the contest of the beaches, where most people felt their level was. And we did win, by the way.

During that ten-month stay in Brazil I got interested in the energy levels of the lighter nuclei. I worked out all the theory for it in my hotel room, but I wanted to check how the data from the experiments looked. This was new stuff that was being worked out up at the Kellogg Laboratory by the experts at Caltech, so I made contact with them—the timing was all arranged—by ham radio. I found an amateur radio operator in Brazil, and about once a week I’d go over to his house. He’d make contact with the ham radio operator in Pasadena, and then, because there was something slightly illegal about it, he’d give me some call letters and would say, “Now I’ll turn you over to WKWX, who’s sitting next to me and would like to talk to you.”

So I’d say, “This is WKWX. Could you please tell me the spacing between the certain levels in boron we talked about last week,” and so on. I would use the data from the experiments to adjust my constants and check whether I was on the right track.

The first guy went on vacation, but he gave me another amateur radio operator to go to. This second guy was blind and operated his station. They were both very nice, and the contact I had with Caltech by ham radio was very effective and useful to me.

As for the physics itself, I worked out quite a good deal, and it was sensible. It was worked out and verified by other people later. I decided, though, that I had so many parameters that I had to adjust—too much “phenomenological adjustment of constants” to make everything fit—that I couldn’t be sure it was very useful. I wanted a rather deeper understanding of the nuclei, and I was never quite convinced it was very significant, so I never did anything with it.

In regard to education in Brazil, I had a very interesting experience. I was teaching a group of students who would ultimately become teachers, since at that time there were not many opportunities in Brazil for a highly trained person in science. These students had already had many courses, and this was to be their most advanced course in electricity and magnetism—Maxwell’s equations, and so on.

The university was located in various office buildings throughout the city, and the course I taught met in a building which overlooked the bay.

I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question—the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell—they couldn’t answer it at all! For instance, one time I was talking about polarized light, and I gave them all some strips of polaroid.

Polaroid passes only light whose electric vector is in a certain direction, so I explained how you could tell which way the light is polarized from whether the polaroid is dark or light.

We first took two strips of polaroid and rotated them until they let the most light through. From doing that we could tell that the two strips were now admitting light polarized in the same direction—what passed through one piece of polaroid could also pass through the other. But then I asked them how one could tell the absolute direction of polarization, for a single piece of polaroid.

They hadn’t any idea.

I knew this took a certain amount of ingenuity, so I gave them a hint: “Look at the light reflected from the bay outside.”

Nobody said anything.

Then I said, “Have you ever heard of Brewster’s Angle?”

“Yes, sir! Brewster’s Angle is the angle at which light reflected from a medium with an index of refraction is completely polarized.”

“And which way is the light polarized when it’s reflected?”

“The light is polarized perpendicular to the plane of reflection, sir.” Even now, I have to think about it; they knew it cold! They even knew the tangent of the angle equals the index!

I said, “Well?”

Still nothing. They had just told me that light reflected from a medium with an index, such as the bay outside, was polarized; they had even told me which way it was polarized.

I said, “Look at the bay outside, through the polaroid. Now turn the polaroid.”

“Ooh, it’s polarized!” they said.

After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” is the direction in which you see something when you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, “What is Brewster’s Angle?” I’m going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, “Look at the water,” nothing happens—they don’t have anything under “Look at the water”!

Later I attended a lecture at the engineering school. The lecture went like this, translated into English: “Two bodies … are considered equivalent … if equal torques … will produce … equal acceleration. Two bodies, are considered equivalent, if equal torques, will produce equal acceleration.” The students were all sitting there taking dictation, and when the professor repeated the sentence, they checked it to make sure they wrote it down all right. Then they wrote down the next sentence, and on and on. I was the only one who knew the professor was talking about objects with the same moment of inertia, and it was hard to figure out.

I didn’t see how they were going to learn anything from that. Here he was talking about moments of inertia, but there was no discussion about how hard it is to push a door open when you put heavy weights on the outside, compared to when you put them near the hinge—nothing!

After the lecture, I talked to a student: “You take all those notes—what do you do with them?”

“Oh, we study them,” he says. “We’ll have an exam.”

“What will the exam be like?”

“Very easy. I can tell you now one of the questions.” He looks at his notebook and says, “ ‘When are two bodies equivalent?’ And the answer is, ‘Two bodies are considered equivalent if equal torques will produce equal acceleration.’ So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and “learn” all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized.

Then I went to an entrance exam for students coming into the engineering school. It was an oral exam, and I was allowed to listen to it. One of the students was absolutely super: He answered everything nifty! The examiners asked him what diamagnetism was, and he answered it perfectly. Then they asked, “When light comes at an angle through a sheet of material with a certain thickness, and a certain index N, what happens to the light?”

“It comes out parallel to itself, sir—displaced.”

“And how much is it displaced?”

“I don’t know, sir, but I can figure it out.” So he figured it out. He was very good. But I had, by this time, my suspicions.

After the exam I went up to this bright young man, and explained to him that I was from the United States, and that I wanted to ask him some questions that would not affect the result of his examination in any way. The first question I ask is, “Can you give me some example of a diamagnetic substance?”

“No.”

Then I asked, “If this book was made of glass, and I was looking at something on the table through it, what would happen to the image if I tilted the glass?”

“It would be deflected, sir, by twice the angle that you’ve turned the book.”

I said, “You haven’t got it mixed up with a mirror, have you?”

“No, sir!”

He had just told me in the examination that the light would be displaced, parallel to itself, and therefore the image would move over to one side, but would not be turned by any angle. He had even figured out how much it would be displaced, but he didn’t realize that a piece of glass is a material with an index, and that his calculation had applied to my question.

I taught a course at the engineering school on mathematical methods in physics, in which I tried to show how to solve problems by trial and error. It’s something that people don’t usually learn, so I began with some simple examples of arithmetic to illustrate the method. I was surprised that only about eight out of the eighty or so students turned in the first assignment. So I gave a strong lecture about having to actually try it, not just sit back and watch me do it.

After the lecture some students came up to me in a little delegation, and told me that I didn’t understand the backgrounds that they have, that they can study without doing the problems, that they have already learned arithmetic, and that this stuff was beneath them.

So I kept going with the class, and no matter how complicated or obviously advanced the work was becoming, they were never handing a damn thing in. Of course I realized what it was: They couldn’t do it!

One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: “If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘What are you wasting our time for in the class? We’re trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking a question’.”

It was a kind of one-upmanship, where nobody knows what’s going on, and they’d put the other one down as if they did know. They all fake that they know, and if one student admits for a moment that something is confusing by asking a question, the others take a high-handed attitude, acting as if it’s not confusing at all, telling him that he’s wasting their time.

I explained how useful it was to work together, to discuss the questions, to talk it over, but they wouldn’t do that either, because they would be losing face if they had to ask someone else. It was pitiful! All the work they did, intelligent people, but they got themselves into this funny state of mind, this strange kind of self-propagating “education” which is meaningless, utterly meaningless!

At the end of the academic year, the students asked me to give a talk about my experiences of teaching in Brazil. At the talk there would be not only students, but professors and government officials, so I made them promise that I could say whatever I wanted. They said, “Sure. Of course. It’s a free country.”

So I came in, carrying the elementary physics textbook that they used in the first year of college. They thought this book was especially good because it had different kinds of typeface—bold black for the most important things to remember, lighter for less important things, and so on.

Right away somebody said, “You’re not going to say anything bad about the textbook, are you? The man who wrote it is here, and everybody thinks it’s a good textbook.”

“You promised I could say whatever I wanted.”

The lecture hall was full. I started out by defining science as an understanding of the behavior of nature. Then I asked, “What is a good reason for teaching science? Of course, no country can consider itself civilized unless … yak, yak, yak.” They were all sitting there nodding, because I know that’s the way they think.

Then I say, “That, of course, is absurd, because why should we feel we have to keep up with another country? We have to do it for a good reason, a sensible reason; not just because other countries do.” Then I talked about the utility of science, and its contribution to the improvement of the human condition, and all that—I really teased them a little bit.

Then I say, “The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that no science is being taught in Brazil!”

I can see them stir, thinking, “What? No science? This is absolutely crazy! We have all these classes.”

So I tell them that one of the first things to strike me when I came to Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much earlier than kids do in the United States, that it’s amazing you don’t find many physicists in Brazil—why is that? So many kids are working so hard, and nothing comes of it.

Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren’t many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek—even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, “What were Socrates’ ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?”—and the student can’t answer. Then he asks the student, What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?” the student lights up and goes, “Brrrrrrrrr-up ”—he tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.

But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!

What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them into words the students can understand.

I said, “That’s how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids ‘science’ here in Brazil.” (Big blast, right?)

Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using. “There are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one place where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and so on. The numbers have ‘errors’ in them—that is, if you look at them, you think you’re looking at experimental results, because the numbers are a little above, or a little below, the theoretical values. The book even talks about having to correct the experimental errors—very fine. The trouble is, when you calculate the value of the acceleration constant from these values, you get the right answer. But a ball rolling down an inclined plane, if it is actually done, has an inertia to get it to turn, and will, if you do the experiment, produce five-sevenths of the right answer, because of the extra energy needed to go into the rotation of the ball. Therefore this single example of experimental ‘results’ is obtained from a fake experiment. Nobody had rolled such a ball, or they would never have gotten those results!

“I have discovered something else,” I continued. “By flipping the pages at random, and putting my finger in and reading the sentences on that page, I can show you what’s the matter—how it’s not science, but memorizing, in every circumstance. Therefore I am brave enough to flip through the pages now, in front of this audience, to put my finger in, to read, and to show you.”

So I did it. Brrrrrrrup—I stuck my finger in, and I started to read: “Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the light emitted when crystals are crushed …”

I said, “And there, have you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You haven’t told anything about nature—what crystals produce light when you crush them, why they produce light. Did you see any student go home and try it? He can’t.

“But if, instead, you were to write, ‘When you take a lump of sugar and crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called “triboluminescence.”‘ Then someone will go home and try it. Then there’s an experience of nature.” I used that example to show them, but it didn’t make any difference where I would have put my finger in the book; it was like that everywhere.

Finally, I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could he educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything. “However,” I said, “I must be wrong. There were two students in my class who did very well, and one of the physicists I know was educated entirely in Brazil. Thus, it must be possible for some people to work their way through the system, had as it is.”

Well, after I gave the talk, the head of the science education department got up and said, “Mr. Feynman has told us some things that are very hard for us to hear, but it appears to be that he really loves science, and is sincere in his criticism. Therefore, I think we should listen to him. I came here knowing we have some sickness in our system of education; what I have learned is that we have a cancer!”—and he sat down.

That gave other people the freedom to speak out, and there was a big excitement. Everybody was getting up and making suggestions. The students got some committee together to mimeograph the lectures in advance, and they got other committees organized to do this and that.

Then something happened which was totally unexpected for me. One of the students got up and said, “I’m one of the two students whom Mr. Feynman referred to at the end of his talk. I was not educated in Brazil; I was educated in Germany, and I’ve just come to Brazil this year.”

The other student who had done well in class had a similar thing to say. And the professor I had mentioned got up and said, “I was educated here in Brazil during the war, when, fortunately, all of the professors had left the university, so I learned everything by reading alone. Therefore I was not really educated under the Brazilian system.”

I didn’t expect that. I knew the system was bad, but 100 percent—it was terrible!

Since I had gone to Brazil under a program sponsored by the United States Government, I was asked by the State Department to write a report about my experiences in Brazil, so I wrote out the essentials of the speech I had just given. I found out later through the grapevine that the reaction of somebody in the State Department was, “That shows you how dangerous it is to send somebody to Brazil who is so naive. Foolish fellow; he can only cause trouble. He didn’t understand the problems.” Quite the contrary! I think this person in the State Department was naive to think that because he saw a university with a list of courses and descriptions, that’s what it was.

Man of a Thousand Tongues

When I was in Brazil I had struggled to learn the local language, and decided to give my physics lectures in Portuguese. Soon after I came to Caltech, I was invited to a party hosted by Professor Bacher. Before I arrived at the party, Bacher told the guests, “This guy Feynman thinks he’s smart because he learned a little Portuguese, so let’s fix him good: Mrs. Smith, here (she’s completely Caucasian), grew up in China. Let’s have her greet Feynman in Chinese.”

I walk into the party innocently, and Bacher introduces me to all these people: “Mr. Feynman, this is Mr. So-and-so.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Feynman.”

“And this is Mr. Such-and-such.”

“My pleasure, Mr. Feynman.”

“And this is Mrs. Smith.”

“Ai, choong, ngong jia! ” she says, bowing.

This is such a surprise to me that I figure the only thing to do is to reply in the same spirit. I bow politely to her, and with complete confidence I say, “Ah ching, jong jien! ”

“Oh, my God!” she exclaims, losing her own composure. “I knew this would happen—I speak Mandarin and he speaks Cantonese!”

Certainly, Mr. Big!

I used to cross the United States in my automobile every summer, trying to make it to the Pacific Ocean. But, for various reasons, I would always get stuck somewhere—usually in Las Vegas.

I remember the first time, particularly, I liked it very much. Then, as now, Las Vegas made its money on the people who gamble, so the whole problem for the hotels was to get people to come there to gamble. So they had shows and dinners which were very inexpensive—almost free. You didn’t have to make any reservations for anything: you could walk in, sit down at one of the many empty tables, and enjoy the show. It was just wonderful for a man who didn’t gamble, because I was enjoying all the advantages—the rooms were inexpensive, the meals were next to nothing, the shows were good, and I liked the girls.

One day I was lying around the pool at my motel, and some guy came up and started to talk to me. I can’t remember how he got started, but his idea was that I presumably worked for a living, and it was really quite silly to do that. Look how easy it is for me,” he said. “I just hang around the pool all the time and enjoy life in Las Vegas.”

“How the hell do you do that without working?”

“Simple: I bet on the horses.”

“I don’t know anything about horses, but I don’t see how you can make a living betting on the horses,” I said, skeptically.

“Of course you can,” he said. “That’s how I live! I’ll tell you what: I’ll teach you how to do it. We’ll go down and I’ll guarantee that you’ll win a hundred dollars.”

“How can you do that?”

“I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that you’ll win,” he said. “So if you win it doesn’t cost you anything, and if you lose, you get a hundred dollars!”

So I think, “Gee! That’s right! If I win a hundred dollars on the horses and I have to pay him, I don’t lose anything; it’s just an exercise—it’s just proof that his system works. And if he fails, I win a hundred dollars. It’s quite wonderful!”

He takes me down to some betting place where they have a list of horses and racetracks all over the country. He introduces me to other people who say, “Geez, he’s great! I won a hundred dollars!”

I gradually realize that I have to put up some of my own money for the bets, and I begin to get a little nervous. “How much money do I have to bet?” I ask.

“Oh, three or four hundred dollars.”

I haven’t got that much. Besides, it begins to worry me: Suppose I lose all the bets?

So then he says, “I’ll tell you what: My advice will cost you only fifty dollars, and only if it works. If it doesn’t work, I’ll give you the hundred dollars you would have won anyway.”

I figure, “Wow! Now I win both ways—either fifty or a hundred dollars! How the heck can he do that?” Then I realize that if you have a reasonably even game—forget the little losses from the take for the moment in order to understand it—the chance that you’ll win a hundred dollars versus losing your four hundred dollars is four to one. So out of five times that he tries this on somebody, four times they’re going to win a hundred dollars, he gets two hundred (and he points out to them how smart he is); the fifth time he has to pay a hundred dollars. So he receives two hundred, on the average, when he’s paying out one hundred! So I finally understood how he could do that.

This process went on for a few days. He would invent some scheme that sounded like a terrific deal at first, but after I thought about it for a while I’d slowly figure out how it worked. Finally, in some sort of desperation he says, “All right, I’ll tell you what: You pay me fifty dollars for the advice, and if you lose, I’ll pay you back all your money.”

Now I can’t lose on that! So I say, “All right, you’ve got a deal!”

“Fine,” he says. “But unfortunately, I have to go to San Francisco this weekend, so you just mail me the results, and if you lose your four hundred dollars, I’ll send you the money.

The first schemes were designed to make him money by honest arithmetic. Now, he’s going to be out of town. The only way he’s going to make money on this scheme is not to send it—to be a real cheat.

So I never accepted any of his offers. But it was very entertaining to see how he operated.

The other thing that was fun in Las Vegas was meeting show girls. I guess they were supposed to hang around the bar between shows to attract customers. I met several of them that way, and talked to them, and found them to be nice people. People who say, “Show girls, eh?” have already made up their mind what they are! But in any group, if you look at it, there’s all kinds of variety. For example, there was the daughter of a dean of an Eastern university. She had a talent for dancing and liked to dance; she had the summer off and dancing jobs were hard to find, so she worked as a chorus girl in Las Vegas. Most of the show girls were very nice, friendly people. They were all beautiful, and I just love beautiful girls. In fact, show girls were my real reason for liking Las Vegas so much.

At first I was a little bit afraid: the girls were so beautiful, they had such a reputation, and so forth. I would try to meet them, and I’d choke a little bit when I talked. It was difficult at first, but gradually it got easier, and finally I had enough confidence that I wasn’t afraid of anybody.

I had a way of having adventures which is hard to explain: it’s like fishing, where you put a line out and then you have to have patience. When I would tell someone about some of my adventures, they might say, “Oh, come on—let’s do that!” So we would go to a bar to see if something will happen, and they would lose patience after twenty minutes or so. You have to spend a couple of days before something happens, on average. I spent a lot of time talking to show girls. One would introduce me to another, and after a while, something interesting would often happen.

I remember one girl who liked to drink Gibsons. She danced at the Flamingo Hotel, and I got to know her rather well. When I’d come into town, I’d order a Gibson put at her table before she sat down, to announce my arrival.

One time I went over and sat next to her and she said, “I’m with a man tonight—a high-roller from Texas.” (I had already heard about this guy. Whenever he’d play at the craps table, everybody would gather around to see him gamble.) He came back to the table where we were sitting, and my show girl friend introduced me to him.

The first thing he said to me was, “You know somethin’? I lost sixty thousand dollars here last night.”

I knew what to do: I turned to him, completely unimpressed, and I said, “Is that supposed to be smart, or stupid?”

We were eating breakfast in the dining room. He said, “Here, let me sign your check. They don’t charge me for all these things because I gamble so much here.”

“I’ve got enough money that I don’t need to worry about who pays for my breakfast, thank you.” I kept putting him down each time he tried to impress me.

He tried everything: how rich he was, how much oil he had in Texas, and nothing worked, because I knew the formula!

We ended up having quite a bit of fun together.

One time when we were sitting at the bar he said to me, “You see those girls at the table over there? They’re whores from Los Angeles.”

They looked very nice; they had a certain amount of class.

He said, “Tell you what I’ll do: I’ll introduce them to you, and then I’ll pay for the one you want.”

I didn’t feel like meeting the girls, and I knew he was saying that to impress me, so I began to tell him no. But then I thought, “This is something! This guy is trying so hard to impress me, he’s willing to buy this for me. If I’m ever going to tell the story … So I said to him, “Well, OK, introduce me.”

We went over to their table and he introduced me to the girls and then went off for a moment. A waitress came around and asked us what we wanted to drink. I ordered some water, and the girl next to me said, “Is it all right if I have a champagne?”

“You can have whatever you want,” I replied, coolly, ‘cause you’re payin’ for it.”

“What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Cheapskate, or something?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re certainly not a gentleman!” she said indignantly.

“You figured me out immediately!” I replied. I had learned in New Mexico many years before not to be a gentleman.

Pretty soon they were offering to buy me drinks—the tables were turned completely! (By the way, the Texas oilman never came back.)

After a while, one of the girls said, “Let’s go over to the El Rancho. Maybe things are livelier over there.” We got in their car. It was a nice car, and they were nice people. On the way, they asked me my name.

“Dick Feynman.”

“Where are you from, Dick? What do you do?”

“I’m from Pasadena; I work at Caltech.”

One of the girls said, “Oh, isn’t that the place where that scientist Pauling comes from?”

I had been in Las Vegas many times, over and over, and there was nobody who ever knew anything about science. I had talked to businessmen of all kinds, and to them, a scientist was a nobody. “Yeah!” I said, astonished.

“And there’s a fella named Gellan, or something like that—a physicist.” I couldn’t believe it. I was riding in a car full of prostitutes and they know all this stuff!

“Yeah! His name is Gell-Mann! How did you happen to know that?”

“Your pictures were in Time magazine.” It’s true, they had pictures of ten U.S. scientists in Time magazine, for some reason. I was in it, and so were Pauling and Gell-Mann.

“How did you remember the names?” I asked.

“Well, we were looking through the pictures, and we picked out the youngest and the handsomest!” (Gell-Mann is younger than I am.)

We got to the El Rancho Hotel and the girls continued this game of acting towards me like everybody normally acts towards them: “Would you like to gamble?” they asked. I gambled a little bit with their money and we all had a good time.

After a while they said, “Look, we see a live one, so we’ll have to leave you now,” and they went back to work.

One time I was sitting at a bar and I noticed two girls with an older man. Finally he walked away, and they came over and sat next to me: the prettier and more active one next to me, and her duller friend, named Pam, on the other side.

Things started going along very nicely right away. She was very friendly. Soon she was leaning against me, and I put my arm around her. Two men came in and sat at a table nearby. Then, before the waitress came, they walked out.

“Did you see those men?” my new-found friend said.

“Yeah.”

“They’re friends of my husband.”

“Oh? What is this?”

“You see, I just married John Big”—she mentioned a very famous name—”and we’ve had a little argument. We’re on our honeymoon, and John is always gambling. He doesn’t pay any attention to me, so I go off and enjoy myself, but he keeps sending spies around to check on what I’m doing.”

She asked me to take her to her motel room, so we went in my car. On the way I asked her, “Well, what about John?”

She said, “Don’t worry. Just look around for a big red car with two antennas. If you don’t see it, he’s not around.”

The next night I took the “Gibson girl” and a friend of hers to the late show at the Silver Slipper, which had a show later than all the hotels. The girls who worked in the other shows liked to go there, and the master of ceremonies announced the arrival of the various dancers as they came in. So in I went with these two lovely dancers on my arm, and he said, “And here comes Miss So-and-so and Miss So-and-so from the Flamingo!” Everybody looked around to see who was coming in. I felt great!

We sat down at a table near the bar, and after a little while there was a bit of a flurry—waiters moving tables around, security guards, with guns, coming in. They were making room for a celebrity. JOHN BIG was coming in!

He came over to the bar, right next to our table, and right away two guys wanted to dance with the girls I brought. They went off to dance, and I was sitting alone at the table when John came over and sat down at my table. “How are yah?” he said. “Whattya doin’ in Vegas?”

I was sure he’d found out about me and his wife. “Just foolin’ around …” (I’ve gotta act tough, right?)

“How long ya been here?”

“Four or five nights.”

“I know ya,” he said. “Didn’t I see you in Florida?”

“Well, I really don’t know …”

He tried this place and that place, and I didn’t know what he was getting at. “I know,” he said; “It was in El Morocco.” (El Morocco was a big nightclub in New York, where a lot of big operators go—like professors of theoretical physics, right?)

“That must have been it,” I said. I was wondering when he was going to get to it. Finally he leaned over to me and said, “Hey, will you introduce me to those girls you’re with when they come back from dancing?”

That’s all he wanted; he didn’t know me from a hole in the wall! So I introduced him, but my show girl friends said they were tired and wanted to go home.

The next afternoon, I saw John Big at the Flamingo, standing at the bar, talking to the bartender about cameras and taking pictures. He must be an amateur photographer: He’s got all these bulbs and cameras, but he says the dumbest things about them. I decided he wasn’t an amateur photographer after all; he was just a rich guy who bought himself some cameras.

I figured by that time that he didn’t know I had been fooling around with his wife; he only wanted to talk to me because of the girls I had. So I thought I would play a game. I’d invent a part for myself: John Big’s assistant.

“Hi, John,” I said. “Let’s take some pictures. I’ll carry your flashbulbs.”

I put the flashbulbs in my pocket, and we started off taking pictures. I’d hand him flashbulbs and give him advice here and there; he likes that stuff.

We went over to the Last Frontier to gamble, and he started to win. The hotels don’t like a high roller to leave, but I could see he wanted to go. The problem was how to do it gracefully.

“John, we have to leave now,” I said in a serious voice.

“But I’m winning.”

“Yes, but we have made an appointment this afternoon.”

“OK, get my car.”

“Certainly, Mr. Big!” He handed me the keys and told me what it looked like (I didn’t let on that I knew).

I went out to the parking lot, and sure enough, there was this big, fat, wonderful car with the two antennas. I climbed into it and turned the key—and it wouldn’t start. It had an automatic transmission; they had just come out and I didn’t know anything about them. After a bit I accidentally shifted it into PARK and it started. I drove it very carefully, like a million-dollar car, to the hotel entrance, where I got out and went inside to the table where he was still gambling, and said, “Your car is ready, sir!”

“I have to quit,” he announced, and we left.

He had me drive the car. “I want to go to the El Rancho,” he said. “Do you know any girls there?”

I knew one girl there rather well, so I said “Yeah.” By this time I felt confident enough that the only reason he was going along with this game I had invented was that he wanted to meet some girls, so I brought up a delicate subject: “I met your wife the other night …”

“My wife? My wife’s not here in Las Vegas.”

I told him about the girl I met in the bar.

“Oh! I know who you mean; I met that girl and her friend in Los Angeles and brought them to Las Vegas. The first thing they did was use my phone for an hour to talk to their friends in Texas. I got mad and threw ‘em out! So she’s been going around telling everybody that she’s my wife, eh?”

So that was cleared up.

We went into the El Rancho, and the show was going to start in about fifteen minutes. The place was packed; there wasn’t a seat in the house. John went over to the majordomo and said, “I want a table.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Big! It will be ready in a few minutes.”

John tipped him and went off to gamble. Meanwhile I went around to the back, where the girls were getting ready for the show, and asked for my friend. She came out and I explained to her that John Big was with me, and he’d like some company after the show.

“Certainly, Dick,” she said. “I’ll bring some friends and we’ll see you after the show.”

I went around to the front to find John. He was still gambling. “Just go in without me,” he said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

There were two tables, at the very front, right at the edge of the stage. Every other table in the place was packed. I sat down by myself. The show started before John came in, and the show girls came out. They could see me at the table, all by myself. Before, they thought I was some small-time professor; now they see I’m a BIG OPERATOR.

Finally John came in, and soon afterwards some people sat down at the table next to us—John’s “wife” and her friend Pam, with two men!

I leaned over to John: “She’s at the other table.”

“Yeah.”

She saw I was taking care of John, so she leaned over to me from the other table and asked, “Could I talk to John?”

I didn’t say a word. John didn’t say anything either.

I waited a little while, then I leaned over to John: “She wants to talk to you.”

Then he waited a little bit. “All right,” he said.

I waited a little more, and then I leaned over to her: “John will speak to you now.”

She came over to our table. She started working on “Johnnie,” sitting very close to him. Things were beginning to get straightened out a little bit, I could tell.

I love to be mischievous, so every time they got things straightened out a little bit, I reminded John of something: “The telephone, John …”

“Yeah!” he said. “What’s the idea, spending an hour on the telephone?”

She said it was Pam who did the calling.

Things improved a little bit more, so I pointed out that it was her idea to bring Pam.

“Yeah!” he said. (I was having a great time playing this game; it went on for quite a while.)

When the show was over, the girls from the El Rancho came over to our table and we talked to them until they had to go back for the next show. Then John said, “I know a nice little bar not too far away from here. Let’s go over there.”

I drove him over to the bar and we went in. “See that woman over there?” he said. “She’s a really good lawyer. Come on, I’ll introduce you to her.”

John introduced us and excused himself to go to the restroom. He never came back. I think he wanted to get back with his “wife” and I was beginning to interfere.

I said, “Hi” to the woman and ordered a drink for myself (still playing this game of not being impressed and not being a gentleman).

“You know,” she said to me, “I’m one of the better lawyers here in Las Vegas.”

“Oh, no, you’re not,” I replied coolly. “You might be a lawyer during the day, but you know what you are right now? You’re just a barfly in a small bar in Vegas.”

She liked me, and we went to a few places dancing. She danced very well, and I love to dance, so we had a great time together.

Then, all of a sudden in the middle of a dance, my back began to hurt. It was some kind of big pain, and it started suddenly. I know now what it was: I had been up for three days and nights having these crazy adventures, and I was completely exhausted.

She said she would take me home. As soon as I got into her bed I went BONGO! I was out.

The next morning I woke up in this beautiful bed. The sun was shining, and there was no sign of her. Instead, there was a maid. “Sir,” she said, “are you awake? I’m ready with breakfast.”

“Well, uh …”

“I’ll bring it to you. What would you like?” and she went through a whole menu of breakfasts.

I ordered breakfast and had it in bed—in the bed of a woman I didn’t know; I didn’t know who she was or where she came from!

I asked the maid a few questions, and she didn’t know anything about this mysterious woman either: She had just been hired, and it was her first day on the job. She thought I was the man of the house, and found it curious that I was asking her questions. I got dressed, finally, and left. I never saw the mysterious woman again.

The first time I was in Las Vegas I sat down and figured out the odds for everything, and I discovered that the odds for the crap table were something like .493. If I bet a dollar, it would only cost me 1.4 cents. So I thought to myself, “Why am I so reluctant to bet? It hardly costs anything!”

So I started betting, and right away I lost five dollars in succession—one, two, three, four, five. I was supposed to be out only seven cents; instead, I was five dollars behind! I’ve never gambled since then (with my own money, that is). I’m very lucky that I started off losing.

One time I was eating lunch with one of the show girls. It was a quiet time in the afternoon; there was not the usual big bustle, and she said, “See that man over there, walking across the lawn? That’s Nick the Greek. He’s a professional gambler.”

Now I knew damn well what all the odds were in Las Vegas, so I said, “How can he be a professional gambler?”

“I’ll call him over.”

Nick came over and she introduced us.” Marilyn tells me that you’re a professional gambler.”

“That’s correct.”

“Well, I’d like to know how it’s possible to make your living gambling, because at the table, the odds are .493.”

“You’re right,” he said, “and I’ll explain it to you. I don’t bet on the table, or things like that. I only bet when the odds are in my favor.”

“Huh? When are the odds ever in your favor?” I asked incredulously.

“It’s really quite easy,” he said. “I’m standing around a table, when some guy says, ‘It’s comin’ out nine! It’s gotta be a nine!’ The guy’s excited; he thinks it’s going to be a nine, and he wants to bet. Now I know the odds for all the numbers inside out, so I say to him, ‘I’ll bet you four to three it’s not a nine,’ and I win in the long run. I don’t bet on the table; instead, I bet with people around the table who have prejudices—superstitious ideas about lucky numbers.”

Nick continued: “Now that I’ve got a reputation, it’s even easier, because people will bet with me even when they know the odds aren’t very good, just to have the chance of telling the story, if they win, of how they beat Nick the Greek. So I really do make a living gambling, and it’s wonderful!”

So Nick the Greek was really an educated character. He was a very nice and engaging man. I thanked him for the explanation; now I understood it. I have to understand the world, you see.

An Offer You Must Refuse

Cornell had all kinds of departments that I didn’t have much interest in. (That doesn’t mean there was anything wrong with them; it’s just that I didn’t happen to have much interest in them.) There was domestic science, philosophy (the guys from this department were particularly inane), and there were the cultural things—music and so on. There were quite a few people I did enjoy talking to, of course. In the math department there was Professor Kac and Professor Feller; in chemistry, Professor Calvin; and a great guy in the zoology department, Dr. Griffin, who found out that bats navigate by making echoes. But it was hard to find enough of these guys to talk to, and there was all this other stuff which I thought was low-level baloney. And Ithaca was a small town.

The weather wasn’t really very good. One day I was driving in the car, and there came one of those quick snow flurries that you don’t expect, so you’re not ready for it, and you figure, “Oh, it isn’t going to amount to much; I’ll keep on going.”

But then the snow gets deep enough that the car begins to skid a little bit, so you have to put the chains on. You get out of the car, put the chains out on the snow, and it’s cold, and you’re beginning to shiver. Then you roll the car back onto the chains, and you have this problem—or we had it in those days; I don’t know what there is now—that there’s a hook on the inside that you have to hook first. And because the chains have to go on pretty tight, it’s hard to get the hook to hook. Then you have to push this clamp down with your fingers, which by this time are nearly frozen. And because you’re on the outside of the tire, and the hook is on the inside, and your hands are cold, it’s very difficult to control. It keeps slipping, and it’s cold, and the snow’s coming down, and you’re trying to push this clamp, and your hand’s hurting, and the damn thing’s not going down—well, I remember that that was the moment when I decided that this is insane; there must be a part of the world that doesn’t have this problem.

I remembered the couple of times I had visited Caltech, at the invitation of Professor Bacher, who had previously been at Cornell. He was very smart when I visited. He knew me inside out, so he said, “Feynman, I have this extra car, which I’m gonna lend you. Now here’s how you go to Hollywood and the Sunset Strip. Enjoy yourself.”

So I drove his car every night down to the Sunset Strip—to the nightclubs and the bars and the action. It was the kind of stuff I liked from Las Vegas—pretty girls, big operators, and so on. So Bacher knew how to get me interested in Caltech.

You know the story about the donkey who is standing exactly in the middle of two piles of hay, and doesn’t go to either one, because it’s balanced? Well, that’s nothing. Cornell and Caltech started making me offers, and as soon as I would move, figuring that Caltech was really better, they would up their offer at Cornell; and when I thought I’d stay at Cornell, they’d up something at Caltech. So you can imagine this donkey between the two piles of hay, with the extra complication that as soon as he moves toward one, the other one gets higher. That makes it very difficult!

The argument that finally convinced me was my sabbatical leave. I wanted to go to Brazil again, this time for ten months, and I had just earned my sabbatical leave from Cornell. I didn’t want to lose that, so now that I had invented a reason to come to a decision, I wrote Bacher and told him what I had decided.

Caltech wrote back: “We’ll hire you immediately, and we’ll give you your first year as a sabbatical year.” That’s the way they were acting: no matter what I decided to do, they’d screw it up. So my first year at Caltech was really spent in Brazil. I came to Caltech to teach on my second year. That’s how it happened.

Now that I have been at Caltech since 1951, I’ve been very happy here. It’s exactly the thing for a one-sided guy like me. There are all these people who are close to the top, who are very interested in what they are doing, and who I can talk to. So I’ve been very comfortable.

But one day, when I hadn’t been at Caltech very long, we had a bad attack of smog. It was worse then than it is now—at least your eyes smarted much more. I was standing on a corner, and my eyes were watering, and I thought to myself, “This is crazy! This is absolutely INSANE! It was all right back at Cornell. I’m getting out of here.”

So I called up Cornell, and asked them if they thought it was possible for me to come back. They said, “Sure! We’ll set it up and call you back tomorrow.”

The next day, I had the greatest luck in making a decision. God must have set it up to help me decide. I was walking to my office, and a guy came running up to me and said, “Hey, Feynman! Did you hear what happened? Baade found that there are two different populations of stars! All the measurements we had been making of the distances to the galaxies had been based on Cephid variables of one type, but there’s another type, so the universe is twice, or three, or even four times as old as we thought!”

I knew the problem. In those days, the earth appeared to be older than the universe. The earth was four and a half billion, and the universe was only a couple, or three billion years old. It was a great puzzle. And this discovery resolved all that: The universe was now demonstrably older than was previously thought. And I got this information right away—the guy came running up to me to tell me all this.

I didn’t even make it across the campus to get to my office, when another guy came up—Matt Meselson, a biologist who had minored in physics. (I had been on his committee for his Ph.D.) He had built the first of what they call a density gradient centrifuge—it could measure the density of molecules. He said, “Look at the results of the experiment I’ve been doing!”

He had proved that when a bacterium makes a new one, there’s a whole molecule, intact, which is passed from one bacterium to another—a molecule we now know as DNA. You see, we always think of everything dividing, dividing. So we think everything in the bacterium divides and gives half of it to the new bacterium. But that’s impossible: Somewhere, the smallest molecule that contains genetic information can’t divide in half; it has to make a copy of itself, and send one copy to the new bacterium, and keep one copy for the old one. And he had proved it in this way: He first grew the bacteria in heavy nitrogen, and later grew them all in ordinary nitrogen. As he went along, he weighed the molecules in his density gradient centrifuge.

The first generation of new bacteria had all of their chromosome molecules at a weight exactly in between the weight of molecules made with heavy, and molecules made with ordinary, nitrogen—a result that could occur if everything divided, including the chromosome molecules.

But in succeeding generations, when one might expect that the weight of the chromosome molecules would be one-fourth, one-eighth, and one-sixteenth of the difference between the heavy and ordinary molecules, the weights of the molecules fell into only two groups. One group was the same weight as the first new generation (halfway between the heavier and the lighter molecules), and the other group was lighter—the weight of molecules made in ordinary nitrogen. The percentage of heavier molecules was cut in half in each succeeding generation, but not their weights. That was tremendously exciting, and very important—it was a fundamental discovery. And I realized, as I finally got to my office, that this is where I’ve got to be. Where people from all different fields of science would tell me stuff, and it was all exciting. It was exactly what I wanted, really.

So when Cornell called a little later, and said they were setting everything up, and it was nearly ready, I said, “I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind again.” But I decided then never to decide again. Nothing—absolutely nothing—would ever change my mind again.

When you’re young, you have all these things to worry about—should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It’s much easier to just plain decide. Never mind—nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again—I had the solution to that problem. Anyway, I decided it would always be Caltech.

One time someone tried to change my mind about Caltech. Fermi had just died a short time before, and the faculty at Chicago were looking for someone to take his place. Two people from Chicago came out and asked to visit me at my home—I didn’t know what it was about. They began telling me all the good reasons why I ought to go to Chicago: I could do this, I could do that, they had lots of great people there, I had the opportunity to do all kinds of wonderful things. I didn’t ask them how much they would pay, and they kept hinting that they would tell me if I asked. Finally, they asked me if I wanted to know the salary. “Oh, no!” I said. “I’ve already decided to stay at Caltech. My wife Mary Lou is in the other room, and if she hears how much the salary is, we’ll get into an argument. Besides, I’ve decided not to decide any more; I’m staying at Caltech for good.” So I didn’t let them tell me the salary they were offering.

About a month later I was at a meeting, and Leona Marshall came over and said, “It’s funny you didn’t accept our offer at Chicago. We were so disappointed, and we couldn’t understand how you could turn down such a terrific offer.”

“It was easy,” I said, “because I never let them tell me what the offer was.”

A week later I got a letter from her. I opened it, and the first sentence said, “The salary they were offering was—,” a tremendous amount of money, three or four times what I was making. Staggering! Her letter continued, “I told you the salary before you could read any further. Maybe now you want to reconsider, because they’ve told me the position is still open, and we’d very much like to have you.”

So I wrote them back a letter that said, “After reading the salary, I’ve decided that I must refuse. The reason I have to refuse a salary like that is I would be able to do what I’ve always wanted to do—get a wonderful mistress, put her up in an apartment, buy her nice things … With the salary you have offered, I could actually do that, and I know what would happen to me. I’d worry about her, what she’s doing; I’d get into arguments when I come home, and so on. All this bother would make me uncomfortable and unhappy. I wouldn’t be able to do physics well, and it would be a big mess! What I’ve always wanted to do would be bad for me, so I’ve decided that I can’t accept your offer.”