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

Would You Solve the Dirac Equation?

Near the end of the year I was in Brazil I received a letter from Professor Wheeler which said that there was going to be an international meeting of theoretical physicists in Japan, and might I like to go? Japan had some famous physicists before the war—Professor Yukawa, with a Nobel prize, Tomonaga, and Nishina—but this was the first sign of Japan coming back to life after the war, and we all thought we ought to go and help them along.

Wheeler enclosed an army phrasebook and wrote that it would be nice if we would all learn a little Japanese. I found a Japanese woman in Brazil to help me with the pronunciation, I practiced lifting little pieces of paper with chopsticks, and I read a lot about Japan. At that time, Japan was very mysterious to me, and I thought it would be interesting to go to such a strange and wonderful country, so I worked very hard.

When we got there, we were met at the airport and taken to a hotel in Tokyo designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was an imitation of a European hotel, right down to the little guy dressed in an outfit like the Philip Morris guy. We weren’t in Japan; we might as well have been in Europe or America! The guy who showed us to our rooms stalled around, pulling the shades up and down, waiting for a tip. Everything was just like America.

Our hosts had everything organized. That first night we were served dinner up at the top of the hotel by a woman dressed Japanese, but the menus were in English. I had gone to a lot of trouble to learn a few phrases in Japanese, so near the end of the meal, I said to the waitress, “Kohi-o motte kite kudasai.” She bowed and walked away.

My friend Marshak did a double take: “What? What?”

“I talk Japanese,” I said.

“Oh, you faker! You’re always kidding around, Feynman.”

“What are you talkin’ about?” I said, in a serious tone.

“OK,” he said. “What did you ask?”

“I asked her to bring us coffee.”

Marshak didn’t believe me. “I’ll make a bet with you,” he said. “If she brings us coffee.

The waitress appeared with our coffee, and Marshak lost his bet.

It turned out I was the only guy who had learned some Japanese—even Wheeler, who had told everybody they ought to learn Japanese, hadn’t learned any—and I couldn’t stand it any more. I had read about the Japanese-style hotels, which were supposed to be very different from the hotel we were staying in.

The next morning I called the Japanese guy who was organizing everything up to my room. “I would like to stay in a Japanese-style hotel.”

“I am afraid that it is impossible, Professor Feynman.”

I had read that the Japanese are very polite, but very obstinate: You have to keep working on them. So I decided to be as obstinate as they, and equally polite. It was a battle of minds: It took thirty minutes, back and forth.

“Why do you want to go to a Japanese-style hotel?”

“Because in this hotel, I don’t feel like I’m in Japan.”

“Japanese-style hotels are no good. You have to sleep on the floor.”

“That’s what I want; I want to see how it is.”

“And there are no chairs—you sit on the floor at the table.”

“It’s OK. That will be delightful. That’s what I’m looking for.”

Finally he owns up to what the situation is: “If you’re in another hotel, the bus will have to make an extra stop on its way to the meeting.”

“No, no!” I say. “In the morning, I’ll come to this hotel, and get on the bus here.”

“Well, then, OK. That’s fine.” That’s all there was to it—except it took half an hour to get to the real problem.

He’s walking over to the telephone to make a call to the other hotel when suddenly he stops; everything is blocked up again. It takes another fifteen minutes to discover that this time it’s the mail. If there are any messages from the meeting, they already have it arranged where to deliver them.

“It’s OK,” I say. “When I come in the morning to get the bus, I’ll look for any messages for me here at this hotel.”

“All right. That’s fine.” He gets on the telephone and at last we’re on our way to the Japanese-style hotel.

As soon as I got there, I knew it was worth it: It was so lovely! There was a place at the front where you take your shoes off, then a girl dressed in the traditional outfit—the obi—with sandals comes shuffling out, and takes your stuff; you follow her down a hallway which has mats on the floor, past sliding doors made of paper, and she’s going cht-cht-cht-cht with little steps. It was all very wonderful!

We went into my room and the guy who arranged everything got all the way down, prostrated, and touched his nose to the floor; she got down and touched her nose to the floor. I felt very awkward. Should I touch my nose to the floor, too?

They said greetings to each other, he accepted the room for me, and went out. It was a really wonderful room. There were all the regular, standard things that you know of now, but it was all new to me. There was a little alcove with a painting in it, a vase with pussywillows nicely arranged, a table along the floor with a cushion nearby, and at the end of the room were two sliding doors which opened onto a garden.

The lady who was supposed to take care of me was a middle-aged woman. She helped me undress and gave me a yukata, a simple blue and white robe, to wear at the hotel.

I pushed open the doors and admired the lovely garden, and sat down at the table to do a little work.

I wasn’t there more than fifteen or twenty minutes when something caught my eye. I looked up, out towards the garden, and I saw, sitting at the entrance to the door, draped in the corner, a very beautiful young Japanese woman, in a most lovely outfit.

I had read a lot about the customs of Japan, and I had an idea of why she was sent to my room. I thought, “This might be very interesting!”

She knew a little English. “Would you rike to see the garden?” she asked.

I put on the shoes that went with the yukata I was wearing, and we went out into the garden. She took my arm and showed me everything.

It turned out that because she knew a little English, the hotel manager thought I would like her to show me the garden—that’s all it was. I was a bit disappointed, of course, but this was a meeting of cultures, and I knew it was easy to get the wrong idea.

Sometime later the woman who took care of my room came in and said something—in Japanese—about a bath. I knew that Japanese baths were interesting and was eager to try it, so I said, “Hai.”

I had read that Japanese baths are very complicated. They use a lot of water that’s heated from the outside, and you aren’t supposed to get soap into the bathwater and spoil it for the next guy.

I got up and walked into the lavatory section, where the sink was, and I could hear some guy in the next section with the door closed, taking a bath. Suddenly the door slides open: the man taking the bath looks to see who is intruding. “Professor!” he says to me in English. “That’s a very bad error to go into the lavatory when someone else has the bath!” It was Professor Yukawa!

He told me that the woman had no doubt asked do I want a bath, and if so, she would get it ready for me and tell me when the bathroom was free. But of all the people in the world to make that serious social error with, I was lucky it was Professor Yukawa!

That Japanese-style hotel was delightful, especially when people came to see me there. The other guys would come in to my room and we’d sit on the floor and start to talk. We wouldn’t be there more than five minutes when the woman who took care of my room would come in with a tray of candies and tea. It was as if you were a host in your own home, and the hotel staff was helping you to entertain your guests. Here, when you have guests at your hotel room, nobody cares; you have to call up for service, and so on.

Eating meals at the hotel was also different. The girl who brings in the food stays with you while you eat, so you’re not alone. I couldn’t have too good a conversation with her, but it was all right. And the food is wonderful. For instance, the soup comes in a bowl that’s covered. You lift the cover and there’s a beautiful picture: little pieces of onion floating in the soup just so; it’s gorgeous. How the food looks on the plate is very important.

I had decided that I was going to live Japanese as much as I could. That meant eating fish. I never liked fish when I was growing up, but I found out in Japan that it was a childish thing: I ate a lot of fish, and enjoyed it. (When I went back to the United States the first thing I did was go to a fish place. It was horrible—just like it was before. I couldn’t stand it. I later discovered the answer: The fish has to be very, very fresh—if it isn’t, it gets a certain taste that bothers me.)

One time when I was eating at the Japanese-style hotel I was served a round, hard thing, about the size of an egg yolk, in a cup of some yellow liquid. So far I had eaten everything in Japan, but this thing frightened me: it was all convoluted, like a brain looks. When I asked the girl what it was, she replied “kuri.” That didn’t help much. I figured it was probably an octopus egg, or something. I ate it, with some trepidation, because I wanted to be as much in Japan as possible. (I also remembered the word “kuri ” as if my life depended on it—I haven’t forgotten it in thirty years.)

The next day I asked a Japanese guy at the conference what this convoluted thing was. I told him I had found it very difficult to eat. What the hell was “kuri ”?

“It means ‘chestnut.’” he replied.

Some of the Japanese I had learned had quite an effect. One time, when the bus was taking a long time to get started, some guy says, “Hey, Feynman! You know Japanese; tell ‘em to get going!”

I said, “Hayaku! Hayaku! Ikimasho! Ikimasho! ”—which means, “Let’s go! Let’s go! Hurry! Hurry!”

I realized my Japanese was out of control. I had learned these phrases from a military phrase book, and they must have been very rude, because everyone at the hotel began to scurry like mice, saying, “Yes, sir! Yes sir!” and the bus left right away.

The meeting in Japan was in two parts: one was in Tokyo, and the other was in Kyoto. In the bus on the way to Kyoto I told my friend Abraham Pais about the Japanese-style hotel, and he wanted to try it. We stayed at the Hotel Miyako, which had both American-style and Japanese-style rooms, and Pais shared a Japanese-style room with me.

The next morning the young woman taking care of our room fixes the bath, which was right in our room. Sometime later she returns with a tray to deliver breakfast. I’m partly dressed. She turns to me and says, politely, “Ohayo, gozai masu,” which means, “Good morning.”

Pais is just coming out of the bath, sopping wet and completely nude. She turns to him and with equal composure says, “Ohayo, gozai masu,” and puts the tray down for us.

Pais looks at me and says, “God, are we uncivilized!”

We realized that in America if the maid was delivering breakfast and the guy’s standing there, stark naked, there would be little screams and a big fuss. But in Japan they were completely used to it, and we felt that they were much more advanced and civilized about those things than we were.

I had been working at that time on the theory of liquid helium, and had figured out how the laws of quantum dynamics explain the strange phenomena of super-fluidity. I was very proud of this achievement, and was going to give a talk about my work at the Kyoto meeting.

The night before I gave my talk there was a dinner, and the man who sat down next to me was none other than Professor Onsager, a topnotch expert in solid-state physics and the problems of liquid helium. He was one of these guys who doesn’t say very much, but any time he said anything, it was significant.

“Well, Feynman,” he said in a gruff voice, “I hear you think you have understood liquid helium.”

“Well, yes …”

“Hoompf.” And that’s all he said to me during the whole dinner! So that wasn’t much encouragement.

The next day I gave my talk and explained all about liquid helium. At the end, I complained that there was still something I hadn’t been able to figure out: that is, whether the transition between one phase and the other phase of liquid helium was first-order (like when a solid melts or a liquid boils—the temperature is constant) or second-order (like you see sometimes in magnetism, in which the temperature keeps changing).

Then Professor Onsager got up and said in a dour voice, “Well, Professor Feynman is new in our field, and I think he needs to be educated. There’s something he ought to know, and we should tell him.”

I thought, “Geesus! What did I do wrong?”

Onsager said, “We should tell Feynman that nobody has ever figured out the order of any transition correctly from first principles, so the fact that his theory does not allow him to work out the order correctly does not mean that he hasn’t understood all the other aspects of liquid helium satisfactorily.” It turned out to be a compliment, but from the way he started out, I thought I was really going to get it!

It wasn’t more than a day later when I was in my room and the telephone rang. It was Time magazine. The guy on the line said, “We’re very interested in your work. Do you have a copy of it you could send us?”

I had never been in Time and was very excited. I was proud of my work, which had been received well at the meeting, so I said, “Sure!”

“Fine. Please send it to our Tokyo bureau.” The guy gave me the address. I was feeling great.

I repeated the address, and the guy said, “That’s right. Thank you very much, Mr. Pais.”

“Oh, no!” I said, startled. “I’m not Pais; it’s Pais you want? Excuse me, I’ll tell him that you want to speak to him when he comes back.”

A few hours later Pais came in: “Hey, Pais! Pais!” I said, in an excited voice. “Time magazine called! They want you to send ‘em a copy of the paper you’re giving.”

“Aw!” he says. “Publicity is a whore!”

I was doubly taken aback.

I’ve since found out that Pais was right, but in those days, I thought it would be wonderful to have my name in Time magazine.

That was the first time I was in Japan. I was eager to go back, and said I would go to any university they wanted me to. So the Japanese arranged a whole series of places to visit for a few days at a time.

By this time I was married to Mary Lou, and we were entertained wherever we went. At one place they put on a whole ceremony with dancing, usually performed only for larger groups of tourists, especially for us. At another place we were met right at the boat by all the students. At another place, the mayor met us.

One particular place we stayed was a little, modest place in the woods, where the emperor would stay when he came by. It was a very lovely place, surrounded by woods, just beautiful, the stream selected with care. It had a certain calmness, a quiet elegance. That the emperor would go to such a place to stay showed a greater sensitivity to nature, I think, than what we were used to in the West.

At all these places everybody working in physics would tell me what they were doing and I’d discuss it with them. They would tell me the general problem they were working on, and would begin to write a bunch of equations.

“Wait a minute,” I would say. “Is there a particular example of this general problem?”

“Why yes; of course.”

“Good. Give me one example.” That was for me: I can’t understand anything in general unless I’m carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I’m kind of slow and I don’t understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these “dumb” questions: “Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an anion this way, or that way?”

But later, when the guy’s in the middle of a bunch of equations, he’ll say something and I’ll say, “Wait a minute! There’s an error! That can’t be right!”

The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he finds the mistake and wonders, “How the hell did this guy, who hardly understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these equations?”

He thinks I’m following the steps mathematically, but that’s not what I’m doing. I have the specific, physical example of what he’s trying to analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the thing. So when the equation says it should behave so-and-so, and I know that’s the wrong way around, I jump up and say, “Wait! There’s a mistake!”

So in Japan I couldn’t understand or discuss anybody’s work unless they could give me a physical example, and most of them couldn’t find one. Of those who could, it was often a weak example, one which could be solved by a much simpler method of analysis.

Since I was perpetually asking not for mathematical equations, but for physical circumstances of what they were trying to work out, my visit was summarized in a mimeographed paper circulated among the scientists (it was a modest but effective system of communication they had cooked up after the war) with the title, “Feynman’s Bombardments, and Our Reactions.”

After visiting a number of universities I spent some months at the Yukawa Institute in Kyoto. I really enjoyed working there. Everything was so nice: You’d come to work, take your shoes off, and someone would come and serve you tea in the morning when you felt like it. It was very pleasant.

While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked much harder at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis and do things. I took lessons from a Japanese man every day for an hour.

One day he was teaching me the word for “see.” “All right,” he said. “You want to say, ‘May I see your garden?’ What do you say?”

I made up a sentence with the word that I had just learned.

“No, no!” he said. “When you say to someone, ‘Would you like to see my garden? you use the first ‘see.’ But when you want to see someone else’s garden, you must use another ‘see,’ which is more polite.”

“Would you like to glance at my lousy garden?” is essentially what you’re saying in the first case, but when you want to look at the other fella’s garden, you have to say something like, “May I observe your gorgeous garden?” So there’s two different words you have to use.

Then he gave me another one: “You go to a temple, and you want to look at the gardens …”

I made up a sentence, this time with the polite “see.”

“No, no!” he said. “In the temple, the gardens are much more elegant. So you have to say something that would be equivalent to ‘May I hang my eyes on your most exquisite gardens?’”

Three or four different words for one idea, because when I’m doing it, it’s miserable; when you’re doing it, it’s elegant.

I was learning Japanese mainly for technical things, so I decided to check if this same problem existed among the scientists.

At the institute the next day, I said to the guys in the office, “How would I say in Japanese, ‘I solve the Dirac Equation’?”

They said such-and-so.

“OK. Now I want to say, ‘Would you solve the Dirac Equation?’—how do I say that?”

“Well, you have to use a different word for ‘solve,’ “they say.

“Why?” I protested. “When I solve it, I do the same damn thing as when you solve it!”

“Well, yes, but it’s a different word—it’s more polite.”

I gave up. I decided that wasn’t the language for me, and stopped learning Japanese.

The 7 Percent Solution

The problem was to find the right laws of beta decay. There appeared to be two particles, which were called a tan and a theta. They seemed to have almost exactly the same mass, but one disintegrated into two pions, and the other into three pions. Not only did they seem to have the same mass, but they also had the same lifetime, which is a funny coincidence. So everybody was concerned about this.

At a meeting I went to, it was reported that when these two particles were produced in a cyclotron at different angles and different energies, they were always produced in the same proportions—so many taus compared to so many thetas.

Now, one possibility, of course, was that it was the same particle, which sometimes decayed into two pions, and sometimes into three pions. But nobody would allow that, because there is a law called the parity rule, which is based on the assumption that all the laws of physics are mirror-image symmetrical, and says that a thing that can go into two pions can’t also go into three pions.

At that particular time I was not really quite up to things: I was always a little behind. Everybody seemed to be smart, and I didn’t feel I was keeping up. Anyway, I was sharing a room with a guy named Martin Block, an experimenter. And one evening he said to me, “Why are you guys so insistent on this parity rule? Maybe the tau and theta are the same particle. What would be the consequences if the parity rule were wrong?”

I thought a minute and said, “It would mean that nature’s laws are different for the right hand and the left hand, that there’s a way to define the right hand by physical phenomena. I don’t know that that’s so terrible, though there must be some bad consequences of that, but I don’t know. Why don’t you ask the experts tomorrow?”

He said, “No, they won’t listen to me. You ask.”

So the next day, at the meeting, when we were discussing the tau-theta puzzle, Oppenheimer said, “We need to hear some new, wilder ideas about this problem.”

So I got up and said, “I’m asking this question for Martin Block: What would be the consequences if the parity rule was wrong?”

Murray Gell-Mann often teased me about this, saying I didn’t have the nerve to ask the question for myself. But that’s not the reason. I thought it might very well be an important idea.

Lee, of Lee and Yang, answered something complicated, and as usual I didn’t understand very well. At the end of the meeting, Block asked me what he said, and I said I didn’t know, but as far as I could tell, it was still open—there was still a possibility. I didn’t think it was likely, but I thought it was possible.

Norm Ramsey asked me if I thought he should do an experiment looking for parity law violation, and I replied, “The best way to explain it is, I’ll bet you only fifty to one you don’t find anything.”

He said, “That’s good enough for me.” But he never did the experiment.

Anyway, the discovery of parity law violation was made, experimentally, by Wu, and this opened up a whole bunch of new possibilities for beta decay theory, It also unleashed a whole host of experiments immediately after that. Some showed electrons coming out of the nuclei spun to the left, and some to the right, and there were all kinds of experiments, all kinds of interesting discoveries about parity. But the data were so confusing that nobody could put things together.

At one point there was a meeting in Rochester—the yearly Rochester Conference. I was still always behind, and Lee was giving his paper on the violation of parity. He and Yang had come to the conclusion that parity was violated, and flow he was giving the theory for it.

During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, “I can’t understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It’s all so complicated.”

“No,” she said, “what you mean is not that you can’t understand it, but that you didn’t invent it. You didn’t figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you’re a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you’ll understand it very easily.”

I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it, thinking it was too difficult.

It reminded me of something I had done a long time ago with left and right unsymmetrical equations, Now it became kind of clear, when I looked at Lee’s formulas, that the solution to it all was much simpler: Everything comes out coupled to the left. For the electron and the muon, my predictions were the same as Lee’s, except I changed some signs around. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Lee had taken only the simplest example of muon coupling, and hadn’t proved that all muons would be full to the right, whereas according to my theory, all muons would have to be full automatically. Therefore, I had, in fact, a prediction on top of what he had. I had different signs, but I didn’t realize that I also had this quantity right.

I predicted a few things that nobody had experiments for yet, but when it came to the neutron and proton, I couldn’t make it fit well with what was then known about neutron and proton coupling: it was kind of messy.

The next day, when I went back to the meeting, a very kind man named Ken Case, who was going to give a paper on something, gave me five minutes of his allotted time to present my idea. I said I was convinced that everything was coupled to the left, and that the signs for the electron and muon are reversed, but I was struggling with the neutron. Later the experimenters asked me some questions about my predictions, and then I went to Brazil for the summer.

When I came back to the United States, I wanted to know what the situation was with beta decay. I went to Professor Wu’s laboratory at Columbia, and she wasn’t there, but another lady was there who showed me all kinds of data, all kinds of chaotic numbers that didn’t fit with anything. The electrons, which in my model would have all come out spinning to the left in the beta decay, came out on the right in some cases. Nothing fit anything.

When I got back to Caltech, I asked some of the experimenters what the situation was with beta decay. I remember three guys, Hans Jensen, Aaldert Wapstra, and Felix Boehm, sitting me down on a little stool, and starting to tell me all these facts: experimental results from other parts of the country, and their own experimental results. Since I knew those guys, and how careful they were, I paid more attention to their results than to the others. Their results, alone, were not so inconsistent; it was all the others plus theirs.

Finally they get all this stuff into me, and they say, “The situation is so mixed up that even some of the things they’ve established for years are being questioned—such as the beta decay of the neutron is S and T. It’s so messed up. Murray says it might even be V and A.”

I jump up from the stool and say, “Then I understand EVVVVVERYTHING!”

They thought I was joking. But the thing that I had trouble with at the Rochester meeting—the neutron and proton disintegration: everything fit but that, and if it was V and A instead of S and T, that would fit too. Therefore I had the whole theory!

That night I calculated all kinds of things with this theory. The first thing I calculated was the rate of disintegration of the muon and the neutron. They should be connected together, if this theory was right, by a certain relationship, and it was right to 9 percent. That’s pretty close, 9 percent. It should have been more perfect than that, but it was close enough.

I went on and checked some other things, which fit, and new things fit, new things fit, and I was very excited. It was the first time, and the only time, in my career that I knew a law of nature that nobody else knew. (Of course it wasn’t true, but finding out later that at least Murray Gell-Mann—and also Sudarshan and Marshak—had worked out the same theory didn’t spoil my fun.)

The other things I had done before were to take somebody else’s theory and improve the method of calculating, or take an equation, such as the Schrodinger Equation, to explain a phenomenon, such as helium. We know the equation, and we know the phenomenon, but how does it work?

I thought about Dirac, who had his equation for a while—a new equation which told how an electron behaved—and I had this new equation for beta decay, which wasn’t as vital as the Dirac Equation, but it was good. It’s the only time I ever discovered a new law.

I called up my sister in New York to thank her for getting me to sit down and work through that paper by Lee and Yang at the Rochester Conference. After feeling uncomfortable and behind, now I was in; I had made a discovery, just from what she suggested. I was able to enter physics again, so to speak, and I wanted to thank her for that. I told her that everything fit, except for the 9 percent.

I was very excited, and kept on calculating, and things that fit kept on tumbling out: they fit automatically, without a strain. I had begun to forget about the 9 percent by now, because everything else was coming out right.

I worked very hard into the night, sitting at a small table in the kitchen next to a window. It was getting later and later—about 2:00 or 3:00 AM. I’m working hard, getting all these calculations packed solid with things that fit, and I’m thinking, and concentrating, and it’s dark, and it’s quiet … when suddenly there’s a TAC-TAC-TAC-TAC—loud, on the window. I look, and there’s this whiteface, right at the window, only inches away, and I scream with shock and surprise!

It was a lady I knew who was angry at me because I had come back from vacation and didn’t immediately call her up to tell her I was back. I let her in, and tried to explain that I was just now very busy, that I had just discovered something, and it was very important. I said, “Please go out and let me finish it.”

She said, “No, I don’t want to bother you. I’ll just sit here in the living room.”

I said, “Well, all right, but it’s very difficult.”

She didn’t exactly sit in the living room. The best way to say it is she sort of squatted in a corner, holding her hands together, not wanting to “bother” me. Of course her purpose was to bother the hell out of me! And she succeeded—I couldn’t ignore her. I got very angry and upset, and I couldn’t stand it. I had to do this calculating; I was making a big discovery and was terribly excited, and somehow, it was more important to me than this lady—at least at that moment. I don’t remember how I finally got her out of there, but it was very difficult.

After working some more, it got to be very late at night, and I was hungry. I walked up the maims street to a little restaurant five or ten blocks away, as I had often done before, late at night.

On early occasions I was often stopped by the police, because I would be walking along, thinking, and then I’d stop—sometimes an idea comes that’s difficult enough that you can’t keep walking; you have to make sure of something. So I’d stop, and sometimes I’d hold my hands out in the air, saying to myself, “The distance between these is that way, and then this would turn over this way …”

I’d be moving my hands, standing in the street, when the police would come: “What is your name? Where do you live? What are you doing?”

“Oh! I was thinking. I’m sorry; I live here, and go often to the restaurant …” After a bit they knew who it was, and they didn’t stop me any more.

So I went to the restaurant, and while I’m eating I’m so excited that I tell a lady that I just made a discovery. She starts in: She’s the wife of a fireman, or forester, or something. She’s very lonely—all this stuff that I’m not interested in. So that happens.

The next morning when I got to work I went to Wapstra, Boehm, and Jensen, and told them, “I’ve got it all worked out. Everything fits.”

Christy, who was there, too, said, “What beta-decay constant did you use?”

“The one from So-and-So’s book.”

“But that’s been found out to be wrong. Recent measurements have shown it’s off by 7 percent.”

Then I remember the 9 percent. It was like a prediction for me: I went home and got this theory that says the neutron decay should be off by 9 percent, and they tell me the next morning that, as a matter of fact, it’s 7 percent changed. But is it changed from 9 to 16, which is bad, or from 9 to 2, which is good?

Just then my sister calls from New York: “How about the 9 percent—what’s happened?”

“I’ve just discovered that there’s new data: 7 percent …”

“Which way? ”

“I’m trying to find out. I’ll call you back.”

I was so excited that I couldn’t think. It’s like when you’re rushing for an airplane, and you don’t know whether you’re late or not, and you just can’t make it, when somebody says, “It’s daylight saving time!” Yes, but which way? You can’t think in the excitement.

So Christy went into one room, and I went into another room, each of us to be quiet, so we could think it through: This moves this way, and that moves that way—it wasn’t very difficult, really; it’s just exciting.

Christy came out, and I came out, and we both agreed: It’s 2 percent, which is well within experimental error. After all, if they just changed the constant by 7 percent, the 2 percent could have been an error. I called my sister back: “Two percent.” The theory was right.

(Actually, it was wrong: it was off, really, by 1 percent, for a reason we hadn’t appreciated, which was only understood later by Nicola Cabibbo. So that 2 percent was not all experimental.)

Murray Gell-Mann compared and combined our ideas and wrote a paper on the theory. The theory was rather neat; it was relatively simple, and it fit a lot of stuff. But as I told you, there was an awful lot of chaotic data. And in some cases, we even went so far as to state that the experiments were in error.

A good example of this was an experiment by Valentine Telegdi, in which he measured the number of electrons that go out in each direction when a neutron disintegrates. Our theory had predicted that the number should be the same in all directions, whereas Telegdi found that 11 percent more came out in one direction than the others. Telegdi was an excellent experimenter, and very careful. And once, when he was giving a talk somewhere, he referred to our theory and said, “The trouble with theorists is, they never pay attention to the experiments!”

Telegdi also sent us a letter, which wasn’t exactly scathing, but nevertheless showed he was convinced that our theory was wrong. At the end he wrote, “The F-G (Feynman—Gell-Mann) theory of beta decay is no F-G.”

Murray says, “What should we do about this? You know, Telegdi’s pretty good.”

I say, “We just wait.”

Two days later there’s another letter from Telegdi. He’s a complete convert. He found out from our theory that he had disregarded the possibility that the proton recoiling from the neutron is not the same in all directions. He had assumed it was the same. By putting in corrections that our theory predicted instead of the ones he had been using, the results straightened out and were in complete agreement.

I knew that Telegdi was excellent, and it would be hard to go upstream against him. But I was convinced by that time that something must be wrong with his experiment, and that he would find it—he’s much better at finding it than we would he. That’s why I said we shouldn’t try to figure it out but just wait.

I went to Professor Bacher and told him about our success, and he said, “Yes, you come out and say that the neutron-proton coupling is V instead of T. Everybody used to think it was T. Where is the fundamental experiment that says it’s T? Why don’t you look at the early experiments and find out what was wrong with them?”

I went out and found the original article on the experiment that said the neutron-proton coupling is T, and I was shocked by something. I remembered reading that article once before (back in the days when I read every article in the Physical Review—it was small enough). And I remembered, when I saw this article again, looking at that curve and thinking, “That doesn’t prove anything!”

You see, it depended on one or two points at the very edge of the range of the data, and there’s a principle that a point on the edge of the range of the data—the last point—isn’t very good, because if it was, they’d have another point further along. And I had realized that the whole idea that neutron-proton coupling is T was based on the last point, which wasn’t very good, and therefore it’s not proved. I remember noticing that!

And when I became interested in beta decay, directly, I read all these reports by the “beta-decay experts,” which said it’s T. I never looked at the original data; I only read those reports, like a dope. Had I been a good physicist, when I thought of the original idea back at the Rochester Conference I would have immediately looked up “how strong do we know it’s T?”—that would have been the sensible thing to do. I would have recognized right away that I had already noticed it wasn’t satisfactorily proved.

Since then I never pay any attention to anything by “experts.” I calculate everything myself. When people said the quark theory was pretty good, I got two Ph. D.s, Finn Ravndal and Mark Kislinger, to go through the whole works with me, just so I could check that the thing was really giving results that fit fairly well, and that it was a significantly good theory. I’ll never make that mistake again, reading the experts’ opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that’s the end of you.

Thirteen Times

One time a science teacher from the local city college came around and asked me if I’d give a talk there. He offered me fifty dollars, but I told him I wasn’t worried about the money. “That’s the city college, right?”

“Yes.”

I thought about how much paperwork I usually had to get involved with when I deal with the government, so I laughed and said, “I’ll be glad to give the talk. There’s only one condition on the whole thing”—I pulled a number out of a hat and continued—”that I don’t have to sign my name more than thirteen times, and that includes the check!”

The guy laughs too. “Thirteen times! No problem.”

So then it starts. First I have to sign something that says I’m loyal to the government, or else I can’t talk in the city college. And I have to sign it double, OK? Then I have to sign some kind of release to the city—I can’t remember what. Pretty soon the numbers are beginning to climb up.

I have to sign that I was suitably employed as a professor—to ensure, of course, since it’s a city thing, that no jerk at the other end was hiring his wife or a friend to come and not even give the lecture. There were all kinds of things to ensure, and the signatures kept mounting.

Well, the guy who started out laughing got pretty nervous, but we just made it. I signed exactly twelve times. There was one more left for the check, so I went ahead and gave the talk.

A few days later the guy came around to give me the check, and he was really sweating. He couldn’t give me the money unless I signed a form saying I really gave the talk.

I said, “If I sign the form, I can’t sign the check. But you were there. You heard the talk; why don’t you sign it?”

“Look,” he said, “Isn’t this whole thing rather silly?”

“No. It was an arrangement we made in the beginning. We didn’t think it was really going to get to thirteen, but we agreed on it, and I think we should stick to it to the end.”

He said, “I’ve been working very hard, calling all around. I’ve been trying everything, and they tell me it’s impossible. You simply can’t get your money unless you sign the form.”

“It’s OK,” I said. “I’ve only signed twelve times, and I gave the talk. I don’t need the money.”

“But I have to do this to you.”

“It’s all right. We made a deal; don’t worry.”

The next day he called me up. “They can’t not give you the money! They’ve already earmarked the money and they’ve got it set aside, so they have to give it to you!”

“OK, if they have to give me the money, let them give me the money.”

“But you have to sign the form.”

“I won’t sign the form!”

They were stuck. There was no miscellaneous pot which was for money that this man deserves but won’t sign for.

Finally, it got straightened out. It took a long time, and it was very complicated—but I used the thirteenth signature to cash my check.

It Sounds Greek to Me!

I don’t know why, but I’m always very careless, when I go on a trip, about the address or telephone number or anything of the people who invited me. I figure I’ll be met, or somebody else will know where we’re going; it’ll get straightened out somehow.

One time, in 1957, I went to a gravity conference at the University of North Carolina. I was supposed to be an expert in a different field who looks at gravity.

I landed at the airport a day late for the conference (I couldn’t make it the first day), and I went out to where the taxis were. I said to the dispatcher, “I’d like to go to the University of North Carolina.”

“Which do you mean,” he said, “the State University of North Carolina at Raleigh, or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill?”

Needless to say, I hadn’t the slightest idea. “Where are they?” I asked, figuring that one must be near the other.

“One’s north of here, and the other is south of here, about the same distance.”

I had nothing with me that showed which one it was, and there was nobody else going to the conference a day late like I was.

That gave me an idea. “Listen,” I said to the dispatcher. “The main meeting began yesterday, so there were a whole lot of guys going to the meeting who must have come through here yesterday. Let me describe them to you: They would have their heads kind of in the air, and they would be talking to each other, not paying attention to where they were going, saying things to each other, like ‘G-mu-nu. G-mu-nu.’”

His face lit up. “Ah, yes,” he said. “You mean Chapel Hill!” He called the next taxi waiting in line. “Take this man to the university at Chapel Hill.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I went to the conference.

But Is It Art?

Once I was at a party playing bongos, and I got going pretty well. One of the guys was particularly inspired by the drumming. He went into the bathroom, took off his shirt, smeared shaving cream in funny designs all over his chest, and came out dancing wildly, with cherries hanging from his ears. Naturally, this crazy nut and I became good friends right away. His name is Jirayr Zorthian; he’s an artist.

We often had long discussions about art and science. I’d say things like, “Artists are lost: they don’t have any subject! They used to have the religious subjects, but they lost their religion and now they haven’t got anything. They don’t understand the technical world they live in; they don’t know anything about the beauty of the real world—the scientific world—so they don’t have anything in their hearts to paint.”

Jerry would reply that artists don’t need to have a physical subject; there are many emotions that can he expressed through art. Besides, art can be abstract. Furthermore, scientists destroy the beauty of nature when they pick it apart and turn it into mathematical equations.

One time I was over at Jerry’s for his birthday, and one of these dopey arguments lasted until 3:00 AM. The next morning I called him up: “Listen, Jerry,” I said, “the reason we have these arguments that never get anywhere is that you don’t know a damn thing about science, and I don’t know a damn thing about art. So, on alternate Sundays, I’ll give you a lesson in science, and you give me a lesson in art.”

“OK,” he said. “I’ll teach you how to draw.”

“That will be impossible,” I said, because when I was in high school, the only thing I could draw was pyramids on deserts—consisting mainly of straight lines—and from time to time I would attempt a palm tree and put in a sun. I had absolutely no talent. I sat next to a guy who was equally adept. When he was permitted to draw anything, it consisted of two flat, elliptical blobs, like tires stacked on one another, with a stalk coming out of the top, culminating in a green triangle. It was supposed to be a tree. So I bet Jerry that he wouldn’t be able to teach me to draw.

“Of course you’ll have to work,” he said.

I promised to work, but still bet that he couldn’t teach me to draw. I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run “behind the scenes” by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It’s a feeling of awe—of scientific awe—which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.

Jerry turned out to be a very good teacher. He told me first to go home and draw anything. So I tried to draw a shoe; then I tried to draw a flower in a pot. It was a mess!

The next time we met I showed him my attempts: “Oh, look!” he said. “You see, around in back here, the line of the flower pot doesn’t touch the leaf.” (I had meant the line to come up to the leaf.) “That’s very good. It’s a way of showing depth. That’s very clever of you.”

“And the fact that you don’t make all the lines the same thickness (which I didn’t mean to do) is good. A drawing with all the lines the same thickness is dull.” It continued like that: Everything that I thought was a mistake, he used to teach me something in a positive way. He never said it was wrong; he never put me down. So I kept on trying, and I gradually got a little bit better, but I was never satisfied.

To get more practice I also signed up for a correspondence school course, with International Correspondence Schools, and I must say they were good. They started me off drawing pyramids and cylinders, shading them and so on. We covered many areas: drawing, pastels, watercolors, and paints. Near the end I petered out: I made an oil painting for them, but I never sent it in. They kept sending me letters urging me to continue. They were very good.

I practiced drawing all the time, and became very interested in it. If I was at a meeting that wasn’t getting anywhere—like the one where Carl Rogers came to Caltech to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a psychology department—I would draw the other people. I had a little pad of paper I kept with me and I practiced drawing wherever I went. So, as Jerry taught me, I worked very hard.

Jerry, on the other hand, didn’t learn much physics. His mind wandered too easily. I tried to teach him something about electricity and magnetism, but as soon as I mentioned electricity,” he’d tell me about some motor he had that didn’t work, and how might he fix it. When I tried to show him how an electromagnet works by making a little coil of wire and hanging a nail on a piece of string, I put the voltage on, the nail swung into the coil, and Jerry said, “Ooh! It’s just like fucking!” So that was the end of that.

So now we have a new argument—whether he’s a better teacher than I was, or I’m a better student than he was.

I gave up the idea of trying to get an artist to appreciate the feeling I had about nature so he could portray it. I would flow have to double my efforts in learning to draw so I could do it myself. It was a very ambitious undertaking, and I kept the idea entirely to myself, because the odds were I would never be able to do it.

Early on in the process of learning to draw, some lady I knew saw my attempts and said, “You should go down to the Pasadena Art Museum. They have drawing classes there, with models—nude models.”

“No,” I said; “I can’t draw well enough: I’d feel very embarrassed.”

“You’re good enough; you should see some of the others!”

So I worked up enough courage to go down there. In the first lesson they told us about newsprint—very large sheets of low-grade paper, the size of a newspaper—and the various kinds of pencils and charcoal to get. For the second class a model came, and she started off with a ten-minute pose.

I started to draw the model, and by the time I’d done one leg, the ten minutes were up. I looked around and saw that everyone else had already drawn a complete picture, with shading in the back—the whole business.

I realized I was way out of my depth. But finally at the end, the model was going to pose for thirty minutes. I worked very hard, and with great effort I was able to draw her whole outline. This time there was half a hope. So this time I didn’t cover up my drawing, as I had done with all the previous ones.

We went around to look at what the others had done, and I discovered what they could really do: they draw the model, with details and shadows, the pocketbook that’s on the bench she’s sitting on, the platform, everything! They’ve all gone zip, zip, zip, zip, zip with the charcoal, all over, and I figure it’s hopeless—utterly hopeless.

I go back to cover up my drawing, which consists of a few lines crowded into the upper left-hand corner of the newsprint—I had, until then, only been drawing on 8Ѕ X 11 paper—but some others in the class are standing nearby: Oh, look at this one,” one of them says. “Every line counts!” I didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but I felt encouraged enough to come to the next class. In the meantime, Jerry kept telling me that drawings that are too full aren’t any good. His job was to teach me not to worry about the others, so he’d tell me they weren’t so hot.

I noticed that the teacher didn’t tell people much (the only thing he told me was my picture was too small on the page). Instead, he tried to inspire us to experiment with new approaches. I thought of how we teach physics: We have so many techniques—so many mathematical methods—that we never stop telling the students how to do things. On the other hand, the drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very heavy, the teacher can’t say, “Your lines are too heavy,” because some artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines. The teacher doesn’t want to push you in some particular direction. So the drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical Problems.

They were always telling me to “loosen up,” to become more relaxed about drawing. I figured that made no more sense than telling someone who’s just learning to drive to “loosen up” at the wheel. It isn’t going to work. Only after you know how to do it carefully can you begin to loosen up. So I resisted this perennial loosen-up stuff.

One exercise they had invented for loosening us up was to draw without looking at the paper. Don’t take your eyes off the model; just look at her and make the lines on the paper without looking at what you’re doing.

One of the guys says, “I can’t help it. I have to cheat. I bet everybody’s cheating!”

“I’m not cheating!” I say.

“Aw, baloney!” they say.

I finish the exercise and they come over to look at what I had drawn. They found that, indeed, I was NOT cheating; at the very beginning my pencil point had busted, and there was nothing but impressions on the paper.

When I finally got my pencil to work, I tried it again. I found that my drawing had a kind of strength—a funny, semi-Picasso-like strength—which appealed to me. The reason I felt good about that drawing was, I knew it was impossible to draw well that way, and therefore it didn’t have to be good—and that’s really what the loosening up was all about. I had thought that “loosen up” meant “make sloppy drawings,” but it really meant to relax and riot worry about how the drawing is going to come out.

I made a lot of progress in the class, and I was feeling pretty good. Up until the last session, all the models we had were rather heavy and out of shape; they were rather interesting to draw. But in the last class we had a model who was a nifty blonde, perfectly proportioned. It was then that I discovered that I still didn’t know how to draw: I couldn’t make anything come out that looked anything like this beautiful girl! With the other models, if you draw something a little too big or bit too small, it doesn’t make any difference because it’s all out of shape anyway. But when you’re trying to draw something that’s so well put together, you can’t fool yourself: It’s got to be just right!

During one of the breaks I overheard a guy who could really draw asking this model whether she posed privately. She said yes. “Good. But I don’t have a studio yet. I’ll have to work that out first.”

I figured I could learn a lot from this guy, and I’d never get another chance to draw this nifty model unless I did something. “Excuse me,” I said to him, “I have a room downstairs in my house that could be used as a studio.”

They both agreed. I took a few of the guy’s drawings to my friend Jerry, but he was aghast. “Those aren’t so good,” he said. He tried to explain why, but I never really understood.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art. I had very little appreciation for things artistic, and only very rarely, such as once when I was in a museum in Japan. I saw a painting done on brown paper of bamboo, and what was beautiful about it to me was that it was perfectly poised between being just some brush strokes and being bamboo—I could make it go back and forth.

The summer after the drawing class I was in Italy for a science conference and I thought I’d like to see the Sistine Chapel. I got there very early in the morning, bought my ticket before anybody else, and ran up the stairs as soon as the place opened. I therefore had the unusual pleasure of looking at the whole chapel for a moment, in silent awe, before anybody else came in.

Soon the tourists came, and there were crowds of people milling around, talking different languages, pointing at this and that. I’m walking around, looking at the ceiling for a while. Then my eye came down a little bit and I saw some big, framed pictures, and I thought, “Gee! I never knew about these!”

Unfortunately I’d left my guidebook at the hotel, but I thought to myself, “I know why these panels aren’t famous; they aren’t any good.” But then I looked at another one, and I said, “Wow! That’s a good one.” I looked at the others. “That’s good too, so is that one, but that one’s lousy.” I had never heard of these panels, but I decided that they were all good except for two.

I went into a place called the Sala de Raphael—the Raphael Room—and I noticed the same phenomenon. I thought to myself, “Raphael is irregular. He doesn’t always succeed. Sometimes he’s very good. Sometimes it’s just junk.”

When I got back to my hotel, I looked at the guidebook. In the part about the Sistine Chapel: “Below the paintings by Michelangelo there are fourteen panels by Botticelli, Perugino”—all these great artists—”and two by So-and-so, which are of no significance.” This was a terrific excitement to me, that I also could tell the difference between a beautiful work of art and one that’s not, without being able to define it. As a scientist you always think you know what you’re doing, so you tend to distrust the artist who says, “It’s great,” or “It’s no good,” and then is not able to explain to you why, as Jerry did with those drawings I took him. But here I was, sunk: I could do it too!

In the Raphael Room the secret turned out to be that only some of the paintings were made by the great master; the rest were made by students. I had liked the ones by Raphael. This was a big jab for my self-confidence in my ability to appreciate art.

Anyway, the guy from the art class and the nifty model came over to my house a number of times and I tried to draw her and learn from him. After many attempts I finally drew what I felt was a really nice picture—it was a portrait of her head—and I got very excited about this first success.

I had enough confidence to ask an old friend of mine named Steve Demitriades if his beautiful wife would pose for me, and in return I would give him the portrait. He laughed. “If she wants to waste her time posing for you, it’s all right with me, ha, ha, ha.”

I worked very hard on her portrait, and when he saw it, he turned over to my side completely: “It’s just wonderful!” he exclaimed. “Can you get a photographer to make copies of it? I want to send one to my mother in Greece!” His mother had never seen the girl he married. That was very exciting to me, to think that I had improved to the point where someone wanted one of my drawings.

A similar thing happened at a small art exhibit that some guy at Caltech had arranged, where I contributed two drawings and a painting. He said, “We oughta put a price on the drawings.”

I thought, “That’s silly! I’m not trying to sell them.”

“It makes the exhibition more interesting. If you don’t mind parting with them, just put a price on.”

After the show the guy told me that a girl had bought one of my drawings and wanted to speak to me to find out more about it.

The drawing was called “The Magnetic Field of the Sun.” For this particular drawing I had borrowed one of those beautiful pictures of the solar prominences taken at the solar laboratory in Colorado. Because I understood how the sun’s magnetic field was holding up the flames and had, by that time, developed some technique for drawing magnetic field lines (it was similar to a girl’s flowing hair), I wanted to draw something beautiful that no artist would think to draw: the rather complicated and twisting lines of the magnetic field, close together here and spreading out there.

I explained all this to her, and showed her the picture that gave me the idea.

She told me this story: She and her husband had gone to the exhibit, and they both liked the drawing very much. “Why don’t we buy it?” she suggested.

Her husband was the kind of a man who could never do anything right away. “Let’s think about it a while,” he said.

She realized his birthday was a few months ahead, so she went back the same day and bought it herself.

That night when he came home from work, he was depressed. She finally got it out of him: He thought it would be nice to buy her that picture, but when he went back to the exhibit, he was told that the picture had already been sold. So she had it to surprise him on his birthday.

What I got out of that story was something still very new to me: I understood at last what art is really for, at least in certain respects. It gives somebody, individually, pleasure. You can make something that somebody likes so much that they’re depressed, or they’re happy, on account of that damn thing you made! In science, it’s sort of general and large: You don’t know the individuals who have appreciated it directly.

I understood that to sell a drawing is not to make money, but to be sure that it’s in the home of someone who really wants it; someone who would feel bad if they didn’t have it. This was interesting.

So I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn’t want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn’t supposed to be able to draw, isn’t that wonderful, so I made up a false name. My friend Dudley Wright suggested “Au Fait,” which means “It is done” in French. I spelled it O-f-e-y, which turned out to be a name the blacks used for “whitey.” But after all, I was whitey, so it was all right.

One of my models wanted me to make a drawing for her, but she didn’t have the money. (Models don’t have money; if they did, they wouldn’t be modeling.) She offered to pose three times free if I would give her a drawing.

“On the contrary,” I said. “I’ll give you three drawings if you’ll pose once for nothing.”

She put one of the drawings I gave her on the wall in her small room, and soon her boyfriend noticed it. He liked it so much that he wanted to commission a portrait of her. He would pay me sixty dollars. (The money was getting pretty good now.)

Then she got the idea to be my agent: She could earn a little extra money by going around selling my drawings, saying, “There’s a new artist in Altadena …” It was fun to be in a different world! She arranged to have some of my drawings put on display at Bullock’s, Pasadena’s most elegant department store. She and the lady from the art section picked out some drawings—drawings of plants that I had made early on (that I didn’t like)—and had them all framed. Then I got a signed document from Bullock’s saying that they had such-and-such drawings on consignment. Of course nobody bought any of them, but otherwise I was a big success: I had my drawings on sale at Bullock’s! It was fun to have them there, just so I could say one day that I had reached that pinnacle of success in the art world.

Most of my models I got through Jerry, but I also tried to get models on my own. Whenever I met a young woman who looked as if she would be interesting to draw, I would ask her to pose for me. It always ended up that I would draw her face, because I didn’t know exactly how to bring up the subject of posing nude.

Once when I was over at Jerry’s, I said to his wife Dabney, “I can never get the girls to pose nude: I don’t know how Jerry does it!”

“Well, did you ever ask them?”

“Oh! I never thought of that.”

The next girl I met that I wanted to pose for me was a Caltech student. I asked her if she would pose nude. “Certainly,” she said, and there we were! So it was easy. I guess there was so much in the back of my mind that I thought it was somehow wrong to ask.

I’ve done a lot of drawing by now, and I’ve gotten so I like to draw nudes best. For all I know it’s not art, exactly; it’s a mixture. Who knows the percentages?

One model I met through Jerry had been a Playboy playmate. She was tall and gorgeous. However, she thought she was too tall. Every girl in the world, looking at her, would have been jealous. When she would come into a room, she’d be half stooped over. I tried to teach her, when she was posing, to please stand up, because she was so elegant and striking. I finally talked her into that.

Then she had another worry: she’s got “dents” near her groin. I had to get out a book of anatomy to show her that it’s the attachment of the muscles to the ilium, and to explain to her that you can’t see these dents on everybody; to see them, everything must be just right, in perfect proportion, like she was. I learned from her that every woman is worried about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.

I wanted to draw a picture of this model in color, in pastels, just to experiment. I thought I would first make a sketch in charcoal, which would be later covered with the pastel. When I got through with this charcoal drawing that I had made without worrying how it was going to look, I realized that it was one of the best drawings I had ever made. I decided to leave it, and forget about the pastels for that one.

My “agent” looked at it and wanted to take it around.

“You can’t sell that,” I said, “it’s on newsprint.”

“Oh, never mind,” she said.

A few weeks later she came back with this picture in a beautiful wooden frame with a red band and a gold edge. It’s a funny thing which must make artists, generally, unhappy—how much improved a drawing gets when you put a frame around it. My agent told me that a particular lady got all excited about the drawing and they took it to a picture framer. He told them that there were special techniques for mounting drawings on newsprint: Impregnate it with plastic, do this, do that. So this lady goes to all that trouble over this drawing I had made, and then has my agent bring it back to me. “I think the artist would like to see how lovely it is, framed,” she said.

I certainly did. There was another example of the direct pleasure somebody got out of one of my pictures. So it was a real kick selling the drawings.

There was a period when there were topless restaurants in town: You could go there for lunch or dinner, and the girls would dance without a top, and after a while without anything. One of these places, it turned out, was only a mile and a half away from my house, so I went there very often. I’d sit in one of the booths and work a little physics on the paper placemats with the scalloped edges, and sometimes I’d draw one of the dancing girls or one of the customers, just to practice.

My wife Gweneth, who is English, had a good attitude about my going to this place. She said, “The Englishmen have clubs they go to.” So it was something like my club.

There were pictures hanging around the place, but I didn’t like them much. They were these fluorescent colors on black velvet—kind of ugly—a girl taking off her sweater, or something. Well, I had a rather nice drawing I had made of my model Kathy, so I gave it to the owner of the restaurant to put up on the wall, and he was delighted.

Giving him the drawing turned out to produce some useful results. The owner became very friendly to me, and would give me free drinks all the time. Now, every time I would come in to the restaurant a waitress would come over with my free 7-Up. I’d watch the girls dance, do a little physics, prepare a lecture, or draw a little bit. If I got a little tired, I’d watch the entertainment for a while, and then do a little more work. The owner knew I didn’t want to be disturbed, so if a drunk man came over and started to talk to me, right away a waitress would come and get the guy out of there. If a girl came over, he would do nothing. We had a very good relationship. His name was Gianonni.

The other effect of my drawing on display was that people would ask him about it. One day a guy came over to me and said, “Gianonni tells me you made that picture.”

“Yeah.”

“Good. I’d like to commission a drawing.”

“All right; what would you like?”

“I want a picture of a nude toreador girl being charged by a bull with a man’s head.”

“Well, uh, it would help me a little if I had some idea of what this drawing is for.”

“I want it for my business establishment.”

“What kind of business establishment?”

“It’s for a massage parlor: you know, private rooms, masseuses—get the idea?”

“Yeah, I get the idea.” I didn’t want to draw a nude toreador girl being charged by a bull with a man’s head, so I tried to talk him out of it. “How do you think that looks to the customers, and how does it make the girls feel? The men come in there and you get ‘em all excited with this picture. Is that the way you want ‘em to treat the girls?”

He’s not convinced.

“Suppose the cops come in and they see this picture, and you’re claiming it’s a massage parlor.”

“OK, OK,” he says; “You’re right. I’ve gotta change it. What I want is a picture that, if the cops look at it, is perfectly OK for a massage parlor, but if a customer looks at it, it gives him ideas.”

“OK,” I said. We arranged it for sixty dollars, and I began to work on the drawing. First, I had to figure out how to do it. I thought and I thought, and I often felt I would have been better off drawing the nude toreador girl in the first place!

Finally I figured out how to do it: I would draw a slave girl in imaginary Rome, massaging some important Roman—a senator, perhaps. Since she’s a slave girl, she has a certain look on her face. She knows what’s going to happen next, and she’s sort of resigned to it.

I worked very hard on this picture. I used Kathy as the model. Later, I got another model for the man. I did lots of studies, and soon the cost for the models was already eighty dollars. I didn’t care about the money; I liked the challenge of having to do a commission. Finally I ended up with a picture of a muscular man lying on a table with the slave girl massaging him: she’s wearing a kind of toga that covers one breast—the other one was nude—and I got the expression of resignation on her face just right.

I was just about ready to deliver my commissioned masterpiece to the massage parlor when Gianonni told me that the guy had been arrested and was in jail. So I asked the girls at the topless restaurant if they knew any good massage parlors around Pasadena that would like to hang my drawing in the lobby.

They gave me names and locations of places in and around Pasadena and told me things like “When you go to the Such-and-such massage parlor, ask for Frank—he’s a pretty good guy. If he’s not there, don’t go in.” Or “Don’t talk to Eddie. Eddie would never understand the value of a drawing.”

The next day I rolled up my picture, put it in the back of my station wagon, and my wife Gweneth wished me good luck as I set out to visit the brothels of Pasadena to sell my drawing.

Just before I went to the first place on my list, I thought to myself, “You know, before I go anywhere else, I oughta check at the place he used to have. Maybe it’s still open, and perhaps the new manager wants my drawing.” I went over there and knocked on the door. It opened a little bit, and I saw a girl’s eye. “Do we know you?” she asked.

“No, you don’t, but how would you like to have a drawing that would be appropriate for your entrance hall?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but we’ve already contracted an artist to make a drawing for us, and he’s working on it.”

“I’m the artist,” I said, “and your drawing is ready!”

It turns out that the guy, as he was going to jail, told his wife about our arrangement. So I went in and showed them the drawing.

The guy’s wife and his sister, who were now running the place, were not entirely pleased with it; they wanted the girls to see it. I hung it up on the wall, there in the lobby, and all the girls came out from the various rooms in the back and started to make comments.

One girl said she didn’t like the expression on the slave girl’s face. “She doesn’t look happy,” she said. “She should be smiling.”

I said to her, “Tell me—while you’re massaging a guy, and he’s not lookin’ at you, are you smiling?”

“Oh, no!” she said. “I feel exactly like she looks! But it’s not right to put it in the picture.”

I left it with them, but after a week of worrying about it back and forth, they decided they didn’t want it. It turned out that the real reason that they didn’t want it was the one nude breast. I tried to explain that my drawing was a tone-down of the original request, but they said they had different ideas about it than the guy did. I thought the irony of people running such an establishment being prissy about one nude breast was amusing, and I took the drawing home.

My businessman friend Dudley Wright saw the drawing and I told him the story about it. He said, “You oughta triple its price. With art, nobody is really sure of its value, so people often think, ‘If the price is higher, it must be more valuable!’”

I said, “You’re crazy!” but, just for fun, I bought a twenty-dollar frame and mounted the drawing so it would be ready for the next customer.

Some guy from the weather forecasting business saw the drawing I had given Gianonni and asked if I had others. I invited him and his wife to my “studio” downstairs in my home, and they asked about the newly framed drawing. “That one is two hundred dollars.” (I had multiplied sixty by three and added twenty for the frame.) The next day they came back and bought it. So the massage parlor drawing ended up in the office of a weather forecaster.

One day there was a police raid on Gianonni’s, and some of the dancers were arrested. Someone wanted to stop Gianonni from putting on topless dancing shows, and Gianonni didn’t want to stop. So there was a big court case about it; it was in all the local papers.

Gianonni went around to all the customers and asked them if they would testify in support of him. Everybody had an excuse: “I run a day camp, and if the parents see that I’m going to this place, they won’t send their kids to my camp …”

Or, “I’m in the such-and-such business, and if it’s publicized that I come down here, we’ll lose customers.”

I think to myself, “I’m the only free man in here. I haven’t any excuse! I like this place, and I’d like to see it continue. I don’t see anything wrong with topless dancing.” So I said to Gianonni, “Yes, I’ll be glad to testify.”

In court the big question was, is topless dancing acceptable to the community—do community standards allow it?

The lawyer from the defense tried to make me into an expert on community standards. He asked me if I went into other bars.

“Yes.”

“And how many times per week would you typically go to Gianonni’s?”

“Five, six times a week.” (That got into the papers: The Caltech professor of physics goes to see topless dancing six times a week.)

“What sections of the community were represented at Gianonni’s?”

“Nearly every section: there were guys from the real estate business, a guy from the city governing board, workmen from the gas station, guys from engineering firms, a professor of physics

“So would you say that topless entertainment is acceptable to the community, given that so many sections of it are watching it and enjoying it?”

“I need to know what you mean by ‘acceptable to the community.’ Nothing is accepted by everybody, so what percentage of the community must accept something in order for it to be ‘acceptable to the community’?”

The lawyer suggests a figure. The other lawyer objects. The judge calls a recess, and they all go into chambers for 15 minutes before they can decide that “acceptable to the community” means accepted by 50% of the community.

In spite of the fact that I made them be precise, I had no precise numbers as evidence, so I said, “I believe that topless dancing is accepted by more than 50% of the community, and is therefore acceptable to the community.”

Gianonni temporarily lost the case, and his, or another one very similar to it, went ultimately to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, his place stayed open, and I got still more free 7-Ups.

Around that time there were some attempts to develop an interest in art at Caltech. Somebody contributed the money to convert an old plant sciences building into some art studios. Equipment and supplies were bought and provided for the students, and they hired an artist from South Africa to coordinate and support the art activities around Caltech.

Various people came in to teach classes. I got Jerry Zorthian to teach a drawing class, and some guy came in to teach lithography, which I tried to learn.

The South African artist came over to my house one time to look at my drawings. He said he thought it would be fun to have a one-man show. This time I was cheating: If I hadn’t been a professor at Caltech, they would have never thought my pictures were worth it.

“Some of my better drawings have been sold, and I feel uncomfortable calling the people,” I said.

“You don’t have to worry, Mr. Feynman,” he reassured me. “You won’t have to call them up. We will make all the arrangements and operate the exhibit officially and correctly.”

I gave him a list of people who had bought my drawings, and they soon received a telephone call from him: “We understand that you have an Ofey.”

“Oh, yes!”

“We are planning to have an exhibition of Ofeys, and we’re wondering if you would consider lending it to us.” Of course they were delighted.

The exhibition was held in the basement of the Athenaeum, the Caltech faculty club. Everything was like the real thing: All the pictures had titles, and those that had been taken on consignment from their owners had due recognition: “Lent by Mr. Gianonni,” for instance.

One drawing was a portrait of the beautiful blonde model from the art class, which I had originally intended to be a study of shading: I put a light at the level of her legs a bit to the side and pointed it upwards. As she sat, I tried to draw the shadows as they were—her nose cast its shadow rather unnaturally across her face—so they wouldn’t look so bad. I drew her torso as well, so you could also see her breasts and the shadows they made. I stuck it in with the other drawings in the exhibit and called it “Madame Curie Observing the Radiations from Radium.” The message I intended to convey was, nobody thinks of Madame Curie as a woman, as feminine, with beautiful hair, bare breasts, and all that. They only think of the radium part.

A prominent industrial designer named Henry Dreyfuss invited various people to a reception at his home after the exhibition—the woman who had contributed money to support the arts, the president of Caltech and his wife, and so on.

One of these art-lovers came over and started up a conversation with me: “Tell me, Professor Feynman, do you draw from photographs or from models?”

“I always draw directly from a posed model.”

“Well, how did you get Madame Curie to pose for you?”

Around that time the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a similar idea to the one I had, that artists are far away from an understanding of science. My idea was that artists don’t understand the underlying generality and beauty of nature and her laws (and therefore cannot portray this in their art). The museum’s idea was that artists should know more about technology: they should become more familiar with machines and other applications of science.

The art museum organized a scheme in which they would get some of the really good artists of the day to go to various companies which volunteered some time and money to the project. The artists would visit these companies and snoop around until they saw something interesting that they could use in their work. The museum thought it might help if someone who knew something about technology could be a sort of liaison with the artists from time to time as they visited the companies. Since they knew I was fairly good at explaining things to people and I wasn’t a complete jackass when it came to art (actually, I think they knew I was trying to learn to draw)—at any rate, they asked me if I would do that, and I agreed.

It was lots of fun visiting the companies with the artists. What typically happened was, some guy would show us a tube that discharged sparks in beautiful blue, twisting patterns. The artists would get all excited and ask me how they could use it in an exhibit. What were the necessary conditions to make it work?

The artists were very interesting people. Some of them were absolute fakes: they would claim to be an artist, and everybody agreed they were an artist, but when you’d sit and talk to them, they’d make no sense whatsoever! One guy in particular, the biggest faker, always dressed funny; he had a big black bowler hat. He would answer your questions in an incomprehensible way, and when you’d try to find out more about what he said by asking him about some of the words he used, off we’d be in another direction! The only thing he contributed, ultimately, to the exhibit for art and technology was a portrait of himself.

Other artists I talked to would say things that made no sense at first, but they would go to great lengths to explain their ideas to me. One time I went somewhere, as a part of this scheme, with Robert Irwin. It was a two-day trip, and after a great effort of discussing back and forth, I finally understood what he was trying to explain to me, and I thought it was quite interesting and wonderful.

Then there were the artists who had absolutely no idea about the real world. They thought that scientists were some kind of grand magicians who could make anything, and would say things like, “I want to make a picture in three dimensions where the figure is suspended in space and it glows and flickers.” They made up the world they wanted, and had no idea what was reasonable or unreasonable to make.

Finally there was an exhibit, and I was asked to be on a panel which judged the works of art. Although there was some good stuff that was inspired by the artists’ visiting the companies, I thought that most of the good works of art were things that were turned in at the last minute out of desperation, and didn’t really have anything to do with technology. All of the other members of the panel disagreed, and I found myself in some difficulty. I’m no good at criticizing art, and I shouldn’t have been on the panel in the first place.

There was a guy there at the county art museum named Maurice Tuchman who really knew what he was talking about when it came to art. He knew that I had had this one-man show at Caltech. He said, “You know, you’re never going to draw again.”

“What? That’s ridiculous! Why should I never.

“Because you’ve had a one-man show, and you’re only an amateur.”

Although I did draw after that, I never worked as hard, with the same energy and intensity, as I did before. I never sold a drawing after that, either. He was a smart fella, and I learned a lot from him. I could have learned a lot more, if I weren’t so stubborn!

Is Electricity Fire?

In the early fifties I suffered temporarily from a disease of middle age: I used to give philosophical talks about science—how science satisfies curiosity, how it gives you a new world view, how it gives man the ability to do things, how it gives him power—and the question is, in view of the recent development of the atomic bomb, is it a good idea to give man that much power? I also thought about the relation of science and religion, and it was about this time when I was invited to a conference in New York that was going to discuss “the ethics of equality.”

There had already been a conference among the older people, somewhere on Long Island, and this year they decided to have some younger people come in and discuss the position papers they had worked out in the other conference.

Before I got there, they sent around a list of “books you might find interesting to read, and please send us any books you want others to read, and we will store them in the library so that others may read them.”

So here comes this wonderful list of books. I start down the first page: I haven’t read a single one of the books, and I feel very uneasy—I hardly belong. I look at the second page: I haven’t read a single one. I found out, after looking through the whole list, that I haven’t read any of the books. I must be an idiot, an illiterate! There were wonderful books there, like Thomas Jefferson On Freedom, or something like that, and there were a few authors I had read. There was a book by Heisenberg, one by Schrodinger, and one by Einstein, but they were something like Einstein, My Later Years and Schrodinger, What Is Life—different from what I had read. So I had a feeling that I was out of my depth, and that I shouldn’t be in this. Maybe I could just sit quietly and listen.

I go to the first big introductory meeting, and a guy gets up and explains that we have two problems to discuss. The first one is fogged up a little bit—something about ethics and equality, but I don’t understand what the problem exactly is. And the second one is, “We are going to demonstrate by our efforts a way that we can have a dialogue among people of different fields.” There was an international lawyer, a historian, a Jesuit priest, a rabbi, a scientist (me), and so on.

Well, right away my logical mind goes like this: The second problem I don’t have to pay any attention to, because if it works, it works; and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work—we don’t have to prove that we can have a dialogue, and discuss that we can have a dialogue, if we haven’t got any dialogue to talk about! So the primary problem is the first one, which I didn’t understand.

I was ready to put my hand up and say, “Would you please define the problem better,” but then I thought, “No, I’m the ignoramus; I’d better listen. I don’t want to start trouble right away.”

The subgroup I was in was supposed to discuss the “ethics of equality in education.” In the meetings of our subgroup the Jesuit priest was always talking about “the fragmentation of knowledge.” He would say, “The real problem in the ethics of equality in education is the fragmentation of knowledge.” This Jesuit was looking back into the thirteenth century when the Catholic Church was in charge of all education, and the whole world was simple. There was God, and everything came from God; it was all organized. But today, it’s not so easy to understand everything. So knowledge has become fragmented. I felt that “the fragmentation of knowledge” had nothing to do with “it,” but “it” had never been defined, so there was no way for me to prove that.

Finally I said, “What is the ethical problem associated with the fragmentation of knowledge?” He would only answer me with great clouds of fog, and I’d say, “I don’t understand,” and everybody else would say they did understand, and they tried to explain it to me, but they couldn’t explain it to me!

So the others in the group told me to write down why I thought the fragmentation of knowledge was not a problem of ethics. I went back to my dormitory room and I wrote out carefully, as best I could, what I thought the subject of “the ethics of equality in education” might be, and I gave some examples of the kinds of problems I thought we might be talking about, For instance, in education, you increase differences. If someone’s good at something, you try to develop his ability, which results in differences, or inequalities. So if education increases inequality, is this ethical? Then, after giving some more examples, I went on to say that while “the fragmentation of knowledge” is a difficulty because the complexity of the world makes it hard to learn things, in light of my definition of the realm of the subject, I couldn’t see how the fragmentation of knowledge had anything to do with anything approximating what the ethics of equality in education might more or less be.

The next day I brought my paper into the meeting, and the guy said, “Yes, Mr. Feynman has brought up some very interesting questions we ought to discuss, and we’ll put them aside for some possible future discussion.” They completely missed the point. I was trying to define the problem, and then show how “the fragmentation of knowledge” didn’t have anything to do with it. And the reason that nobody got anywhere in that conference was that they hadn’t clearly defined the subject of “the ethics of equality in education,” and therefore no one knew exactly what they were supposed to talk about.

There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read—something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself, “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means.”

So I stopped—at random—and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”

Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: “Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio,” and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn’t understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.

There was only one thing that happened at that meeting that was pleasant or amusing. At this conference, every word that every guy said at the plenary session was so important that they had a stenotypist there, typing every goddamn thing. Somewhere on the second day the stenotypist came up to me and said, “What profession are you? Surely not a professor.”

“I am a professor,” I said.

“Of what?”

“Of physics—science.”

“Oh! That must be the reason,” he said.

“Reason for what?”

He said, “You see, I’m a stenotypist, and I type everything that is said here. Now, when the other fellas talk, I type what they say, but I don’t understand what they’re saying. But every time you get up to ask a question or to say something, I understand exactly what you mean—what the question is, and what you’re saying—so I thought you can’t be a professor!”

There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology place, a very nice, very Jewish man, gave a speech. It was a good speech, and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, when I’m telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we have atomic weapons, any war and we’re doomed, so therefore the right way out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we should give up nearly everything to the other countries until we’re all even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses on the way home.

The next day one of the guys in our group said, “I think that speech last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the summary of our conference.”

I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there’s only X amount of stuff in the world, that somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn’t take into account the real reason for the differences between countries—that is, the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn’t the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time.

The conference made me so nervous that a girl I knew in New York had to calm me down. “Look,” she said, “you’re shaking! You’ve gone absolutely nuts! Just take it easy, and don’t take it so seriously. Back away a minute and look at what it is.” So I thought about the conference, how crazy it was, and it wasn’t so bad. But if someone were to ask me to participate in something like that again, I’d shy away from it like mad—I mean zero! No! Absolutely not! And I still get invitations for this kind of thing today.

When it came time to evaluate the conference at the end, the others told how much they got out of it, how successful it was, and so on. When they asked me, I said, “This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There’s a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!

Even worse, at the end of the conference they were going to have another meeting, but this time the public would come, and the guy in charge of our group has the nerve to say that since we’ve worked out so much, there won’t be any time for public discussion, so we’ll just tell the public all the things we’ve worked out. My eyes bugged out: I didn’t think we had worked out a damn thing!

Finally, when we were discussing the question of whether we had developed a way of having a dialogue among people of different disciplines—our second basic “problem”—I said that I noticed something interesting. Each of us talked about what we thought the “ethics of equality” was, from our own point of view, without paying any attention to the other guy’s point of view. For example, the historian proposed that the way to understand ethical problems is to look historically at how they evolved and how they developed; the international lawyer suggested that the way to do it is to see how in fact people actually act in different situations and make their arrangements; the Jesuit priest was always referring to “the fragmentation of knowledge”; and I, as a scientist, proposed that we should isolate the problem in a way analogous to Galileo’s techniques for experiments; and so on. “So, in my opinion,” I said, “we had no dialogue at all. Instead, we had nothing but chaos!”

Of course I was attacked, from all around. “Don’t you think that order can come from chaos?”

“Uh, well, as a general principle, or … I didn’t understand what to do with a question like “Can order come from chaos?” Yes, no, what of it?

There were a lot of fools at that conference—pompous fools—and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible! And that’s what I got at the conference, a bunch of pompous fools, and I got very upset. I’m not going to get upset like that again, so I won’t participate in interdisciplinary conferences any more.

A footnote: While I was at the conference, I stayed at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where young rabbis—I think they were Orthodox—were studying. Since I have a Jewish background, I knew of some of the things they told me about the Talmud, but I had never seen the Talmud. It was very interesting. It’s got big pages, and in a little square in the corner of the page is the original Talmud, and then in a sort of L-shaped margin, all around this square, are commentaries written by different people. The Talmud has evolved, and everything has been discussed again and again, all very carefully, in a medieval kind of reasoning. I think the commentaries were shut down around the thirteen– or fourteen– or fifteen-hundreds—there hasn’t been any modern commentary. The Talmud is a wonderful book, a great, big potpourri of things: trivial questions, and difficult questions—for example, problems of teachers, and how to teach—and then some trivia again, and so on. The students told me that the Talmud was never translated, something I thought was curious, since the book is so valuable,

One day, two or three of the young rabbis came to me and said, “We realize that we can’t study to be rabbis in the modern world without knowing something about science, so we’d like to ask you some questions.”

Of course there are thousands of places to find out about science, and Columbia University was right near there, but I wanted to know what kinds of questions they were interested in.

They said, “Well, for instance, is electricity fire?”

“No,” I said, “but… what is the problem?”

They said, “In the Talmud it says you’re not supposed to make fire on a Saturday, so our question is, can we use electrical things on Saturdays?”

I was shocked. They weren’t interested in science at all! The only way science was influencing their lives was so they might be able to interpret better the Talmud! They weren’t interested in the world outside, in natural phenomena; they were only interested in resolving some question brought up in the Talmud.

And then one day—I guess it was a Saturday—I want to go up in the elevator, and there’s a guy standing near the elevator. The elevator comes, I go in, and he goes in with me. I say, “Which floor?” and my hand’s ready to push one of the buttons.

“No, no!” he says, “I’m supposed to push the buttons for you.”

“What?”

“Yes! The boys here can’t push the buttons on Saturday, so I have to do it for them. You see, I’m not Jewish, so it’s all right for me to push the buttons. I stand near the elevator, and they tell me what floor, and I push the button for them.”

Well, this really bothered me, so I decided to trap the students in a logical discussion. I had been brought up in a Jewish home, so I knew the kind of nitpicking logic to use, and I thought, “Here’s fun!”

My plan went like this: I’d start off by asking, “Is the Jewish viewpoint a viewpoint that any man can have? Because if it is not, then it’s certainly not something that is truly valuable for humanity … yak, yak, yak.” And then they would have to say, “Yes, the Jewish viewpoint is good for any man.”

Then I would steer them around a little more by asking, “Is it ethical for a man to hire another man to do something which is unethical for him to do? Would you hire a man to rob for you, for instance?” And I keep working them into the channel, very slowly, and very carefully until I’ve got them—trapped!

And do you know what happened? They’re rabbinical students, right? They were ten times better than I was! As soon as they saw I could put them in a hole, they went twist, turn, twist—I can’t remember how—and they were free! I thought I had come up with an original idea—phooey! It had been discussed in the Talmud for ages! So they cleaned me up just as easy as pie—they got right out.

Finally I tried to assure the rabbinical students that the electric spark that was bothering them when they pushed the elevator buttons was not fire. I said, “Electricity is not fire. It’s not a chemical process, as fire is.”

“Oh?” they said.

“Of course, there’s electricity in amongst the atoms in a fire.”

“Aha!” they said.

“And in every other phenomenon that occurs in the world.”

I even proposed a practical solution for eliminating the spark. “If that’s what’s bothering you, you can put a condenser across the switch, so the electricity will go on and off without any spark whatsoever—anywhere.” But for some reason, they didn’t like that idea either.

It really was a disappointment. Here they are, slowly coming to life, only to better interpret the Talmud. Imagine! In modern times like this, guys are studying to go into society and do something—to be a rabbi—and the only way they think that science might be interesting is because their ancient, provincial, medieval problems are being confounded slightly by some new phenomena.

Something else happened at that time which is worth mentioning here. One of the questions the rabbinical students and I discussed at some length was why it is that in academic things, such as theoretical physics, there is a higher proportion of Jewish kids than their proportion in the general population. The rabbinical students thought the reason was that the Jews have a history of respecting learning: They respect their rabbis, who are really teachers, and they respect education. The Jews pass on this tradition in their families all the time, so that if a boy is a good student, it’s as good as, if not better than, being a good football player.

It was the same afternoon that I was reminded how true it is. I was invited to one of the rabbinical students’ home, and he introduced me to his mother, who had just come back from Washington, D.C. She clapped her hands together, in ecstasy, and said, “Oh! My day is complete. Today I met a general, and a professor!”

I realized that there are not many people who think it’s just as important, and just as nice, to meet a professor as to meet a general. So I guess there’s something in what they said.

Judging Books by Their Covers

After the war, physicists were often asked to go to Washington and give advice to various sections of the government, especially the military. What happened, I suppose, is that since the scientists had made these bombs that were so important, the military felt we were useful for something.

Once I was asked to serve on a committee which was to evaluate various weapons for the army, and I wrote a letter back which explained that I was only a theoretical physicist, and I didn’t know anything about weapons for the army.

The army responded that they had found in their experience that theoretical physicists were very useful to them in making decisions, so would I please reconsider?

I wrote back again and said I didn’t really know anything, and doubted I could help them.

Finally I got a letter from the Secretary of the Army, which proposed a compromise: I would come to the first meeting, where I could listen and see whether I could make a contribution or not. Then I could decide whether I should continue.

I said I would, of course. What else could I do?

I went down to Washington and the first thing that I went to was a cocktail party to meet everybody. There were generals and other important characters from the army, and everybody talked. It was pleasant enough.

One guy in a uniform came to me and told me that the army was glad that physicists were advising the military because it had a lot of problems. One of the problems was that tanks use up their fuel very quickly and thus can’t go very far. So the question was how to refuel them as they’re going along. Now this guy had the idea that, since the physicists can get energy out of uranium, could I work out a way in which we could use silicon dioxide—sand, dirt—as a fuel? If that were possible, then all this tank would have to do would be to have a little scoop underneath, and as it goes along, it would pick up the dirt and use it for fuel! He thought that was a great idea, and that all I had to do was to work out the details. That was the kind of problem I thought we would be talking about in the meeting the next day.

I went to the meeting and noticed that some guy who had introduced me to all the people at the cocktail party was sitting next to me. He was apparently some flunky assigned to be at my side at all times. On my other side was some super general I had heard of before.

At the first session of the meeting they talked about some technical matters, and I made a few comments. But later on, near the end of the meeting, they began to discuss some problem of logistics, about which I knew nothing. It had to do with figuring out how much stuff you should have at different places at different times. And although I tried to keep my trap shut, when you get into a situation like that, where you’re sitting around a table with all these “important people” discussing these “important problems,” you can’t keep your mouth shut, even if you know nothing whatsoever! So I made some comments in that discussion, too.

During the next coffee break the guy who had been assigned to shepherd me around said, “I was very impressed by the things you said during the discussion. They certainly were an important contribution.”

I stopped and thought about my “contribution” to the logistics problem, and realized that a man like the guy who orders the stuff for Christmas at Macy’s would be better able to figure out how to handle problems like that than I. So I concluded: a) if I had made an important contribution, it was sheer luck; b) anybody else could have done as well, but most people could have done better, and c) this flattery should wake me up to the fact that I am not capable of contributing much.

Right after that they decided, in the meeting, that they could do better discussing the organization of scientific research (such as, should scientific development be under the Corps of Engineers or the Quartermaster Division?) than specific technical matters. I knew that if there was to be any hope of my making a real contribution, it would be only on some specific technical matter, and surely not on how to organize research in the army.

Until then I didn’t let on any of my feelings about the situation to the chairman of the meeting—the big shot who had invited me in the first place. As we were packing our bags to leave, he said to me, all smiles, “You’ll be joining us, then, for the next meeting …”

“No, I won’t.” I could see his face change suddenly. He was very surprised that I would say no, after making those “contributions.”

In the early sixties, a lot of my friends were still giving advice to the government. Meanwhile, I was having no feeling of social responsibility and resisting, as much as possible, offers to go to Washington, which took a certain amount of courage in those times.

I was giving a series of freshman physics lectures at that time, and after one of them, Tom Harvey, who assisted me in putting on the demonstrations, said, “You oughta see what’s happening to mathematics in schoolbooks! My daughter comes home with a lot of crazy stuff!”

I didn’t pay much attention to what he said.

But the next day I got a telephone call from a pretty famous lawyer here in Pasadena, Mr. Norris, who was at that time on the State Board of Education. He asked me if I would serve on the State Curriculum Commission, which had to choose the new schoolbooks for the state of California. You see, the state had a law that all of the schoolbooks used by all of the kids in all of the public schools have to be chosen by the State Board of Education, so they have a committee to look over the books and to give them advice on which books to take.

It happened that a lot of the books were on a new method of teaching arithmetic that they called “new math,” and since usually the only people to look at the books were schoolteachers or administrators in education, they thought it would be a good idea to have somebody who uses mathematics scientifically, who knows what the end product is and what we’re trying to teach it for, to help in the evaluation of the schoolbooks.

I must have had, by this time, a guilty feeling about not cooperating with the government, because I agreed to get on this committee.

Immediately I began getting letters and telephone calls from book publishers. They said things like, “We’re very glad to hear you’re on the committee because we really wanted a scientific guy … and “It’s wonderful to have a scientist on the committee, because our books are scientifically oriented …”

But they also said things like, “We’d like to explain to you what our book is about …” and “We’ll be very glad to help you in any way we can to judge our books …”

That seemed to me kind of crazy. I’m an objective scientist, and it seemed to me that since the only thing the kids in school are going to get is the books (and the teachers get the teacher’s manual, which I would also get), any extra explanation from the company was a distortion. So I didn’t want to speak to any of the publishers and always replied, “You don’t have to explain; I’m sure the books will speak for themselves.”

I represented a certain district, which comprised most of the Los Angeles area except for the city of Los Angeles, which was represented by a very nice lady from the L.A. school system named Mrs. Whitehouse. Mr. Norris suggested that I meet her and find out what the committee did and how it worked.

Mrs. Whitehouse started out telling me about the stuff they were going to talk about in the next meeting (they had already had one meeting; I was appointed late). “They’re going to talk about the counting numbers.” I didn’t know what that was, but it turned out they were what I used to call integers. They had different names for everything, so I had a lot of trouble right from the start.

She told me how the members of the commission normally rated the new schoolbooks. They would get a relatively large number of copies of each book and would give them to various teachers and administrators in their district. Then they would get reports back on what these people thought about the books. Since I didn’t know a lot of teachers or administrators, and since I felt that I could, by reading the books myself, make up my mind as to how they looked to me, I chose to read all the books myself. (There were some people in my district who had expected to look at the books and wanted a chance to give their opinion. Mrs. Whitehouse offered to put their reports in with hers so they would feel better and I wouldn’t have to worry about their complaints. They were satisfied, and I didn’t get much trouble.)

A few days later a guy from the book depository called me up and said, “We’re ready to send you the books, Mr. Feynman; there are three hundred pounds.”

I was overwhelmed.

“It’s all right, Mr. Feynman; we’ll get someone to help you read them.”

I couldn’t figure out how you do that: you either read them or you don’t read them. I had a special bookshelf put in my study downstairs (the books took up seventeen feet), and began reading all the books that were going to be discussed in the next meeting. We were going to start out with the elementary schoolbooks.

It was a pretty big job, and I worked all the time at it down in the basement. My wife says that during this period it was like living over a volcano. It would be quiet for a while, but then all of a sudden, “BLLLLLOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!”—there would be a big explosion from the “volcano” below. The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for “sets”) which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren’t accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous—they weren’t smart enough to understand what was meant by “rigor.” They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn’t understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child.

I understood what they were trying to do. Many people thought we were behind the Russians after Sputnik, and some mathematicians were asked to give advice on how to teach math by using some of the rather interesting modern concepts of mathematics. The purpose was to enhance mathematics for the children who found it dull.

I’ll give you an example: They would talk about different bases of numbers—five, six, and so on—to show the possibilities. That would be interesting for a kid who could understand base ten—something to entertain his mind. But what they had turned it into, in these books, was that every child had to learn another base! And then the usual horror would come: “Translate these numbers, which are written in base seven, to base five.” Translating from one base to another is an utterly useless thing. If you can do it, maybe it’s entertaining; if you can’t do it, forget it. There’s no point to it.

Anyhow, I’m looking at all these books, all these books, and none of them has said anything about using arithmetic in science. If there are any examples on the use of arithmetic at all (most of the time it’s this abstract new modern nonsense), they are about things like buying stamps.

Finally I come to a book that says, “Mathematics is used in science in many ways. We will give you an example from astronomy, which is the science of stars.” I turn the page, and it says, “Red stars have a temperature of four thousand degrees, yellow stars have a temperature of five thousand degrees …”—so far, so good. It continues: “Green stars have a temperature of seven thousand degrees, blue stars have a temperature of ten thousand degrees, and violet stars have a temperature of … (some big number).” There are no green or violet stars, but the figures for the others are roughly correct. It’s vaguely right—but already, trouble! That’s the way everything was: Everything was written by somebody who didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, so it was a little bit wrong, always! And how we are going to teach well by using books written by people who don’t quite understand what they’re talking about, I cannot understand. I don’t know why, but the books are lousy; UNIVERSALLY LOUSY!

Anyway, I’m happy with this book, because it’s the first example of applying arithmetic to science. I’m a bit unhappy when I read about the stars’ temperatures, but I’m not very unhappy because it’s more or less right—it’s just an example of error. Then comes the list of problems. It says, “John and his father go out to look at the stars. John sees two blue stars and a red star. His father sees a green star, a violet star, and two yellow stars. What is the total temperature of the stars seen by John and his father?”—and I would explode in horror.

My wife would talk about the volcano downstairs. That’s only an example: it was perpetually like that. Perpetual absurdity! There’s no purpose whatsoever in adding the temperature of two stars. Nobody ever does that except, maybe, to then take the average temperature of the stars, but not to find out the total temperature of all the stars! It was awful! All it was was a game to get you to add, and they didn’t understand what they were talking about. It was like reading sentences with a few typographical errors, and then suddenly a whole sentence is written backwards. The mathematics was like that. Just hopeless!

Then I came to my first meeting. The other members had given some kind of ratings to some of the books, and they asked me what my ratings were. My rating was often different from theirs, and they would ask, “Why did you rate that book low?”

I would say the trouble with that book was this and this on page so-and-so—I had my notes.

They discovered that I was kind of a goldmine: I would tell them, in detail, what was good and bad in all the books; I had a reason for every rating.

I would ask them why they had rated this book so high, and they would say, “Let us hear what you thought about such and such a book.” I would never find out why they rated anything the way they did. Instead, they kept asking me what I thought.

We came to a certain book, part of a set of three supplementary books published by the same company, and they asked me what I thought about it.

I said, “The book depository didn’t send me that book, but the other two were nice.”

Someone tried repeating the question: “What do you think about that book?”

“I said they didn’t send me that one, so I don’t have any judgment on it.”

The man from the book depository was there, and he said, “Excuse me; I can explain that. I didn’t send it to you because that book hadn’t been completed yet. There’s a rule that you have to have every entry in by a certain time, and the publisher was a few days late with it. So it was sent to us with just the covers, and it’s blank in between. The company sent a note excusing themselves and hoping they could have their set of three books considered, even though the third one would be late.”

It turned out that the blank book had a rating by some of the other members! They couldn’t believe it was blank, because they had a rating. In fact, the rating for the missing book was a little bit higher than for the two others. The fact that there was nothing in the book had nothing to do with the rating.

I believe the reason for all this is that the system works this way: When you give books all over the place to people, they’re busy; they’re careless; they think, “Well, a lot of people are reading this book, SO it doesn’t make any difference.” And they put in some kind of number—some of them, at least; not all of them, but some of them. Then when you receive your reports, you don’t know why this particular book has fewer reports than the other books—that is, perhaps one book has ten, and this one only has six people reporting—so you average the rating of those who reported; you don’t average the ones who didn’t report, so you get a reasonable number. This process of averaging all the time misses the fact that there is absolutely nothing between the covers of the book!

I made that theory up because I saw what happened in the curriculum commission: For the blank book, only six out of the ten members were reporting, whereas with the other books, eight or nine out of the ten were reporting. And when they averaged the six, they got as good an average as when they averaged with eight or nine. They were very embarrassed to discover they were giving ratings to that book, and it gave me a little bit more confidence. It turned out the other members of the committee had done a lot of work in giving out the books and collecting reports, and had gone to sessions in which the book publishers would explain the books before they read them; I was the only guy on that commission who read all the books and didn’t get any information from the book publishers except what was in the books themselves, the things that would ultimately go to the schools.

This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by looking at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who looked at it carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China’s nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China’s nose is, and you average it. And that would be very “accurate” because you averaged so many people. But it’s no way to find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it, you don’t improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging.

At first we weren’t supposed to talk about the cost of the books. We were told how many books we could choose, so we designed a program which used a lot of supplementary books, because all the new textbooks had failures of one kind or another. The most serious failures were in the “new math” books: there were no applications; not enough word problems. There was no talk of selling stamps; instead there was too much talk about commutation and abstract things and not enough translation to situations in the world. What do you do: add, subtract, multiply, or divide? So we suggested some books which had some of that as supplementary—one or two for each classroom—in addition to a textbook for each student. We had it all worked out to balance everything, after much discussion.

When we took our recommendations to the Board of Education, they told us they didn’t have as much money as they had thought, so we’d have to go over the whole thing and cut out this and that, now taking the cost into consideration, and ruining what was a fairly balanced program, in which there was a chance for a teacher to find examples of the things (s)he needed.

Now that they changed the rules about how many books we could recommend and we had no more chance to balance, it was a pretty lousy program. When the senate budget committee got to it, the program was emasculated still further. Now it was really lousy! I was asked to appear before the state senators when the issue was being discussed, but I declined: By that time, having argued this stuff so much, I was tired. We had prepared our recommendations for the Board of Education, and I figured it was their job to present it to the state—which was legally right, but not politically sound. I shouldn’t have given up so soon, but to have worked so hard and discussed so much about all these books to make a fairly balanced program, and then to have the whole thing scrapped at the end—that was discouraging! The whole thing was an unnecessary effort that could have been turned around and done the opposite way: start with the cost of the books, and buy what you can afford.

What finally clinched it, and made me ultimately resign, was that the following year we were going to discuss science books. I thought maybe the science would be different, so I looked at a few of them.

The same thing happened: something would look good at first and then turn out to be horrifying. For example, there was a book that started out with four pictures: first there was a wind-up toy; then there was an automobile; then there was a boy riding a bicycle; then there was something else. And underneath each picture it said, “What makes it go?”

I thought, “I know what it is: They’re going to talk about mechanics, how the springs work inside the toy; about chemistry, how the engine of the automobile works; and biology, about how the muscles work.”

It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: “What makes it go? Everything goes because the sun is shining.” And then we would have fun discussing it:

“No, the toy goes because the spring is wound up,” I would say.

“How did the spring get wound up?” he would ask.

“I wound it up.”

“And how did you get moving?”

“From eating.”

“And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it’s because the sun is shining that all these things are moving.” That would get the concept across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun’s power.

I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, “Energy makes it go.” And for the boy on the bicycle, “Energy makes it go.” For everything, “Energy makes it go.”

Now that doesn’t mean anything. Suppose it’s “Wakalixes.” That’s the general principle: “Wakalixes makes it go.” There’s no knowledge coming in. The child doesn’t learn anything; it’s just a word!

What they should have done is to look at the wind-up toy, see that there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never mind “energy.” Later on, when the children know something about how the toy actually works, they can discuss the more general principles of energy.

It’s also not even true that “energy makes it go,” because if it stops, you could say, “energy makes it stop” just as well, What they’re talking about is concentrated energy being transformed into more dilute forms, which is a very subtle aspect of energy. Energy is neither increased nor decreased in these examples; it’s just changed from one form to another. And when the things stop, the energy is changed into heat, into general chaos.

But that’s the way all the books were: They said things that were useless, mixed-up, ambiguous, confusing, and partially incorrect. How anybody can learn science from these books, I don’t know, because it’s not science.

So when I saw all these horrifying books with the same kind of trouble as the math books had, I saw my volcano process starting again. Since I was exhausted from reading all the math books, and discouraged from its all being a wasted effort, I couldn’t face another year of that, and had to resign.

Sometime later I heard that the energy-makes-it-go book was going to be recommended by the curriculum commission to the Board of Education, so I made one last effort. At each meeting of the commission the public was allowed to make comments, so I got up and said why I thought the book was bad.

The man who replaced me on the commission said, “That book was approved by sixty-five engineers at the Such-and-such Aircraft Company!”

I didn’t doubt that the company had some pretty good engineers, but to take sixty-five engineers is to take a wide range of ability—and to necessarily include some pretty poor guys! It was once again the problem of averaging the length of the emperor’s nose, or the ratings on a book with nothing between the covers. It would have been far better to have the company decide who their better engineers were, and to have them look at the book. I couldn’t claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys—but the average of sixty five other guys, certainly!

I couldn’t get through to him, and the book was approved by the board.

When I was still on the commission, I had to go to San Francisco a few times for some of the meetings, and when I returned to Los Angeles from the first trip, I stopped in the commission office to get reimbursed for my expenses.

“How much did it cost, Mr. Feynman?”

“Well, I flew to San Francisco, so it’s the airfare, plus the parking at the airport while I was away.”

“Do you have your ticket?”

I happened to have the ticket.

“Do you have a receipt for the parking?”

“No, but it cost $2.35 to park my car.”

“But we have to have a receipt.”

“I told you how much it cost. If you don’t trust me, why do you let me tell you what I think is good and bad about the schoolbooks?”

There was a big stew about that. Unfortunately, I had been used to giving lectures for some company or university or for ordinary people, not for the government. I was used to, “What were your expenses?”—”So-and-so much.”—”Here you are, Mr. Feynman.”

I then decided I wasn’t going to give them a receipt for anything.

After the second trip to San Francisco they again asked me for my ticket and receipts.

“I haven’t got any.”

“This can’t go on, Mr. Feynman.”

“When I accepted to serve on the commission, I was told you were going to pay my expenses.”

“But we expected to have some receipts to prove the expenses.”

“I have nothing to prove it, but you know I live in Los Angeles and I go to these other towns; how the hell do you think I get there?”

They didn’t give in, and neither did I. I feel when you’re in a position like that, where you choose not to buckle down to the System, you must pay the consequences if it doesn’t work. So I’m perfectly satisfied, but I never did get compensation for the trips.

It’s one of those games I play. They want a receipt? I’m not giving them a receipt. Then you’re not going to get the money. OK, then I’m not taking the money. They don’t trust me? The hell with it; they don’t have to pay me. Of course it’s absurd! I know that’s the way the government works; well, screw the government! I feel that human beings should treat human beings like human beings. And unless I’m going to be treated like one, I’m not going to have anything to do with them! They feel bad? They feel bad. I feel bad, too. We’ll just let it go. I know they’re “protecting the taxpayer,” but see how well you think the taxpayer was being protected in the following situation.

There were two books that we were unable to come to a decision about after much discussion; they were extremely close. So we left it open to the Board of Education to decide. Since the board was now taking the cost into consideration, and since the two books were so evenly matched, the board decided to open the bids and take the lower one.

Then the question came up, “Will the schools be getting the books at the regular time, or could they, perhaps, get them a little earlier, in time for the coming term?”

One publisher’s representative got up and said, “We are happy that you accepted our bid; we can get it out in time for the next term.”

A representative of the publisher that lost out was also there, and he got up and said, “Since our bids were submitted based on the later deadline, I think we should have a chance a bid again for the earlier deadline, because we too can meet the earlier deadline.”

Mr. Norris, the Pasadena lawyer on the board, asked the guy from the other publisher, “And how much would it cost for us to get your books at the earlier date?”

And he gave a number: It was less!

The first guy got up: “If he changes his bid, I have the right to change my bid!”—and his bid is still less!

Norris asked, “Well how is that—we get the books earlier and it’s cheaper?”

“Yes,” one guy says. “We can use a special offset method we wouldn’t normally use …”—some excuse why it came out cheaper.

The other guy agreed: “When you do it quicker, it costs less!”

That was really a shock. It ended up two million dollars cheaper. Norris was really incensed by this sudden change.

What happened, of course, was that the uncertainty about the date had opened the possibility that these guys could bid against each other. Normally, when books were supposed to be chosen without taking the cost into consideration, there was no reason to lower the price; the book publishers could put the prices at any place they wanted to. There was no advantage in competing by lowering the price; the way you competed was to impress the members of the curriculum commission.

By the way, whenever our commission had a meeting, there were book publishers entertaining curriculum commission members by taking them to lunch and talking to them about their books. I never went.

It seems obvious now, but I didn’t know what was happening the time I got a package of dried fruit and whatnot delivered by Western Union with a message that read, “From our family to yours, Happy Thanksgiving—The Pamilios.”

It was from a family I had never heard of in Long Beach, obviously someone wanting to send this to his friend’s family who got the name and address wrong, so I thought I’d better straighten it out. I called up Western Union, got the telephone number of the people who sent the stuff, and I called them.

“Hello, my name is Mr. Feynman. I received a package …”

“Oh, hello, Mr. Feynman, this is Pete Pamilio” and he says it in such a friendly way that I think I’m supposed to know who he is! I’m normally such a dunce that I can’t remember who anyone is.

So I said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Pamilio, but I don’t quite remember who you are …”

It turned out he was a representative of one of the publishers whose books I had to judge on the curriculum commission.

“I see. But this could be misunderstood.”

“It’s only family to family.”

“Yes, but I’m judging a book that you’re publishing, and maybe someone might misinterpret your kindness!” I knew what was happening, but I made it sound like I was a complete idiot.

Another thing like this happened when one of the publishers sent me a leather briefcase with my name nicely written in gold on it. I gave them the same stuff: “I can’t accept it; I’m judging some of the books you’re publishing. I don’t think you understand that!”

One commissioner, who had been there for the greatest length of time, said, “I never accept the stuff; it makes me very upset. But it just goes on.”

But I really missed one opportunity. If I had only thought fast enough, I could have had a very good time on that commission. I got to the hotel in San Francisco in the evening to attend my very first meeting the next day, and I decided to go out to wander in the town and eat something. I came out of the elevator, and sitting on a bench in the hotel lobby were two guys who jumped up and said, “Good evening, Mr. Feynman. Where are you going? Is there something we can show you in San Francisco?” They were from a publishing company, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with them.

“I’m going out to eat.”

“We can take you out to dinner.”

“No, I want to be alone.”

“Well, whatever you want, we can help you.”

I couldn’t resist. I said, “Well, I’m going out to get myself in trouble.”

“I think we can help you in that, too.”

“No, I think I’ll take care of that myself.” Then I thought, “What an error! I should have let all that stuff operate and keep a diary, so the people of the state of California could find out how far the publishers will go!” And when I found out about the two-million-dollar difference, God knows what the pressures are!

Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake

In Canada they have a big association of physics students. They have meetings; they give papers, and so on. One time the Vancouver chapter wanted to have me come and talk to them. The girl in charge of it arranged with my secretary to fly all the way to Los Angeles without telling me. She just walked into my office. She was really cute, a beautiful blonde. (That helped; it’s not supposed to, but it did.) And I was impressed that the students in Vancouver had financed the whole thing. They treated me so nicely in Vancouver that now I know the secret of how to really be entertained and give talks: Wait for the students to ask you.

One time, a few years after I had won the Nobel Prize, some kids from the Irvine students’ physics club came around and wanted me to talk. I said, “I’d love to do it. What I want to do is talk just to the physics club. But—I don’t want to be immodest—I’ve learned from experience that there’ll be trouble.”

I told them how I used to go over to a local high school every year to talk to the physics club about relativity, or whatever they asked about. Then, after I got the Prize, I went over there again, as usual, with no preparation, and they stuck me in front of an assembly of three hundred kids. It was a mess!

I got that shock about three or four times, being an idiot and not catching on right away. When I was invited to Berkeley to give a talk on something in physics, I prepared something rather technical, expecting to give it to the usual physics department group. But when I got there, this tremendous lecture hall is full of people! And I know there’s not that many people in Berkeley who know the level at which I prepared my talk. My problem is, I like to please the people who come to hear me, and I can’t do it if everybody and his brother wants to hear: I don’t know my audience then.

After the students understood that I can’t just easily go over somewhere and give a talk to the physics club, I said, “Let’s cook up a dull-sounding title and a dull-sounding professor’s name, and then only the kids who are really interested in physics will bother to come, and those are the ones we want, OK? You don’t have to sell anything.”

A few posters appeared on the Irvine campus: Professor Henry Warren from the University of Washington is going to talk about the structure of the proton on May 17th at 3:00 in Room D102.

Then I came and said, “Professor Warren had some personal difficulties and was unable to come and speak to you today, so he telephoned me and asked me if I would talk to you about the subject, since I’ve been doing some work in the field. So here I am.” It worked great.

But then, somehow or other, the faculty adviser of the club found out about the trick, and he got very angry at them. He said, “You know, if it were known that Professor Feynman was coming down here, a lot of people would like to have listened to him.”

The students explained, “That’s just it!” But the adviser was mad that he hadn’t been allowed in on the joke.

Hearing that the students were in real trouble, I decided to write a letter to the adviser and explained that it was all my fault, that I wouldn’t have given the talk unless this arrangement had been made; that I had told the students not to tell anyone; I’m very sorry; please excuse me, blah, blah, blah …” That’s the kind of stuff I have to go through on account of that damn prize!

Just last year I was invited by the students at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks to talk, and had a wonderful time, except for the interviews on local television. I don’t need interviews; there’s no point to it. I came to talk to the physics students, and that’s it. If everybody in town wants to know that, let the school newspaper tell them. It’s on account of the Nobel Prize that I’ve got to have an interview—I’m a big shot, right?

A friend of mine who’s a rich man—he invented some kind of simple digital switch—tells me about these people who contribute money to make prizes or give lectures: “You always look at them carefully to find out what crookery they’re trying to absolve their conscience of.”

My friend Matt Sands was once going to write a book to be called Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake.

For many years I would look, when the time was coming around to give out the Prize, at who might get it. But after a while I wasn’t even aware of when it was the right “season.” I therefore had no idea why someone would be calling me at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning.

“Professor Feynman?”

“Hey! Why are you bothering me at this time in the morning?”

“I thought you’d like to know that you’ve won the Nobel Prize.”

“Yeah, but I’m sleeping! It would have been better if you had called me in the morning.”—and I hung up.

My wife said, “Who was that?”

“They told me I won the Nobel Prize.”

“Oh, Richard, who was it?” I often kid around and she is so smart that she never gets fooled, but this time I caught her.

The phone rings again: “Professor Feynman, have you heard …”

(In a disappointed voice) “Yeah.”

Then I began to think, “How can I turn this all off? I don’t want any of this!” So the first thing was to take the telephone off the hook, because calls were coming one right after the other. I tried to go back to sleep, but found it was impossible.

I went down to the study to think: What am I going to do? Maybe I won’t accept the Prize. What would happen then? Maybe that’s impossible.

I put the receiver back on the hook and the phone rang right away. It was a guy from Time magazine. I said to him, “Listen, I’ve got a problem, so I want this off the record. I don’t know how to get out of this thing. Is there some way not to accept the Prize?”

He said, “I’m afraid, sir, that there isn’t any way you can do it without making more of a fuss than if you leave it alone.” It was obvious. We had quite a conversation, about fifteen or twenty minutes, and the Time guy never published anything about it.

I said thank you very much to the Time guy and hung up. The phone rang immediately: it was the newspaper.

“Yes, you can come up to the house. Yes, it’s all right. Yes, Yes, Yes …”

One of the phone calls was a guy from the Swedish consulate. He was going to have a reception in Los Angeles.

I figured that since I decided to accept the Prize, I’ve got to go through with all this stuff.

The consul said, “Make a list of the people you would like to invite, and we’ll make a list of the people we are inviting. Then I’ll come to your office and we’ll compare the lists to see if there are any duplicates, and we’ll make up the invitations …”

So I made up my list. It had about eight people-my neighbor from across the street, my artist friend Zorthian, and so on.

The consul came over to my office with his list: the Governor of the State of California, the This, the That; Getty, the oilman; some actress—it had three hundred people! And, needless to say, there was no duplication whatsoever!

Then I began to get a little bit nervous. The idea of meeting all these dignitaries frightened me.

The consul saw I was worried. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “Most of them don’t come.”

Well, I had never arranged a party that I invited people to, and knew to expect them not to come! I don’t have to kowtow to anybody and give them the delight of being honored with this invitation that they can refuse; it’s stupid!

By the time I got home I was really upset with the whole thing. I called the consul back and said, “I’ve thought it over, and I realize that I just can’t go through with the reception.”

He was delighted. He said, “You’re perfectly right.” I think he was in the same position—having to set up a party for this jerk was just a pain in the ass, It turned out, in the end, everybody was happy. Nobody wanted to come, including the guest of honor! The host was much better off, too!

I had a certain psychological difficulty all the way through this period. You see, I had been brought up by my father against royalty and pomp (he was in the uniforms business, so he knew the difference between a man with a uniform on, and with the uniform off—it’s the same man). I had actually learned to ridicule this stuff all my life, and it was so strong and deeply cut into me that I couldn’t go up to a king without some strain. It was childish, I know, but I was brought up that way, so it was a problem.

People told me that there was a rule in Sweden that after you accept the Prize, you have to back away from the king without turning around. You come down some steps, accept the Prize, and then go back up the steps. So I said to myself, “All right, I’m gonna fix them!”—and I practiced jumping up stairs, backwards, to show how ridiculous their custom was. I was in a terrible mood! That was stupid and silly, of course.

I found out this wasn’t a rule any more; you could turn around when you left the king, and walk like a normal human being, in the direction you were intending to go, with your nose in front.

I was pleased to find that not all the people in Sweden take the royal ceremonies as seriously as you! might think. When you get there, you discover that they’re on your side.

The students had, for example, a special ceremony in which they granted each Nobel-Prize-winner the special “Order of the Frog.” When you get this little frog, you have to make a frog noise.

When I was younger I was anti-culture, but my father had some good books around. One was a book with the old Greek play TheFrogs in it, and I glanced at it one time and I saw in there that a frog talks. It was written as “brek, kek, kek.” I thought, “No frog ever made a sound like that; that’s a crazy way to describe it!” so I tried it, and after practicing it awhile, I realized that it’s very accurately what a frog says.

So my chance glance into a book by Aristophanes turned out to be useful, later on: I could make a good frog noise at the students’ ceremony for the Nobel-Prize-winners! And jumping backwards fit right in, too. So I liked that part of it; that ceremony went well.

While I had a lot of fun, I did still have this psychological difficulty all the way through. My greatest problem was the Thank-You speech that you give at the King’s Dinner. When they give you the Prize they give you some nicely bound books about the years before, and they have all the Thank-You speeches written out as if they’re some big deal. So you begin to think it’s of some importance what you say in this ThankYou speech, because it’s going to be published. What I didn’t realize was that hardly anyone was going to listen to it carefully, and nobody was going to read it! I had lost my sense of proportion: I couldn’t just say thank you very much, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah; it would have been so easy to do that, but no, I have to make it honest. And the truth was, I didn’t really want this Prize, so how do I say thank you when I don’t want it?

My wife says I was a nervous wreck, worrying about what I was going to say in the speech, but I finally figured out a way to make a perfectly satisfactory-sounding speech that was nevertheless completely honest. I’m sure those who heard the speech had no idea what this guy had gone through in preparing it.

I started out by saying that I had already received my prize in the pleasure I got in discovering what I did, from the fact that others used my work, and so on. I tried to explain that I had already received everything I expected to get, and the rest was nothing compared to it. I had already received my prize.

But then I said I received, all at once, a big pile of letters—I said it much better in the speech—reminding me of all these people that I knew: letters from childhood friends who jumped up when they read the morning newspaper and cried out, “I know him! He’s that kid we used to play with!” and so on; letters like that, which were very supportive and expressed what I interpreted as a kind of love. For that I thanked them.

The speech went fine, but I was always getting into slight difficulties with royalty. During the King’s Dinner I was sitting next to a princess who had gone to college in the United States. I assumed, incorrectly, that she had the same attitudes as I did. I figured she was just a kid like everybody else. I remarked on how the king and all the royalty had to stand for such a long time, shaking hands with all the guests at the reception before the dinner. “In America,” I said, “we could make this more efficient. We would design a machine to shake hands.”

“Yes, but there wouldn’t be very much of a market for it here,” she said, uneasily. “There’s not that much royalty.”

“On the contrary, there’d be a very big market. At first, only the king would have a machine, and we could give it to him free. Then, of course, other people would want a machine, too. The question now becomes, who will be allowed to have a machine? The prime minister is permitted to buy one; then the president of the senate is allowed to buy one, and then the most important senior deputies. So there’s a very big, expanding market, and pretty soon, you wouldn’t have to go through the reception line to shake hands with the machines; you’d send your machine!”

I also sat next to the lady who was in charge of organizing the dinner. A waitress came by to fill my wine glass, and I said, “No, thank you. I don’t drink.”

The lady said, “No, no. Let her pour the drink.”

“But I don’t drink.”

She said, “It’s all right. Just look. You see, she has two bottles. We know that number eighty-eight doesn’t drink.” (Number eighty-eight was on the back of my chair.) “They look exactly the same, but one has no alcohol.”

“But how do you know?” I exclaimed.

She smiled. “Now watch the king,” she said. “He doesn’t drink either.”

She told me some of the problems they had had this particular year. One of them was, where should the Russian ambassador sit? The problem always is, at dinners like this, who sits nearer to the king. The Prize-winners normally sit closer to the king than the diplomatic corps does. And the order in which the diplomats sit is determined according to the length of time they have been in Sweden. Now at that time, the United States ambassador had been in Sweden longer than the Russian ambassador, But that year, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Mr. Sholokhov, a Russian, and the Russian ambassador wanted to be Mr. Sholokhov’s translator—and therefore to sit next to him. So the problem was how to let the Russian ambassador sit closer to the king without offending the United States ambassador and the rest of the diplomatic corps.

She said, “You should have seen what a fuss they went through—letters back and forth, telephone calls, and so on—before I ever got permission to have the ambassador sit next to Mr. Sholokhov. It was finally agreed that the ambassador wouldn’t officially represent the embassy of the Soviet Union that evening; rather, he was to be only the translator for Mr. Sholokhov.”

After the dinner we went off into another room, where there were different conversations going on. There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty chair at their table and sat down.

She turned to me and said, “Oh! You’re one of the Nobel-Prize-winners. In what field did you do your work?”

“In physics,” I said.

“Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can’t talk about it.”

“On the contrary,” I answered. “It’s because somebody knows something about it that we can’t talk about physics. It’s the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance—gold transfers we can’t talk about, because those are understood—so it’s the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!”

I don’t know how they do it. There’s a way of forming ice on the surface of the face, and she did it! She turned to talk to somebody else.

After a while I could tell I was completely cut out of the conversation, so I got up and started away. The Japanese ambassador, who was also sitting at that table, jumped up and walked after me. “Professor Feynman,” he said, “there is something I should like to tell you about diplomacy.”

He went into a long story about how a young man in Japan goes to the university and studies international relations because he thinks he can make a contribution to his country. As a sophomore he begins to have slight twinges of doubt about what he is learning. After college he takes his first post in an embassy and has still more doubts about his understanding of diplomacy, until he finally realizes that nobody knows anything about international relations. At that point, he can become an ambassador! “So Professor Feynman,” he said, “next time you give examples of things that everybody talks about that nobody knows about, please include international relations!”

He was a very interesting man, and we got to talking. I had always been interested in how it is the different countries and different peoples develop differently. I told the ambassador that there was one thing that always seemed to me to be a remarkable phenomenon: how Japan had developed itself so rapidly to become such a modern and important country in the world. “What is the aspect and character of the Japanese people that made it possible for the Japanese to do that?” I asked.

The ambassador answered in a way I like to hear: “I don’t know,” he said. “I might suppose something, but I don’t know if it’s true. The people of Japan believed they had only one way of moving up: to have their children educated more than they were; that it was very important for them to move out of their peasantry to become educated. So there has been a great energy in the family to encourage the children to do well in school, and to be pushed forward. Because of this tendency to learn things all the time, new ideas from the outside would spread through the educational system very easily. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Japan has advanced so rapidly.”

All in all, I must say I enjoyed the visit to Sweden, in the end. Instead of coming home immediately, I went to CERN, the European center for nuclear research in Switzerland, to give a talk. I appeared before my colleagues in the suit that I had worn to the King’s Dinner—I had never given a talk in a suit before—and I began by saying, “Funny thing, you know; in Sweden we were sitting around, talking about whether there are any changes as a result of our having won the Nobel Prize, and as a matter of fact, I think I already see a change: I rather like this suit.”

Everybody says “Booooo!” and Weisskopf jumps up and tears off his coat and says, “We’re not gonna wear suits at lectures!”

I took my coat off, loosened my tie, and said, “By the time I had been through Sweden, I was beginning to like this stuff, but now that I’m back in the world, everything’s all right again. Thanks for straightening me out!” They didn’t want me to change. So it was very quick: at CERN they undid everything that they had done in Sweden.

It’s nice that I got some money—I was able to buy a beach house—but altogether, I think it would have been much nicer not to have had the Prize—because you never, any longer, can be taken straightforwardly in any public situation.

In a way, the Nobel Prize has been something of a pain in the neck, though there was at least one time that I got some fun out of it, Shortly after I won the Prize, Gweneth and I received an invitation from the Brazilian government to be the guests of honor at the Carnaval celebrations in Rio. We gladly accepted and had a great time. We went from one dance to another and reviewed the big street parade that featured the famous samba schools playing their wonderful rhythms and music. Photographers from newspapers and magazines were taking pictures all the time—”Here, the Professor from America is dancing with Miss Brazil.”

It was fun to be a “celebrity,” but we were obviously the wrong celebrities. Nobody was very excited about the guests of honor that year. I found out later how our invitation had come about. Gina Lollobrigida was supposed to be the guest of honor, but just before Carnaval, she said no. The Minister of Tourism, who was in charge of organizing Carnaval, had some friends at the Center for Physical Research who knew I had played in a samba band, and since I had recently won the Nobel Prize, I was briefly in the news, In a moment of panic the Minister and his friends got this crazy idea to replace Gina Lollobrigida with the professor of physics!

Needless to say, the Minister did such a bad job on that Carnaval that he lost his position in the government.

Bringing Culture to the Physicists

Nina Byers, a professor at UCLA, became in charge of the physics colloquium sometime in the early seventies. The colloquia are normally a place where physicists from other universities come and talk pure technical stuff. But partly as a result of the atmosphere of that particular period of time, she got the idea that the physicists needed more culture, so she thought she would arrange something along those lines: Since Los Angeles is near Mexico, she would have a colloquium on the mathematics and astronomy of the Mayans—the old civilization of Mexico.

(Remember my attitude to culture: This kind of thing would have driven me crazy if it were in my university!)

She started looking for a professor to lecture on the subject, and couldn’t find anybody at UCLA who was quite an expert. She telephoned various places and still couldn’t find anybody.

Then she remembered Professor Otto Neugebauer, of Brown University, the great expert on Babylonian mathematics [2]. She telephoned him in Rhode Island and asked if he knew someone on the West Coast who could lecture on Mayan mathematics and astronomy.

“Yes,” he said. “I do. He’s not a professional anthropologist or a historian; he’s an amateur. But he certainly knows a lot about it. His name is Richard Feynman.”

She nearly died! She’s trying to bring some culture to the physicists, and the only way to do it is to get a physicist!

The only reason I knew anything about Mayan mathematics was that I was getting exhausted on my honeymoon in Mexico with my second wife, Mary Lou. She was greatly interested in art history, particularly that of Mexico. So we went to Mexico for our honeymoon and we climbed up pyramids and down pyramids; she had me following her all over the place. She showed me many interesting things, such as certain relationships in the designs of various figures, but after a few days (and nights) of going up and down in hot and steamy jungles, I was exhausted.

In some little Guatemalan town in the middle of nowhere we went into a museum that had a case displaying a manuscript full of strange symbols, pictures, and bars and dots. It was a copy (made by a man named Villacorta) of the Dresden Codex, an original book made by the Mayans found in a museum in Dresden. I knew the bars and dots were numbers. My father had taken me to the New York World’s Fair when I was a little kid, and there they had reconstructed a Mayan temple. I remembered him telling me how the Mayans had invented the zero and had done many interesting things.

The museum had copies of the codex for sale, so I bought one. On each page at the left was the codex copy, and on the right a description and partial translation in Spanish.

I love puzzles and codes, so when I saw the bars and dots, I thought, “I’m gonna have some fun!” I covered up the Spanish with a piece of yellow paper and began playing this game of deciphering the Mayan bars and dots, sitting in the hotel room, while my wife climbed up and down the pyramids all day.

I quickly figured out that a bar was equal to five dots, what the symbol for zero was, and so on. It took me a little longer to figure out that the bars and dots always carried at twenty the first time, but they carried at eighteen the second time (making cycles of 360). I also worked out all kinds of things about various faces: they had surely meant certain days and weeks.

After we got back home I continued to work on it. Altogether, it’s a lot of fun to try to decipher something like that, because when you start out you don’t know anything—you have no clue to go by. But then you notice certain numbers that appear often, and add up to other numbers, and so on.

There was one place in the codex where the number 584 was very prominent. This 584 was divided into periods of 236, 90, 250, and 8. Another prominent number was 2920, or 584 × 5 (also 365 × 8). There was a table of multiples of 2920 up to 13 × 2920, then there were multiples of 13 × 2920 for a while, and then—funny numbers! They were errors, as far as I could tell. Only many years later did I figure out what they were.

Because figures denoting days were associated with this 584 which was divided up so peculiarly, I figured if it wasn’t some mythical period of some sort, it might be something astronomical, Finally I went down to the astronomy library and looked it up, and found that 583.92 days is the period of Venus as it appears from the earth. Then the 236, 90, 250, 8 became apparent: it must be the phases that Venus goes through. It’s a morning star, then it can’t be seen (it’s on the far side of the sun); then it’s an evening star, and finally it disappears again (it’s between the earth and the sun). The 90 and the 8 are different because Venus moves more slowly through the sky when it is on the far side of the sun compared to when it passes between the earth and the sun. The difference between the 236 and the 250 might indicate a difference between the eastern and western horizons in Maya land.

I discovered another table nearby that had periods of 11,959 days. This turned out to be a table for predicting lunar eclipses. Still another table had multiples of 91 in descending order. I never did figure that one out (nor has anyone else).

When I had worked out as much as I could, I finally decided to look at the Spanish commentary to see how much I was able to figure out. It was complete nonsense. This symbol was Saturn, this symbol was a god—it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense. So I didn’t have to have covered the commentary; I wouldn’t have learned anything from it anyway.

After that I began to read a lot about the Mayans, and found that the great man in this business was Eric Thompson, some of whose books I now have.

When Nina Byers called me up I realized that I had lost my copy of the Dresden Codex. (I had lent it to Mrs. H. E. Robertson, who had found a Mayan codex in an old trunk of an antique dealer in Paris. She had brought it back to Pasadena for me to look at—I still remember driving home with it on the front seat of my car, thinking, “I’ve gotta be careful driving: I’ve got the new codex”—but as soon as I looked at it carefully, I could see immediately that it was a complete fake. After a little bit of work I could find where each picture in the new codex had come from in the Dresden Codex. So I lent her my book to show her, and I eventually forgot she had it.) So the librarians at UCLA worked very hard to find another copy of Villacorta’s rendition of the Dresden Codex, and lent it to me.

I did all the calculations all over again, and in fact I got a little bit further than I did before: I figured out that those “funny numbers” which I thought before were errors were really integer multiples of something closer to the correct period (583.923)—the Mayans had realized that 584 wasn’t exactly right! [3]

After the colloquium at UCLA Professor Byers presented me with some beautiful color reproductions of the Dresden Codex. A few months later Caltech wanted me to give the same lecture to the public in Pasadena. Robert Rowan, a real estate man, lent me some very valuable stone carvings of Mayan gods and ceramic figures for the Caltech lecture, It was probably highly illegal to take something like that out of Mexico, and they were so valuable that we hired security guards to protect them.

A few days before the Caltech lecture there was a big splurge in the New York Times, which reported that a new codex had been discovered. There were only three codices (two of which are hard to get anything out of) known to exist at the time—hundreds of thousands had been burned by Spanish priests as “works of the Devil.” My cousin was working for the AP, so she got me a glossy picture copy of what the New York Times had published and I made a slide of it to include in my talk.

This new codex was a fake. In my lecture I pointed out that the numbers were in the style of the Madrid codex, but were 236, 90, 250, 8—rather a coincidence! Out of the hundred thousand books originally made we get another fragment, and it has the same thing on it as the other fragments! It was obviously, again, one of these put-together things which had nothing original in it.

These people who copy things never have the courage to make up something really different. If you find something that is really new, it’s got to have something different. A real hoax would be to take something like the period of Mars, invent a mythology to go with it, and then draw pictures associated with this mythology with numbers appropriate to Mars—not in an obvious fashion; rather, have tables of multiples of the period with some mysterious “errors,” and so on. The numbers should have to be worked out a little bit. Then people would say, “Geez! This has to do with Mars!” In addition, there should be a number of things in it that are not understandable, and are not exactly like what has been seen before. That would make a good fake.

I got a big kick out of giving my talk on “Deciphering Mayan Hieroglyphics.” There I was, being something I’m not, again. People filed into the auditorium past these glass cases, admiring the color reproductions of the Dresden Codex and the authentic Mayan artifacts watched over by an armed guard in uniform; they heard a two-hour lecture on Mayan mathematics and astronomy from an amateur expert in the field (who even told them how to spot a fake codex), and then they went out, admiring the cases again. Murray Gell-Mann countered in the following weeks by giving a beautiful set of six lectures concerning the linguistic relations of all the languages of the world.

Found Out in Paris

I gave a series of lectures in physics that the Addison-Wesley Company made into a book, and one time at lunch we were discussing what the cover of the book should look like, I thought that since the lectures were a combination of the real world and mathematics, it would be a good idea to have a picture of a drum, and on top of it some mathematical diagrams—circles and lines for the nodes of the oscillating drumheads, which were discussed in the book.

The book came out with a plain, red cover, but for some reason, in the preface, there’s a picture of me playing a drum. I think they put it in there to satisfy this idea they got that “the author wants a drum somewhere.” Anyway, everybody wonders why that picture of me playing drums is in the preface of the Feynman Lectures, because it doesn’t have any diagrams on it, or any other things which would make it clear. (It’s true that I like drumming, but that’s another story.)

At Los Alamos things were pretty tense from all the work, and there wasn’t any way to amuse yourself: there weren’t any movies, or anything like that. But I discovered some drums that the boys’ school, which had been there previously, had collected: Los Alamos was in the middle of New Mexico, where there are lots of Indian villages. So I amused myself—sometimes alone, sometimes with another guy—just making noise, playing on these drums. I didn’t know any particular rhythm, but the rhythms of the Indians were rather simple, the drums were good, and I had fun.

Sometimes I would take the drums with me into the woods at some distance, so I wouldn’t disturb anybody, and would beat them with a stick, and sing. I remember one night walking around a tree, looking at the moon, and beating the drum, making believe I was an Indian.

One day a guy came up to me and said, “Around Thanksgiving you weren’t out in the woods beating a drum, were you?”

“Yes, I was,” I said.

“Oh! Then my wife was right!” Then he told me this story:

One night he heard some drum music in the distance, and went upstairs to the other guy in the duplex house that they lived in, and the other guy heard it too. Remember, all these guys were from the East. They didn’t know anything about Indians, and they were very interested: the Indians must have been having some kind of ceremony, or something exciting, and the two men decided to go out to see what it was.

As they walked along, the music got louder as they came nearer, and they began to get nervous. They realized that the Indians probably had scouts out watching so that nobody would disturb their ceremony. So they got down on their bellies and crawled along the trail until the sound was just over the next hill, apparently. They crawled up over the hill and discovered to their surprise that it was only one Indian, doing the ceremony all by himself—dancing around a tree, beating the drum with a stick, chanting. The two guys backed away from him slowly, because they didn’t want to disturb him: He was probably setting up some kind of spell, or something.

They told their wives what they saw, and the wives said, “Oh, it must have been Feynman—he likes to beat drums.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” the men said. “Even Feynman wouldn’t be that crazy!”

So the next week they set about trying to figure out who the Indian was. There were Indians from the nearby reservation working at Los Alamos, so they asked one Indian, who was a technician in the technical area, who it could be. The Indian asked around, but none of the other Indians knew who it might be, except there was one Indian whom nobody could talk to. He was an Indian who knew his race: He had two big braids down his back and held his head high; whenever he walked anywhere he walked with dignity, alone; and nobody could talk to him. You would be afraid to go up to him and ask him anything; he had too much dignity. He was a furnace man. So nobody ever had the nerve to ask this Indian, and they decided it must have been him. (I was pleased to find that they had discovered such a typical Indian, such a wonderful Indian, that I might have been. It was quite an honor to be mistaken for this man.)

So the fella who’d been talking to me was just checking at the last minute—husbands always like to prove their wives wrong—and he found out, as husbands often do, that his wife was quite right.

I got pretty good at playing the drums, and would play them when we had parties. I didn’t know what I was doing; I just made rhythms—and I got a reputation: Everybody at Los Alamos knew I liked to play drums.

When the war was over, and we were going back to “civilization,” the people there at Los Alamos teased me that I wouldn’t be able to play drums any more because they made too much noise. And since I was trying to become a dignified professor in Ithaca, I sold the drum that I had bought sometime during my stay at Los Alamos.

The following summer I went back out to New Mexico to work on some report, and when I saw the drums again, I couldn’t stand it. I bought myself another drum, and thought, “I’ll just bring it back with me this time so I can look at it.”

That year at Cornell I had a small apartment inside a bigger house. I had the drum in there, just to look at, but one day I couldn’t quite resist: I said, “Well, I’ll just be very quiet …”

I sat on a chair and put the drum between my legs and played it with my fingers a little bit: bup, bup, bup, buddle bup. Then a little bit louder—after all, it was tempting me! I got a little bit louder and BOOM!—the telephone rang.

“Hello?”

“This is your landlady. Are you beating drums down there?”

“Yes; I’m sor—”

“It sounds so good. I wonder if I could come down and listen to it more directly?”

So from that time on the landlady would always come down when I’d start to drum. That was freedom, all right. I had a very good time from then on, beating the drums.

Around that time I met a lady from the Belgian Congo who gave me some ethnological records. In those days, records like that were rare, with drum music from the Watusi and other tribes of Africa. I really admired the Watusi drummers very, very much, and I used to try to imitate them—not very accurately, but just to sound something like them—and I developed a larger number of rhythms as a result of that.

One time I was in the recreation hall, late at night, when there weren’t many people, and I picked up a wastebasket and started to beat the back end of it. Some guy from way downstairs came running all the way up and said, “Hey! You play drums!” It turned out he really knew how to play drums, and he taught me how to play bongos.

There was some guy in the music department who had a collection of African music, and I’d come to his house and play drums. He’d make recordings of me, and then at his parties, he had a game that he called “Africa or Ithaca?” in which he’d play some recordings of drum music, and the idea was to guess whether what you were hearing was manufactured in the continent of Africa, or locally. So I must have been fairly good at imitating African music by that time.

When I came to Caltech, I used to go down to the Sunset Strip a lot. One time there was a group of drummers led by a big fella from Nigeria called Ukonu, playing this wonderful drum music—just percussion—at one of the nightclubs. The second-in-command, who was especially nice to me, invited me to come up on the stage with them and play a little. So I got up there with the other guys and played along with them on the drums for a little while.

I asked the second guy if Ukonu ever gave lessons, and he said yes. So I used to go down to Ukonu’s place, near Century Boulevard (where the Watts riots later occurred) to get lessons in drumming. The lessons weren’t very efficient: he would stall around, talk to other people, and be interrupted by all kinds of things. But when they worked they were very exciting, and I learned a lot from him.

At dances near Ukonu’s place, there would be only a few whites, but it was much more relaxed than it is today. One time they had a drumming contest, and I didn’t do very well: They said my drumming was “too intellectual”; theirs was much more pulsing.

One day when I was at Caltech I got a very serious telephone call.

“Hello?”

“This is Mr. Trowbridge, Mahster of the Polytechnic School.” The Polytechnic School was a small, private school which was across the street diagonally from Caltech. Mr. Trowbridge continued in a very formal voice: “I have a friend of yours here, who would like to speak to you.”

“OK.”

“Hello, Dick!” It was Ukonu! It turned out the Master of the Polytechnic School was not as formal as he was making himself out to be, and had a great sense of humor. Ukonu was visiting the school to play for the kids, so he invited me to come over and be on the stage with him, and play along. So we played for the kids together: I played bongos (which I had in my office) against his big tumba drum.

Ukonu had a regular thing: He went to various schools and talked about the African drums and what they meant, and told about the music. He had a terrific personality and a grand smile; he was a very, very nice man. He was just sensational on the drums—he had records out—and was here studying medicine. He went back to Nigeria at the beginning of the war there—or before the war—and I don’t know what happened to him.

After Ukonu left I didn’t do very much drumming, except at parties once in a while, entertaining a little bit. One time I was at a dinner party at the Leightons’ house, and Bob’s son Ralph and a friend asked me if I wanted to drum. Thinking that they were asking me to do a solo, I said no. But then they started drumming on some little wooden tables, and I couldn’t resist: I grabbed a table too, and the three of us played on these little wooden tables, which made lots of interesting sounds.

Ralph and his friend Tom Rutishauser liked playing drums, and we began meeting every week to just ad lib, develop rhythms and work stuff out. These two guys were real musicians: Ralph played piano, and Torn played the cello. All I had done was rhythms, and I didn’t know anything about music, which, as far as I could tell, was just drumming with notes. But we worked out a lot of good rhythms and played a few times at some of the schools to entertain the kids. We also played rhythms for a dance class at a local college—something I learned was fun to do when I was working at Brookhaven for a while—and called ourselves The Three Quarks, so you can figure out when that was.

One time I went to Vancouver to talk to the students there, and they had a party with a real hot rock-type band playing down in the basement. The band was very nice: they had an extra cowbell lying around, and they encouraged me to play it. So I started to play a little bit, and since their music was very rhythmic (and the cowbell is just an accompaniment—you can’t screw it up) I really got hot.

After the party was over, the guy who organized the party told me that the band leader said, “Geez! Who was that guy who came down and played on the cowbell! He can really knock out a rhythm on that thing! And by the way, that big shot this party was supposed to be for–you know, he never came down here; I never did see who it was!”

Anyhow, at Caltech there’s a group that puts on plays. Some of the actors are Caltech students; others are from the outside. When there’s a small part, such as a policeman who’s supposed to arrest somebody, they get one of the professors to do it. It’s always a big joke—the professor comes on and arrests somebody, and goes off again.

A few years ago the group was doing Guys and Dolls, and there was a scene where the main guy takes the girl to Havana, and they’re in a nightclub. The director thought it would be a good idea to have the bongo player on the stage in the nightclub be me.

I went to the first rehearsal, and the lady directing the show pointed to the orchestra conductor and said, “Jack will show you the music.”

Well, that petrified me. I don’t know how to read music; I thought all I had to do was get up there on the stage and make some noise.

Jack was sitting by the piano, and he pointed to the music and said, “OK, you start here, you see, and you do this. Then I play plonk, plonk, plonk ”—he played a few notes on the piano. He turned the page. “Then you play this, and now we both pause for a speech, you see, here”—and he turned some more pages and said, “Finally, you play this.”

He showed me this “music” that was written in some kind of crazy pattern of little x’s in the bars and lines. He kept telling me all this stuff, thinking I was a musician, and it was completely impossible for me to remember any of it.

Fortunately, I got ill the next day, and couldn’t come to the next rehearsal, I asked my friend Ralph to go for me, and since he’s a musician, he should know what it’s all about. Ralph came back and said, “It’s not so bad. First, at the very beginning, you have to do something exactly right because you’re starting the rhythm out for the rest of the orchestra, which will mesh in with it. But after the orchestra comes in, it’s a matter of ad-libbing, and there will be times when we have to pause for speeches, but I think we’ll be able to figure that out from the cues the orchestra conductor gives.”

In the meantime I had gotten the director to accept Ralph too, so the two of us would be on the stage. He’d play the tumba and I’d play the bongos—so that made it a helluva lot easier for me.

So Ralph showed me what the rhythm was. It must have been only about twenty or thirty beats, but it had to be just so. I’d never had to play anything just so, and it was very hard for me to get it right. Ralph would patiently explain, “left hand, and right hand, and two left hands, then right.

I worked very hard, and finally, very slowly, I began to get the rhythm just right. It took me a helluva long time—many days—to get it.

A week later we went to the rehearsal and found there was a new drummer there—the regular drummer had quit the band to do something else—and we introduced ourselves to him:

“Hi. We’re the guys who are going to be on stage for the Havana scene.”

“Oh, hi. Let me find the scene here …” and he turned to the page where our scene was, took out his drumming stick, and said, “Oh, you start off the scene with …” and with his stick against the side of his drum he goes bing, bong, ban g-a-bang, bing-a-bing, bang, bang at full speed, while he was looking at the music! What a shock that was to me. I had worked for four days to try to get that damn rhythm, and he could just patter it right out!

Anyway, after practicing again and again I finally got it straight and played it in the show. It was pretty successful: Everybody was amused to see the professor on stage playing the bongos, and the music wasn’t so bad; but that part at the beginning, that had to be the same: that was hard.

In the Havana nightclub scene some of the students had to do some sort of dance that had to be choreographed. So the director had gotten the wife of one of the guys at Caltech, who was a choreographer working at that time for Universal Studios, to teach the boys how to dance. She liked our drumming, and when the shows were over, she asked us if we would like to drum in San Francisco for a ballet.

“WHAT?”

Yes. She was moving to San Francisco, and was choreographing a ballet for a small ballet school there. She had the idea of creating a ballet in which the music was nothing but percussion. She wanted Ralph and me to come over to her house before she moved and play the different rhythms that we knew, and from those she would make up a story that went with the rhythms.

Ralph had some misgivings, but I encouraged him to go along with this adventure. I did insist, however, that she not tell anybody there that I was a professor of physics, Nobel Prize-winner, or any other baloney. I didn’t want to do the drumming if I was doing it because, as Samuel Johnson said, If you see a dog walking on his hind legs, it’s not so much that he does it well, as that he does it at all. I didn’t want to do it if I was a physics professor doing it at all; we were just some musicians she had found in Los Angeles, who were going to come up and play this drum music that they had composed.

So we went over to her house and played various rhythms we had worked out. She took some notes, and soon after, that same night, she got this story cooked up in her mind and said, “OK, I want fifty-two repetitions of this; forty bars of that; whatever of this, that, this, that …”

We went home, and the next night we made a tape at Ralph’s house. We played all the rhythms for a few minutes, and then Ralph made some cuts and splices with his tape recorder to get the various lengths right. She took a copy of our tape with her when she moved, and began training the dancers with it in San Francisco.

Meanwhile we had to practice what was on that tape: fifty-two cycles of this, forty cycles of that, and so on. What we had done spontaneously (and spliced) earlier, we now had to learn exactly. We had to imitate our own damn tape!

The big problem was counting. I thought Ralph would know how to do that because he’s a musician, but we both discovered something funny. The “playing department” in our minds was also the “talking department” for counting—we couldn’t play and count at the same time!

When we got to our first rehearsal in San Francisco, we discovered that by watching the dancers we didn’t have to count because the dancers went through certain motions.

There were a number of things that happened to us because we were supposed to be professional musicians and I wasn’t. For example, one of the scenes was about a beggar woman who sifts through the sand on a Caribbean beach where the society ladies, who had come out at the beginning of the ballet, had been. The music that the choreographer had used to create this scene was made on a special drum that Ralph and his father had made rather amateurishly some years before, and out of which we had never had much luck in getting a good tone. But we discovered that if we sat opposite each other on chairs and put this “crazy drum” between us on our knees, with one guy beating bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda rapidly with his two fingers, constantly, the other fella could push on the drum in different places with his two hands and change the pitch. Now it would go booda– booda– booda– bidda– beeda– beeda– beeda– bidda– booda-booda-booda-badda-bidda-bidda-bidda-badda, creating a lot of interesting sounds.

Well, the dancer who played the beggar woman wanted the rises and falls to coincide with her dance (our tape had been made arbitrarily for this scene), so she proceeded to explain to us what she was going to do: “First, I do four of these movements this way; then I bend down and sift through the sand this way for eight counts; then I stand and turn this way.” I knew damn well I couldn’t keep track of this, so I interrupted her:

“Just go ahead and do the dance, and I’ll play along.”

“But don’t you want to know how the dance goes? You see, after I’ve finished the second sifting part, I go for eight counts over this way.” It was no use; I couldn’t remember anything, and I wanted to interrupt her again, but then there was this problem: I would look like I was not a real musician!

Well, Ralph covered for me very smoothly by explaining, “Mr. Feynman has a special technique for this type of situation: He prefers to develop the dynamics directly and intuitively, as he sees you dance. Let’s try it once that way, and if you’re not satisfied, we can correct it.”

Well, she was a first-rate dancer, and you could anticipate what she was going to do. If she was going to dig into the sand, she would get ready to go down into the sand; every motion was smooth and expected, so it was rather easy to make the bzzzzs and bshshs and boodas and biddas with my hands quite appropriate to what she was doing, and she was very satisfied with it. So we got past that moment where we might have had our cover blown.

The ballet was kind of a success. Although there weren’t many people in the audience, the people who came to see the performances liked it very much.

Before we went to San Francisco for the rehearsals and the performances, we weren’t sure of the whole idea. I mean, we thought the choreographer was insane: first, the ballet has only percussion; second, that we’re good enough to make music for a ballet and get paid for it was surely crazy! For me, who had never had any “culture,” to end up as a professional musician for a ballet was the height of achievement, as it were.

We didn’t think that she’d be able to find ballet dancers who would be willing to dance to our drum music. (As a matter of fact, there was one prima donna from Brazil, the wife of the Portuguese consul, who decided it was beneath her to dance to it.) But the other dancers seemed to like it very much, and my heart felt good when we played for them for the first time in rehearsal. The delight they felt when they heard how our rhythms really sounded (they had until then been using our tape played on a small cassette recorder) was genuine, and I had much more confidence when I saw how they reacted to our actual playing. And from the comments of the people who had come to the performances, we realized that we were a success.

The choreographer wanted to do another ballet to our drumming the following spring, so we went through the same procedure. We made a tape of some more rhythms, and she made up another story, this time set in Africa. I talked to Professor Munger at Caltech and got some real African phrases to sing at the beginning (GAwa baNYUma GAwa WO, or something like that), and I practiced them until I had them just so.

Later, we went up to San Francisco for a few rehearsals. When we first got there, we found they had a problem. They couldn’t figure out how to make elephant tusks that looked good on stage. The ones they had made out of papier mâché were so bad that some of the dancers were embarrassed to dance in front of them.

We didn’t offer any solution, but rather waited to see what would happen when the performances came the following weekend. Meanwhile, I arranged to visit Werner Erhard, whom I had known from participating in some conferences he had organized. I was sitting in his beautiful home, listening to some philosophy or idea he was trying to explain to me, when all of a sudden I was hypnotized.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

My eyes popped out as I exclaimed, “Tusks!” Behind him, on the floor, were these enormous, massive, beautiful ivory tusks!

He lent us the tusks. They looked very good on stage (to the great relief of the dancers): real elephant tusks, super size, courtesy of Werner Erhard.

The choreographer moved to the East Coast, and put on her Caribbean ballet there. We heard later that she entered that ballet in a contest for choreographers from all over the United States, and she finished first or second. Encouraged by this success, she entered another competition, this time in Paris, for choreographers from all over the world. She brought a high-quality tape we had made in San Francisco and trained some dancers there in France to do a small section of the ballet—that’s how she entered the contest.

She did very well. She got into the final round, where there were only two left—a Latvian group that was doing a standard ballet with their regular dancers to beautiful classical music, and a maverick from America, with only the two dancers that she had trained in France, dancing to a ballet which had nothing but our drum music.

She was the favorite of the audience, but it wasn’t a popularity contest, and the judges decided that the Latvians had won. She went to the judges afterwards to find out the weakness in her ballet.

“Well, Madame, the music was not really satisfactory. It was not subtle enough. Controlled crescendoes were missing …”

And so we were at last found out: When we came to some really cultured people in Paris, who knew music from drums, we flunked out.

Altered States

I used to give a lecture every Wednesday over at the Hughes Aircraft Company, and one day I got there a little ahead of time, and was flirting around with the receptionist, as usual, when about half a dozen people came in—a man, a woman, and a few others. I had never seen them before. The man said, “Is this where Professor Feynman is giving some lectures?”

“This is the place,” the receptionist replied.

The man asks if his group can come to the lectures.

“I don’t think you’d like ‘em much,” I say. “They’re kind of technical.”

Pretty soon the woman, who was rather clever, figured it out: “I bet you’re Professor Feynman!”

It turned out the man was John Lilly, who had earlier done some work with dolphins. He and his wife were doing some research into sense deprivation, and had built some tanks.

“Isn’t it true that you’re supposed to get hallucinations under those circumstances?” I asked, excitedly.

“That is true indeed.”

I had always had this fascination with the images from dreams and other images that come to the mind that haven’t got a direct sensory source, and how it works in the head, and I wanted to see hallucinations. I had once thought to take drugs, but I got kind of scared of that: I love to think, and I don’t want to screw up the machine. But it seemed to me that just lying around in a sense-deprivation tank had no physiological danger, SO I was very anxious to try it.

I quickly accepted the Lillys’ invitation to use the tanks, a very kind invitation on their part, and they came to listen to the lecture with their group.

So the following week I went to try the tanks. Mr. Lilly introduced me to the tanks as he must have done with other people. There were lots of bulbs, like neon lights, with different gases in them. He showed me the Periodic Table and made up a lot of mystic hokey-poke about different kinds of lights that have different kinds of influences. He told me how you get ready to go into the tank by looking at yourself in the mirror with your nose up against it—all kinds of wicky-wack things, all kinds of gorp. I didn’t pay any attention to the gorp, but I did everything because I wanted to get into the tanks, and I also thought that perhaps such preparations might make it easier to have hallucinations. So I went through everything according to the way he said. The only thing that proved difficult was choosing what color light I wanted, especially as the tank was supposed to be dark inside.

A sense-deprivation tank is like a big bathtub, but with a cover that comes down. It’s completely dark inside, and because the cover is thick, there’s no sound. There’s a little pump that pumps air in, but it turns out you don’t need to worry about air because the volume of air is rather large, and you’re only in there for two or three hours, and you don’t really consume a lot of air when you breathe normally. Mr. Lilly said that the pumps were there to put people at ease, so I figured it’s just psychological, and asked him to turn the pump off, because it made a little bit of noise.

The water in the tank has Epsom salts in it to make it denser than normal water, so you float in it rather easily. The temperature is kept at body temperature, or 94, or something—he had it all figured out. There wasn’t supposed to be any light, any sound, any temperature sensation, no nothing! Once in a while you might drift over to the side and bump slightly, or because of condensation on the ceiling of the tank a drop of water might fall, but these slight disturbances were very rare.

I must have gone about a dozen times, each time spending about two and a half hours in the tank. The first time I didn’t get any hallucinations, but after I had been in the tank, the Lillys introduced me to a man billed as a medical doctor, who told me about a drug called ketamine, which was used as an anesthetic. I’ve always been interested in questions related to what happens when you go to sleep, or what happens when you get conked out, so they showed me the papers that came with the medicine and gave me one tenth of the normal dose.

I got this strange kind of feeling which I’ve never been able to figure out whenever I tried to characterize what the effect was. For instance, the drug had quite an effect on my vision; I felt I couldn’t see clearly. But when I’d look hard at something, it would be OK. It was sort of as if you didn’t care to look at things; you’re sloppily doing this and that, feeling kind of woozy, but as soon as you look, and concentrate, everything is, for a moment at least, all right. I took a book they had on organic chemistry and looked at a table full of complicated substances, and to my surprise was able to read them.

I did all kinds of other things, like moving my hands toward each other from a distance to see if my fingers would touch each other, and although I had a feeling of complete disorientation, a feeling of an inability to do practically anything, I never found a specific thing that I couldn’t do.

As I said before, the first time in the tank I didn’t get any hallucinations, and the second time I didn’t get any hallucinations. But the Lillys were very interesting people; I enjoyed them very, very much. They often gave me lunch, and so on, and after a while we discussed things on a different level than the early stuff with the lights. I realized that other people had found the sense-deprivation tank somewhat frightening, but to me it was a pretty interesting invention. I wasn’t afraid because I knew what it was: it was just a tank of Epsom salts.

The third time there was a man visiting—I met many interesting people there—who went by the name Baba Ram Das. He was a fella from Harvard who had gone to India and had written a popular book called Be Here Now. He related how his guru in India told him how to have an “out-of-body experience” (words I had often seen written on the bulletin board): Concentrate on your breath, on how it goes in and out of your nose as you breathe.

I figured I’d try anything to get a hallucination, and went into the tank. At some stage of the game I suddenly realized that—it’s hard to explain—I’m an inch to one side. In other words, where my breath is going, in and out, in and out, is not centered: My ego is off to one side a little bit, by about an inch.

I thought: “Now where is the ego located? I know everybody thinks the seat of thinking is in the brain, but how do they know that?” I knew already from reading things that it wasn’t so obvious to people before a lot of psychological studies were made. The Greeks thought the seat of thinking was in the liver, for instance. I wondered, “Is it possible that where the ego is located is learned by children looking at people putting their hand to their head when they say, ‘Let me think’? Therefore the idea that the ego is located up there, behind the eyes, might be conventional!” I figured that if I could move my ego an inch to one side, I could move it further. This was the beginning of my hallucinations.

I tried and after a while I got my ego to go down through my neck into the middle of my chest. When a drop of water came down and hit me on the shoulder, I felt it “up there,” above where “I” was. Every time a drop came I was startled a little bit, and my ego would jump back up through the neck to the usual place. Then I would have to work my way down again. At first it took a lot of work to go down each time, but gradually it got easier. I was able to get myself all the way down to the loins, to one side, but that was about as far as I could go for quite a while.

It was another time I was in the tank when I decided that if I could move myself to my loins, I should be able to get completely outside of my body. So I was able to “sit to one side.” It’s hard to explain—I’d move my hands and shake the water, and although I couldn’t see them, I knew where they were. But unlike in real life, where the hands are to each side, part way down, they were both to one side! The feeling in my fingers and everything else was exactly the same as normal, only my ego was sitting outside, “observing” all this.

From then on I had hallucinations almost every time, and was able to move further and further outside of my body. It developed that when I would move my hands I would see them as sort of mechanical things that were going up and down—they weren’t flesh; they were mechanical. But I was still able to feel everything. The feelings would be exactly consistent with the motion, but I also had this feeling of “he is that.” “I” even got out of the room, ultimately, and wandered about, going some distance to locations where things happened that I had seen earlier another day.

I had many types of out-of-the-body experiences. One time, for example, I could “see” the back of my head, with my hands resting against it. When I moved my fingers, I saw them move, but between the fingers and the thumb I saw the blue sky. Of course that wasn’t right; it was a hallucination. But the point is that as I moved my fingers, their movement was exactly consistent with the motion that I was imagining that I was seeing. The entire imagery would appear, and be consistent with what you feel and are doing, much like when you slowly wake up in the morning and are touching something (and you don’t know what it is), and suddenly it becomes clear what it is. So the entire imagery would suddenly appear, except it’s unusual, in the sense that you usually would imagine the ego to be located in front of the back of the head, but instead you have it behind the back of the head.

One of the things that perpetually bothered me, psychologically, while I was having a hallucination, was that I might have fallen asleep and would therefore be only dreaming. I had already had some experience with dreams, and I wanted a new experience. It was kind of dopey, because when you’re having hallucinations, and things like that, you’re not very sharp, so you do these dumb things that you set your mind to do, such as checking that you’re not dreaming. So I perpetually was checking that I wasn’t dreaming by—since my hands were often behind my head—rubbing my thumbs together, back and forth, feeling them. Of course I could have been dreaming that, but I wasn’t: I knew it was real.

After the very beginning, when the excitement of having a hallucination made them “jump out,” or stop happening, I was able to relax and have long hallucinations.

A week or two after, I was thinking a great deal about how the brain works compared to how a computing machine works—especially how information is stored. One of the interesting problems in this area is how memories are stored in the brain: You can get at them from so many directions compared to a machine—you don’t have to come directly with the correct address to the memory. If I want to get at the word “rent,” for example, I can be filling in a crossword puzzle, looking for a four-letter word that begins with r and ends in t; I can be thinking of types of income, or activities such as borrowing and lending; this in turn can lead to all sorts of other related memories or information. I was thinking about how to make an “imitating machine,” which would learn language as a child does: you would talk to the machine. But I couldn’t figure out how to store the stuff in an organized way so the machine could get it out for its own purposes.

When I went into the tank that week, and had my hallucination, I tried to think of very early memories. I kept saying to myself, “It’s gotta be earlier; it’s gotta be earlier”—I was never satisfied that the memories were early enough. When I got a very early memory—let’s say from my home town of Far Rockaway—then immediately would come a whole sequence of memories, all from the town of Far Rockaway. If I then would think of something from another city—Cedarhurst, or something—then a whole lot of stuff that was associated with Cedarhurst would come. And so I realized that things are stored according to the location where you had the experience.

I felt pretty good about this discovery, and came out of the tank, had a shower, got dressed, and so forth, and started driving to Hughes Aircraft to give my weekly lecture. It was therefore about forty-five minutes after I came out of the tank that I suddenly realized for the first time that I hadn’t the slightest idea of how memories are stored in the brain; all I had was a hallucination as to how memories are stored in the brain! What I had “discovered” had nothing to do with the way memories are stored in the brain; it had to do with the way I was playing games with myself.

In our numerous discussions about hallucinations on my earlier visits, I had been trying to explain to Lilly and others that the imagination that things are real does not represent true reality. If you see golden globes, or something, several times, and they talk to you during your hallucination and tell you they are another intelligence, it doesn’t mean they’re another intelligence; it just means that you have had this particular hallucination. So here I had this tremendous feeling of discovering how memories are stored, and it’s surprising that it took forty-five minutes before I realized the error that I had been trying to explain to everyone else.

One of the questions I thought about was whether hallucinations, like dreams, are influenced by what you already have in your mind—from other experiences during the day or before, or from things you are expecting to see. The reason, I believe, that I had an out-of-body experience was that we were discussing out-of-body experiences just before I went into the tank. And the reason I had a hallucination about how memories are stored in the brain was, I think, that I had been thinking about that problem all week.

I had considerable discussion with the various people there about the reality of experiences. They argued that something is considered real, in experimental science, if the experience can be reproduced. Thus when many people see golden globes that talk to them, time after time, the globes must be real. My claim was that in such situations there was a bit of discussion previous to going into the tank about the golden globes, so when the person hallucinating, with his mind already thinking about golden globes when he went into the tank, sees some approximation of the globes—maybe they’re blue, or something—he thinks he’s reproducing the experience. I felt that I could understand the difference between the type of agreement among people whose minds are set to agree, and the kind of agreement that you get in experimental work. It’s rather amusing that it’s so easy to tell the difference—but so hard to define it!

I believe there’s nothing in hallucinations that has anything to do with anything external to the internal psychological state of the person who’s got the hallucination. But there are nevertheless a lot of experiences by a lot of people who believe there’s reality in hallucinations. The same general idea may account for a certain amount of success that interpreters of dreams have. For example, some psychoanalysts interpret dreams by talking about the meanings of various symbols. And then, it’s not completely impossible that these symbols do appear in dreams that follow. So I think that, perhaps, the interpretation of hallucinations and dreams is a self-propagating process: you’ll have a general, more or less, success at it, especially if you discuss it carefully ahead of time.

Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going, but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly. But fifteen minutes was fast enough for me.

One thing that often happened was that as the hallucination was coming on, what you might describe as “garbage” would come: there were simply chaotic images—complete, random junk. I tried to remember some of the items of the junk in order to be able to characterize it again, but it was particularly difficult to remember. I think I was getting close to the kind of thing that happens when you begin to fall asleep: There are apparent logical connections, but when you try to remember what made you think of what you’re thinking about, you can’t remember. As a matter of fact, you soon forget what it is that you’re trying to remember. I can only remember things like a white sign with a pimple on it, in Chicago, and then it disappears. That kind of stuff all the time.

Mr. Lilly had a number of different tanks, and we tried a number of different experiments. It didn’t seem to make much difference as far as hallucinations were concerned, and I became convinced that the tank was unnecessary. Now that I saw what to do, I realized that all you have to do is sit quietly—why was it necessary that you had to have everything absolutely super duper?

So when I’d come home I’d turn out the lights and sit in the living room in a comfortable chair, and try and try—it never worked. I’ve never been able to have a hallucination outside of the tanks. Of course I would like to have done it at home, and I don’t doubt that you could meditate and do it if you practice, but I didn’t practice.

Cargo Cult Science [4]

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas—which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked—or very little of it did.

But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOs, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world.

Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I’m overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism, and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it’s a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn’t realize how much there was.

At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky shore below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl sitting with a guy who didn’t seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, “Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude babe?”

I’m trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, “I’m, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?”

“Sure,” she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby.

I think to myself, “What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!” He starts to rub her big toe. “I think I feel it,” he says. “I feel a kind of dent—is that the pituitary?”

I blurt out, “You’re a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!

They looked at me, horrified—I had blown my cover—and said, “It’s reflexology!”

I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.

That’s just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn’t do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.

But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down—or hardly going up—in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress—lots of theory, but no progress—in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way—or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn’t do “the right thing,” according to the experts.

So we really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science.

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people.

During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they’re missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school—we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated,

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn’t soak through food. Well, that’s true. It’s not dishonest; but the thing I’m talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest, it’s a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will—including Wesson oil. So it’s the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.

We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.

A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. Nevertheless, it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty. That’s why the planes don’t land—but they don’t land.

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.

But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves—of having utter scientific integrity—is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. “Well,” I said, “there aren’t any.” He said, “Yes, but then we won’t get support for more research of this kind.” I think that’s kind of dishonest. If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing—and if they don’t want to support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.

One example of the principle is this: If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.

I say that’s also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish it at all. That’s not giving scientific advice.

Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this—it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.

I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person—to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.

She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happens.

Nowadays there’s a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an experiment done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen, he had to use data from someone else’s experiment on light, hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn’t get time on the program (because there’s so little time and it’s such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn’t be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying—possibly—the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands.

All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.

He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using—not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.

I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science.

Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other people. As various people have made criticisms—and they themselves have made criticisms of their own experiments—they improve the techniques so that the effects are smaller, and smaller, and smaller until they gradually disappear. All the parapsychologists are looking for some experiment that can be repeated—that you can do again and get the same effect—statistically, even. They run a million rats—no, it’s people this time—they do a lot of things and get a certain statistical effect. Next time they try it they don’t get it any more. And now you find a man saying that it is an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is science?

This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which he was resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology. And, in telling people what to do next, he says that one of the things they have to do is be sure they only train students who have shown their ability to get PSI results to an acceptable extent—not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students who get only chance results. It is very dangerous to have such a policy in teaching—to teach students only how to get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific integrity.

So I have just one wish for you—the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel heed by a need to maintain your position In the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.