Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character

by Richard P. Feynman

When Feynman finally gets up to speak, he cracks a joke about how odd it is that whenever he’s invited to perform on the bongos, “the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.”

Feynman was as lucky as he was brilliant, because not only did that symbol represent a valve but it was also a problem area that needed fixing. His colleagues marveled at his genius and asked how he did it. His answer was, as always, honest and straight to the point: “You try to find out whether it’s a valve or not.”

When a person has been negative to you, and then you do something like that, they’re usually a hundred percent the other way, kind of to compensate. He got me other jobs, and kept telling everybody what a tremendous genius I was, saying, ‘He fixes radios by thinking!’ The whole idea of thinking, to fix a radio—a little boy stops and thinks, and figures out how to do it—he never thought that was possible.

I learned there that innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world.

We came to an intersection not far from the lake—there were still no houses or anything—and the rest of us were discussing whether we should go this way or that way, when Maurice caught up to us and said, ‘Go this way.’ ‘What the hell do you know, Maurice?’ we said, frustrated. ‘You’re always making these jokes. Why should we go this way?’ ‘Simple: Look at the telephone lines. Where there’s more wires, it’s going toward the central station.’ This guy, who looked like he wasn’t paying attention to anything, had come up with a terrific idea! We walked straight into town without making an error.

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

According to Einstein, if you go very high, your clock will go faster, because the higher something is in a gravitational field, the faster its clock goes. But if you try to go too high, since you’ve only got an hour, you have to go so fast to get there that the speed slows your clock down. So you can’t go too high. The question is, exactly what program of speed and height should you make so that you get the maximum time on your clock?

This assistant of Einstein worked on it for quite a bit before he realized that the answer is the real motion of matter. If you shoot something up in a normal way, so that the time it takes the shell to go up and come down is an hour, that’s the correct motion. It’s the fundamental principle of Einstein’s gravity—that is, what’s called the ‘proper time’ is at a maximum for the actual curve. But when I put it to him, about a rocket with a clock, he didn’t recognize it. It was just like the guys in mechanical drawing class, but this time it wasn’t dumb freshmen. So this kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people.

People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way—in such a way that often nobody believes me!

I call back, ‘RONte BALta!’, returning the greeting. He didn’t know I didn’t know, and I didn’t know what he said, and he didn’t know what I said. But it was OK! It was great! It works! After all, when they hear the intonation, they recognize it immediately as Italian—maybe it’s Milano instead of Romano, what the hell. But he’s an iTALian! So it’s just great. But you have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen.

After the banquet was over, the scoutmaster and a schoolteacher came over and told me they had been discussing my poem. One of them thought it was Italian, and the other thought it was Latin. The schoolteacher asks, ‘Which one of us is right?’ I said, ‘You’ll have to go ask the girls—they understood what language it was right away.’

One other thing about dreams. I had a friend named Deutsch, whose wife was from a family of psychoanalysts in Vienna. One evening, during a long discussion about dreams, he told me that dreams have significance: there are symbols in dreams that can be interpreted psychoanalytically.

‘I would guess they must have twenty-five or fifty chemists, and the chief research chemist has his own office—special, with glass. You know, like they have in the movies—guys coming in all the time with research projects that they’re doing, getting his advice, and rushing off to do more research, people coming in and out all the time. With twenty-five or fifty chemists, how the hell could we compete with them?’ ‘You’ll be interested and amused to know that you are now talking to the chief research chemist of the Metaplast Corporation, whose staff consisted of one bottle-washer!’

So I found hypnosis to be a very interesting experience. All the time you’re saying to yourself, ‘I could do that, but I won’t’—which is just another way of saying that you can’t.

‘A map of the cat, sir?’ she asked, horrified. ‘You mean a zoological chart!’ From then on there were rumors about some dumb biology graduate student who was looking for a ‘map of the cat.’ When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: ‘We know all that!’ ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you’ve had four years of biology.’ They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

But that was my big moment: I gave a seminar in the biology department at Harvard! I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.

But that shows you how much I trusted these ‘real guys.’ The painter had told me so much stuff that was reasonable that I was ready to give a certain chance that there was an odd phenomenon I didn’t know. I was expecting pink, but my set of thoughts were, ‘The only way to get yellow will be something new and interesting, and I’ve got to see this.’ I’ve very often made mistakes in my physics by thinking the theory isn’t as good as it really is, thinking that there are lots of complications that are going to spoil it—an attitude that anything can happen, in spite of what you’re pretty sure should happen.

The result was, when guys at MIT or Princeton had trouble doing a certain integral, it was because they couldn’t do it with the standard methods they had learned in school. If it was contour integration, they would have found it; if it was a simple series expansion, they would have found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under the integral sign, and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else’s, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.

I took an oyster, and it was absolutely terrible. But I said to myself, ‘That doesn’t really prove you’re a man. You didn’t know how terrible it was gonna be. It was easy enough when it was uncertain.’

We did a few more experiments, and I discovered that while bloodhounds are indeed quite capable, humans are not as incapable as they think they are: it’s just that they carry their nose so high off the ground!

People’s hands smell very different—that’s why dogs can identify people; you have to try it! All hands have a sort of moist smell, and a person who smokes has a very different smell on his hands from a person who doesn’t; ladies often have different kinds of perfumes, and so on. If somebody happened to have some coins in his pocket and happened to be handling them, you can smell that.

I remember a friend of mine who worked with me, Paul Olum, a mathematician, came up to me afterwards and said, ‘When they make a moving picture about this, they’ll have the guy coming back from Chicago to make his report to the Princeton men about the bomb. He’ll be wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase and so on—and here you’re in dirty shirtsleeves and just telling us all about it, in spite of its being such a serious and dramatic thing.’

My wife, Arlene, was ill with tuberculosis—very ill indeed. It looked as if something might happen at any minute, so I arranged ahead of time with a friend of mine in the dormitory to borrow his car in an emergency so I could get to Albuquerque quickly. His name was Klaus Fuchs. He was the spy, and he used his automobile to take the atomic secrets away from Los Alamos down to Santa Fe. But nobody knew that.

‘She’s dead. And how’s the program going?’ They caught on right away that I didn’t want to moon over it. (I had obviously done something to myself psychologically: Reality was so important—I had to understand what really happened to Arlene, physiologically—that I didn’t cry until a number of months later, when I was in Oak Ridge. I was walking past a department store with dresses in the window, and I thought Arlene would like one of them. That was too much for me.)

Anyway, Smith told me to sign some papers for the three ideas I was giving to the government to patent. Now, it’s some dopey legal thing, but when you give the patent to the government, the document you sign is not a legal document unless there’s some exchange, so the paper I signed said, ‘For the sum of one dollar, I, Richard P. Feynman, give this idea to the government …’ I sign the paper. ‘Where’s my dollar?’ ‘That’s just a formality,’ he says. ‘We haven’t got any funds set up to give a dollar.’ ‘You’ve got it all set up that I’m signing for the dollar,’ I say. ‘I want my dollar!’ ‘This is silly,’ Smith protests. ‘No, it’s not,’ I say. ‘It’s a legal document. You made me sign it, and I’m an honest man. If I sign something that says I got a dollar, I’ve gotta get a dollar. There’s no fooling around about it.’ ‘All right, all right!’ he says, exasperated. ‘I’ll give you a dollar, from my pocket!’

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

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

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

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.

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!’

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.

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.’

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.

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.