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

by Richard P. Feynman

That was just right for me, because I was not very good socially. I was so timid that when I had to take the mail out and walk past some seniors sitting on the steps with some girls, I was petrified: I didn’t know how to walk past them!

I was always terrified if a tennis ball would come over the fence and land near me, because I never could get it over the fence—it usually went about a radian off of where it was supposed to go.) I figured this was a new situation, a new world, and I could make a new reputation.

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!

Another time I’m dreaming and I hear ‘knock-knock; knock-knock.’ Something was happening in the dream that made this knocking fit, but not perfectly—it seemed sort of foreign. I thought: ‘Absolutely guaranteed that this knocking is coming from outside my dream, and I’ve invented this part of the dream to fit with it. I’ve got to wake up and find out what the hell it is.’

A day or two before the talk I saw Wigner in the hall. ‘Feynman,’ he said, ‘I think that work you’re doing with Wheeler is very interesting, so I’ve invited Russell to the seminar.’ Henry Norris Russell, the famous, great astronomer of the day, was coming to the lecture! Wigner went on. ‘I think Professor von Neumann would also be interested.’ Johnny Von Neumann was the greatest mathematician around. ‘And Professor Pauli is visiting from Switzerland, it so happens, so I’ve invited Professor Pauli to come’—Pauli was a very famous physicist—and by this time, I’m turning yellow. Finally, Wigner said, ‘Professor Einstein only rarely comes to our weekly seminars, but your work is so interesting that I’ve invited him specially, so he’s coming, too.’

‘What can I do to stop them from coming to my larder without killing any ants? No poison; you gotta be humane to the ants!’ What I did was this: In preparation, I put a bit of sugar about six or eight inches from their entry point into the room, that they didn’t know about. Then I made those ferry things again, and whenever an ant returning with food walked onto my little ferry, I’d carry him over and put him on the sugar. Any ant coming toward the larder that walked onto a ferry I also carried over to the sugar. Eventually the ants found their way from the sugar to their hole, so this new trail was being doubly reinforced, while the old trail was being used less and less. I knew that after half an hour or so the old trail would dry up, and in an hour they were out of my larder. I didn’t wash the floor; I didn’t do anything but ferry ants.

Then the son told me what happened. The last time he was there, Bohr said to his son, ‘Remember the name of that little fellow in the back over there? He’s the only guy who’s not afraid of me, and will say when I’ve got a crazy idea. So next time when we want to discuss ideas, we’re not going to be able to do it with these guys who say everything is yes, yes, Dr Bohr. Get that guy and we’ll talk with him first.’

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

And then I thought to myself, ‘You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it’s impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!’ It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.

There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

I suddenly got this treMENdous, strong feeling: ‘That’s just what I want; that’ll fit just right. I’d just love to have a drink right now!’ I started to walk into the bar, and I suddenly thought to myself, ‘Wait a minute! It’s the middle of the afternoon. There’s nobody here. There’s no social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you have to have a drink?’—and I got scared. I never drank ever again, since then.

‘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?”’

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.’

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!

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.

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.

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!

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!