O Americano, Outra Vez!

   One time I picked up a hitchhiker who told me how interesting South America was, and that I ought to go there. I complained that the language is different, but he said just go ahead and learn it—it’s no big problem. So I thought, that’s a good idea: I’ll go to South America.
   Cornell had some foreign language classes which followed a method used during the war, in which small groups of about ten students and one native speaker speak only the foreign language-nothing else. Since I was a rather young-looking professor there at Cornell, I decided to take the class as if I were a regular student. And since I didn’t know yet where I was going to end up in South America, I decided to take Spanish, because the great majority of the countries there speak Spanish.
   So when it was time to register for the class, we were standing outside, ready to go into the classroom, when this pneumatic blonde came along. You know how once in a while you get this feeling, WOW? She looked terrific. I said to myself, “Maybe she’s going to be in the Spanish class—that’ll be great!” But no, she walked into the Portuguese class. So I figured, What the hell—I might as well learn Portuguese.
   I started walking right after her when this Anglo-Saxon attitude that I have said, “No, that’s not a good reason to decide which language to speak.” So I went back and signed up for the Spanish class, to my utter regret.
   Some time later I was at a Physics Society meeting in New York, and I found myself sitting next to Jaime Tiomno, from Brazil, and he asked, “What are you going to do next summer?”
   “I’m thinking of visiting South America.”
   “Oh! Why don’t you come to Brazil? I’ll get a position for you at the Center for Physical Research.”
   So now I had to convert all that Spanish into Portuguese! I found a Portuguese graduate student at Cornell, and twice a week he gave me lessons, so I was able to alter what I had learned. On the plane to Brazil I started out sitting next to a guy from Colombia who spoke only Spanish: so I wouldn’t talk to him because I didn’t want to get confused again. But sitting in front of me were two guys who were talking Portuguese. I had never heard real Portuguese; I had only had this teacher who had talked very slowly and clearly. So here are these two guys talking a blue streak, brrrrrrr-a-ta brrrrrrr-a-ta, and I can’t even hear the word for “I,” or the word for “the,” or anything.
   Finally, when we made a refueling stop in Trinidad, I went up to the two fellas and said very slowly in Portuguese, or what I thought was Portuguese, “Excuse me … can you understand … what I am saying to you now?”
   “Pues nгo, porque nгo? ”—” Sure, why not?” they replied.
   So I explained as best I could that I had been learning Portuguese for some months now, but I had never heard it spoken in conversation, and I was listening to them on the airplane, but couldn’t understand a word they were saying.
   “Oh,” they said with a laugh, “Nao e Portugues! E Ladдo! Judeo!” What they were speaking was to Portuguese as Yiddish is to German, so you can imagine a guy who’s been studying German sitting behind two guys talking Yiddish, trying to figure out what’s the matter. It’s obviously German, but it doesn’t work. He must not have learned German very well.
   When we got back on the plane, they pointed out another man who did speak Portuguese, so I sat next to him. He had been studying neurosurgery in Maryland, so it was very easy to talk with him—as long as it was about cirugia neural, o cerebreu, and other such “complicated” things. The long words are actually quite easy to translate into Portuguese because the only difference is their endings: “-tion” in English is “-зao” in Portuguese; “-ly” is “-mente,” and so on. But when he looked out the window and said something simple, I was lost: I couldn’t decipher “the sky is blue.”
   I got off the plane in Recife (the Brazilian government was going to pay the part from Recife to Rio) and was met by the father-in-law of Cesar Lattes, who was the director of the Center for Physical Research in Rio, his wife, and another man. As the men were off getting my luggage, the lady started talking to me in Portuguese: “You speak Portuguese? How nice! How was it that you learned Portuguese?”
   I replied slowly, with great effort. “First, I started to learn Spanish… then I discovered I was going to Brazil.
   Now I wanted to say, “So, I learned Portuguese,” but I couldn’t think of the word for “so.” I knew how to make BIG words, though, so I finished the sentence like this: “CONSEQUENTEMENTE, apprendiPortugues!”
   When the two men came back with the baggage, she said, “Oh, he speaks Portuguese! And with such wonderful words: CONSEQUENTEMENTE!”
   Then an announcement came over the loudspeaker. The flight to Rio was canceled, and there wouldn’t be another one till next Tuesday—and I had to be in Rio on Monday, at the latest.
   I got all upset. “Maybe there’s a cargo plane. I’ll travel in a cargo plane,” I said.
   “Professor!” they said, “It’s really quite nice here in Recife. We’ll show you around. Why don’t you relax—you’re in Brazil.”
   That evening I went for a walk in town, and came upon a small crowd of people standing around a great big rectangular hole in the road—it had been dug for sewer pipes, or something—and there, sitting exactly in the hole, was a car. It was marvelous: it fitted absolutely perfectly, with its roof level with the road. The workmen hadn’t bothered to put up any signs at the end of the day, and the guy had simply driven into it. I noticed a difference: When we’d dig a hole, there’d be all kinds of detour signs and flashing lights to protect us. There, they dig the hole, and when they’re finished for the day, they just leave.
   Anyway, Recife was a nice town, and I did wait until next Tuesday to fly to Rio.
   When I got to Rio I met Cesar Lattes. The national TV network wanted to make some pictures of our meeting, so they started filming, but without any sound. The cameramen said, “Act as if you’re talking. Say something—anything.”
   So Lattes asked me, “Have you found a sleeping dictionary yet?”
   That night, Brazilian TV audiences saw the director of the Center for Physical Research welcome the Visiting Professor from the United States, but little did they know that the subject of their conversation was finding a girl to spend the night with!
   When I got to the center, we had to decide when I would give my lectures—in the morning, or afternoon.
   Lattes said, “The students prefer the afternoon.”
   “So let’s have them in the afternoon.”
   “But the beach is nice in the afternoon, so why don’t you give the lectures in the morning, so you can enjoy the beach in the afternoon.”
   “But you said the students prefer to have them in the afternoon.”
   “Don’t worry about that. Do what’s most convenient for you! Enjoy the beach in the afternoon.”
   So I learned how to look at life in a way that’s different from the way it is where I come from. First, they weren’t in the same hurry that I was. And second, if it’s better for you, never mind! So I gave the lectures in the morning and enjoyed the beach in the afternoon. And had I learned that lesson earlier, I would have learned Portuguese in the first place, instead of Spanish.
   I thought at first that I would give my lectures in English, but I noticed something: When the students were explaining something to me in Portuguese, I couldn’t understand it very well, even though I knew a certain amount of Portuguese. It was not exactly clear to me whether they had said “increase,” or “decrease,” or “not increase,” or “not decrease,” or “decrease slowly.” But when they struggled with English, they’d say “ahp” or “doon,” and I knew which way it was, even though the pronunciation was lousy and the grammar was all screwed up. So I realized that if I was going to talk to them and try to teach them, it would be better for me to talk in Portuguese, poor as it was. It would be easier for them to understand.
   During that first time in Brazil, which lasted six weeks, I was invited to give a talk at the Brazilian Academy of Sciences about some work in quantum electrodynamics that I had just done. I thought I would give the talk in Portuguese, and two students at the center said they would help me with it. I began by writing out my talk in absolutely lousy Portuguese. I wrote it myself, because if they had written it, there would be too many words I didn’t know and couldn’t pronounce correctly. So I wrote it, and they fixed up all the grammar, fixed up the words and made it nice, but it was still at the level that I could read easily and know more or less what I was saying. They practiced with me to get the pronunciations absolutely right: the “de” should be in between “deh” and “day”—it had to be just so.
   I got to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences meeting, and the first speaker, a chemist, got up and gave his talk—in English. Was he trying to be polite, or what? I couldn’t understand what he was saying because his pronunciation was so bad, but maybe everybody else had the same accent so they could understand him; I don’t know. Then the next guy gets up, and gives his talk in English!
   When it was my turn, I got up and said, “I’m sorry; I hadn’t realized that the official language of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences was English, and therefore I did not prepare my talk in English. So please excuse me, but I’m going to have to give it in Portuguese.”
   So I read the thing, and everybody was very pleased with it.
   The next guy to get up said, “Following the example of my colleague from the United States, I also will give my talk in Portuguese.” So, for all I know, I changed the tradition of what language is used in the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
   Some years later, I met a man from Brazil who quoted to me the exact sentences I had used at the beginning of my talk to the Academy. So apparently it made quite an impression on them.
   But the language was always difficult for me, and I kept working on it all the time, reading the newspaper, and so on. I kept on giving my lectures in Portuguese—what I call “Feynman’s Portuguese,” which I knew couldn’t be the same as real Portuguese, because I could understand what I was saying, while I couldn’t understand what the people in the street were saying.
   Because I liked it so much that first time in Brazil, I went again a year later, this time for ten months. This time I lectured at the University of Rio, which was supposed to pay me, but they never did, so the center kept giving me the money I was supposed to get from the university.
   I finally ended up staying in a hotel right on the beach at Copacabana, called the Miramar. For a while I had a room on the thirteenth floor, where I could look out the window at the ocean and watch the girls on the beach.
   It turned out that this hotel was the one that the airline pilots and the stewardesses from Pan American Airlines stayed at when they would “lay over”—a term that always bothered me a little bit. Their rooms were always on the fourth floor, and late at night there would often be a certain amount of sheepish sneaking up and down in the elevator.
   One time I went away for a few weeks on a trip, and when I came back the manager told me he had to book my room to somebody else, since it was the last available empty room, and that he had moved my stuff to a new room.
   It was a room right over the kitchen, that people usually didn’t stay in very long. The manager must have figured that I was the only guy who could see the advantages of that room sufficiently clearly that I would tolerate the smells and not complain. I didn’t complain: It was on the fourth floor, near the stewardesses. It saved a lot of problems.
   The people from the airlines were somewhat bored with their lives, strangely enough, and at night they would often go to bars to drink. I liked them all, and in order to be sociable, I would go with them to the bar to have a few drinks, several nights a week.
   One day, about 3:30 in the afternoon, I was walking along the sidewalk opposite the beach at Copacabana past a bar. I suddenly got this treMENdous, strong feeling: “That’s just what I want; that’ll fit just right. I’d just love to have a drink right now!”
   I started to walk into the bar, and I suddenly thought to myself, “Wait a minute! It’s the middle of the afternoon. There’s nobody here, There’s no social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you have to have a drink?”—and I got scared.
   I never drank ever again, since then. I suppose I really wasn’t in any danger, because I found it very easy to stop. But that strong feeling that I didn’t understand frightened me. You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I don’t want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick. It’s the same reason that, later on, I was reluctant to try experiments with LSD in spite of my curiosity about hallucinations.
   Near the end of that year in Brazil I took one of the air hostesses—a very lovely girl with braids—to the museum. As we went through the Egyptian section, I found myself telling her things like, “The wings on the sarcophagus mean such-and-such, and in these vases they used to put the entrails, and around the corner there oughta be a so-and-so …” and I thought to myself, “You know where you learned all that stuff? From Mary Lou”—and I got lonely for her.
   I met Mary Lou at Cornell and later, when I came to Pasadena, I found that she had come to Westwood, nearby. I liked her for a while, but we used to argue a bit; finally we decided it was hopeless, and we separated. But after a year of taking out these air hostesses and not really getting anywhere, I was frustrated. So when I was telling this girl all these things, I thought Mary Lou really was quite wonderful, and we shouldn’t have had all those arguments.
   I wrote a letter to her and proposed. Somebody who’s wise could have told me that was dangerous: When you’re away and you’ve got nothing but paper, and you’re feeling lonely, you remember all the good things and you can’t remember the reasons you had the arguments. And it didn’t work out. The arguments started again right away, and the marriage lasted for only two years.
   There was a man at the U.S. Embassy who knew I liked samba music. I think I told him that when I had been in Brazil the first time, I had heard a samba band practicing in the street, and I wanted to learn more about Brazilian music.
   He said a small group, called a regional, practiced at his apartment every week, and I could come over and listen to them play.
   There were three or four people—one was the janitor from the apartment house-and they played rather quiet music up in his apartment; they had no other place to play. One guy had a tambourine that they called a pandeiro, and another guy had a small guitar. I kept hearing the beat of a drum somewhere, but there was no drum! Finally I figured out that it was the tambourine, which the guy was playing in a complicated way, twisting his wrist and hitting the skin with his thumb. I found that interesting, and learned how to play the pandeiro, more or less.
   Then the season for Carnaval began to come around. That’s the season when new music is presented. They don’t put out new music and records all the time; they put them all out during Carnaval time, and it’s very exciting.
   It turned out that the janitor was the composer for a small samba “school”—not a school in the sense of education, but in the sense of fish—from Copacabana Beach, called Farзantes deCopacabana, which means “Fakers from Copacabana,” which was just right for me, and he invited me to be in it.
   Now this samba school was a thing where guys from the favelas–the poor sections of the city—would come down, and meet behind a construction lot where some apartment houses were being built, and practice the new music for the Carnaval.
   I chose to play a thing called a “frigideira,” which is a toy frying pan made of metal, about six inches in diameter, with a little metal stick to beat it with. It’s an accompanying instrument which makes a tinkly, rapid noise that goes with the main samba music and rhythm and fills it out. So I tried to play this thing and everything was going all right. We were practicing, the music was roaring along and we were going like sixty, when all of a sudden the head of the batteria section, a great big black man, yelled out, “STOP! Hold it, hold it—wait a minute!” And everybody stopped. “Something’s wrong with the frigideiras!” he boomed out. “0 Americano, outra vez! ” (“The American again!”)
   So I felt uncomfortable. I practiced all the time. I’d walk along the beach holding two sticks that I had picked up, getting the twisty motion of the wrists, practicing, practicing, practicing. I kept working on it, but I always felt inferior, that I was some kind of trouble, and wasn’t really up to it.
   Well, it was getting closer to Carnaval time, and one evening there was a conversation between the leader of the band and another guy, and then the leader started coming around, picking people out: “You!” he said to a trumpeter. “You!” he said to a singer. “You!”—and he pointed to me. I figured we were finished. He said, “Go out in front!”
   We went out to the front of the construction site—the five or six of us—and there was an old Cadillac convertible, with its top down. “Get in!” the leader said.
   There wasn’t enough room for us all, so some of us had to sit up on the back. I said to the guy next to me, “What’s he doing—is he putting us out?”
   “Nao sй, nгo sй.” (“I don’t know.”)
   We drove off way up high on a road which ended near the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. The car stopped and the leader said, “Get out!”—and they walked us right up to the edge of the cliff!
   And sure enough, he said, “Now line up! You first, you next, you next! Start playing! Now march!”
   We would have marched off the edge of the cliff—except for a steep trail that went down. So our little group goes down the trail—the trumpet, the singer, the guitar, the pandeiro, and the frigideira–to an outdoor party in the woods. We weren’t picked out because the leader wanted to get rid of us; he was sending us to this private party that wanted some samba music! And afterwards he collected money to pay for some costumes for our band.
   After that I felt a little better, because I realized that when he picked the frigideira player, he picked me!
   Another thing happened to increase my confidence. Some time later, a guy came from another samba school, in Leblon, a beach further on. He wanted to join our school.
   The boss said, “Where’re you from?”
   “Leblon.”
   “What do you play?”
   “Frigideira.”
   “OK. Let me hear you play the frigideira.”
   So this guy picked up his frigideira and his metal stick and … “brrra -dup -dup; chick -a -chick.” Gee whiz! It was wonderful!
   The boss said to him, “You go over there and stand next to O Americano, and you’ll learn how to play the frigideira!”
   My theory is that it’s like a person who speaks French who comes to America. At first they’re making all kinds of mistakes, and you can hardly understand them. Then they keep on practicing until they speak rather well, and you find there’s a delightful twist to their way of speaking—their accent is rather nice, and you love to listen to it. So I must have had some sort of accent playing the frigideira, because I couldn’t compete with those guys who had been playing it all their lives; it must have been some kind of dumb accent. But whatever it was, I became a rather successful frigideira player.
   One day, shortly before Carnaval time, the leader of the samba school said, “OK, we’re going to practice marching in the street.”
   We all went out from the construction site to the street, and it was full of traffic. The streets of Copacabana were always a big mess. Believe it or not, there was a trolley line in which the trolley cars went one way, and the automobiles went the other way. Here it was rush hour in Copacabana, and we were going to march down the middle of Avenida Atlantica.
   I said to myself, “Jesus! The boss didn’t get a license, he didn’t OK it with the police, he didn’t do anything. He’s decided we’re just going to go out.”
   So we started to go out into the street, and everybody, all around, was excited. Some volunteers from a group of bystanders took a rope and formed a big square around our band, so the pedestrians wouldn’t walk through our lines. People started to lean out of the windows. Everybody wanted to hear the new samba music. It was very exciting!
   As soon as we started to march, I saw a policeman, way down at the other end of the road. He looked, saw what was happening, and started diverting traffic! Everything was informal. Nobody made any arrangements, but it worked fine. The people were holding the ropes around us, the policeman was diverting the traffic, the pedestrians were crowded and the traffic was jammed, but we were going along great! We walked down the street, around the corners, and all over the damn Copacabana, at random!
   Finally we ended up in a little square in front of the apartment where the boss’s mother lived. We stood there in this place, playing, and the guy’s mother, and aunt, and so on, came down. They had aprons on; they had been working in the kitchen, and you could see their excitement—they were almost crying. It was really nice to do that human stuff. And all the people leaning out of the windows—that was terrific! And I remembered the time I had been in Brazil before, and had seen one of these samba bands—how I loved the music and nearly went crazy over it—and now I was in it!
   By the way, when we were marching around the streets of Copacabana that day, I saw in a group on the sidewalk two young ladies from the embassy. Next week I got a note from the embassy saying, “It’s a great thing you are doing, yak, yak, yak …” as if my purpose was to improve relations between the United States and Brazil! So it was a “great” thing I was doing.
   Well, in order to go to these rehearsals, I didn’t want to go dressed in my regular clothes that I wore to the university. The people in the band were very poor, and had only old, tattered clothes. So I put on an old undershirt, some old pants, and so forth, so I wouldn’t look too peculiar. But then I couldn’t walk out of my luxury hotel on Avenida Atlantica in Copacabana Beach through the lobby. So I always took the elevator down to the bottom and went out through the basement.
   A short time before Carnaval, there was going to be a special competition between the samba schools of the beaches—Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon; there were three or four schools, and we were one. We were going to march in costume down Avenida Atlantica. I felt a little uncomfortable about marching in one of those fancy Carnaval costumes, since I wasn’t a Brazilian. But we were supposed to be dressed as Greeks, so I figured I’m as good a Greek as they are.
   On the day of the competition, I was eating at the hotel restaurant, and the head waiter, who had often seen me tapping on the table when there was samba music playing, came over to me and said, “Mr. Feynman, this evening there’s going to be something you will love! It’s tipicoBrasileiro–typical Brazilian: There’s going to be a march of the samba schools right in front of the hotel! And the music is so good—you must hear it.”
   I said, “Well, I’m kind of busy tonight. I don’t know if I can make it.”
   “Oh! But you’d love it so much! You must not miss it! It’s tipicoBrasileiro!”
   He was very insistent, and as I kept telling him I didn’t think I’d be there to see it, he became disappointed.
   That evening I put on my old clothes and went down through the basement, as usual. We put on the costumes at the construction lot and began marching down Avenida Atlantica, a hundred Brazilian Greeks in paper costumes, and I was in the back, playing away on the frigideira.
   Big crowds were along both sides of the Avenida; everybody was leaning out of the windows, and we were coming up to the Miramar Hotel, where I was staying. People were standing on the tables and chairs, and there were crowds and crowds of people. We were playing along, going like sixty, as our band started to pass in front of the hotel. Suddenly I saw one of the waiters shoot up in the air, pointing with his arm, and through all this noise I can hear him scream, “0 PROFESSOR!” So the head waiter found out why I wasn’t able to be there that evening to see the competition—I was in it!
   The next day I saw a lady I knew from meeting her on the beach all the time, who had an apartment overlooking the Avenida. She had some friends over to watch the parade of the samba schools, and when we went by, one of her friends exclaimed, “Listen to that guy play the frigideira–heisgood!” I had succeeded. I got a kick out of succeeding at something I wasn’t supposed to be able to do.
   When the time came for Carnaval, not very many people from our school showed up. There were some special costumes that were made just for the occasion, but not enough people. Maybe they had the attitude that we couldn’t win against the really big samba schools from the city; I don’t know. I thought we were working day after day, practicing and marching for the Carnaval, but when Carnaval came, a lot of the band didn’t show up, and we didn’t compete very well. Even as we were marching around in the street, some of the band wandered off. Funny result! I never did understand it very well, but maybe the main excitement and fun was tryjng to win the contest of the beaches, where most people felt their level was. And we did win, by the way.


   During that ten-month stay in Brazil I got interested in the energy levels of the lighter nuclei. I worked out all the theory for it in my hotel room, but I wanted to check how the data from the experiments looked. This was new stuff that was being worked out up at the Kellogg Laboratory by the experts at Caltech, so I made contact with them—the timing was all arranged—by ham radio. I found an amateur radio operator in Brazil, and about once a week I’d go over to his house. He’d make contact with the ham radio operator in Pasadena, and then, because there was something slightly illegal about it, he’d give me some call letters and would say, “Now I’ll turn you over to WKWX, who’s sitting next to me and would like to talk to you.”
   So I’d say, “This is WKWX. Could you please tell me the spacing between the certain levels in boron we talked about last week,” and so on. I would use the data from the experiments to adjust my constants and check whether I was on the right track.
   The first guy went on vacation, but he gave me another amateur radio operator to go to. This second guy was blind and operated his station. They were both very nice, and the contact I had with Caltech by ham radio was very effective and useful to me.
   As for the physics itself, I worked out quite a good deal, and it was sensible. It was worked out and verified by other people later. I decided, though, that I had so many parameters that I had to adjust—too much “phenomenological adjustment of constants” to make everything fit—that I couldn’t be sure it was very useful. I wanted a rather deeper understanding of the nuclei, and I was never quite convinced it was very significant, so I never did anything with it.

   In regard to education in Brazil, I had a very interesting experience. I was teaching a group of students who would ultimately become teachers, since at that time there were not many opportunities in Brazil for a highly trained person in science. These students had already had many courses, and this was to be their most advanced course in electricity and magnetism—Maxwell’s equations, and so on.
   The university was located in various office buildings throughout the city, and the course I taught met in a building which overlooked the bay.
   I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question—the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell—they couldn’t answer it at all! For instance, one time I was talking about polarized light, and I gave them all some strips of polaroid.
   Polaroid passes only light whose electric vector is in a certain direction, so I explained how you could tell which way the light is polarized from whether the polaroid is dark or light.
   We first took two strips of polaroid and rotated them until they let the most light through. From doing that we could tell that the two strips were now admitting light polarized in the same direction—what passed through one piece of polaroid could also pass through the other. But then I asked them how one could tell the absolute direction of polarization, for a single piece of polaroid.
   They hadn’t any idea.
   I knew this took a certain amount of ingenuity, so I gave them a hint: “Look at the light reflected from the bay outside.”
   Nobody said anything.
   Then I said, “Have you ever heard of Brewster’s Angle?”
   “Yes, sir! Brewster’s Angle is the angle at which light reflected from a medium with an index of refraction is completely polarized.”
   “And which way is the light polarized when it’s reflected?”
   “The light is polarized perpendicular to the plane of reflection, sir.” Even now, I have to think about it; they knew it cold! They even knew the tangent of the angle equals the index!
   I said, “Well?”
   Still nothing. They had just told me that light reflected from a medium with an index, such as the bay outside, was polarized; they had even told me which way it was polarized.
   I said, “Look at the bay outside, through the polaroid. Now turn the polaroid.”
   “Ooh, it’s polarized!” they said.
   After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” is the direction in which you see something when you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, “What is Brewster’s Angle?” I’m going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, “Look at the water,” nothing happens—they don’t have anything under “Look at the water”!
   Later I attended a lecture at the engineering school. The lecture went like this, translated into English: “Two bodies … are considered equivalent … if equal torques … will produce … equal acceleration. Two bodies, are considered equivalent, if equal torques, will produce equal acceleration.” The students were all sitting there taking dictation, and when the professor repeated the sentence, they checked it to make sure they wrote it down all right. Then they wrote down the next sentence, and on and on. I was the only one who knew the professor was talking about objects with the same moment of inertia, and it was hard to figure out.
   I didn’t see how they were going to learn anything from that. Here he was talking about moments of inertia, but there was no discussion about how hard it is to push a door open when you put heavy weights on the outside, compared to when you put them near the hinge—nothing!
   After the lecture, I talked to a student: “You take all those notes—what do you do with them?”
   “Oh, we study them,” he says. “We’ll have an exam.”
   “What will the exam be like?”
   “Very easy. I can tell you now one of the questions.” He looks at his notebook and says, “ ‘When are two bodies equivalent?’ And the answer is, ‘Two bodies are considered equivalent if equal torques will produce equal acceleration.’ So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and “learn” all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized.
   Then I went to an entrance exam for students coming into the engineering school. It was an oral exam, and I was allowed to listen to it. One of the students was absolutely super: He answered everything nifty! The examiners asked him what diamagnetism was, and he answered it perfectly. Then they asked, “When light comes at an angle through a sheet of material with a certain thickness, and a certain index N, what happens to the light?”
   “It comes out parallel to itself, sir—displaced.”
   “And how much is it displaced?”
   “I don’t know, sir, but I can figure it out.” So he figured it out. He was very good. But I had, by this time, my suspicions.
   After the exam I went up to this bright young man, and explained to him that I was from the United States, and that I wanted to ask him some questions that would not affect the result of his examination in any way. The first question I ask is, “Can you give me some example of a diamagnetic substance?”
   “No.”
   Then I asked, “If this book was made of glass, and I was looking at something on the table through it, what would happen to the image if I tilted the glass?”
   “It would be deflected, sir, by twice the angle that you’ve turned the book.”
   I said, “You haven’t got it mixed up with a mirror, have you?”
   “No, sir!”
   He had just told me in the examination that the light would be displaced, parallel to itself, and therefore the image would move over to one side, but would not be turned by any angle. He had even figured out how much it would be displaced, but he didn’t realize that a piece of glass is a material with an index, and that his calculation had applied to my question.
   I taught a course at the engineering school on mathematical methods in physics, in which I tried to show how to solve problems by trial and error. It’s something that people don’t usually learn, so I began with some simple examples of arithmetic to illustrate the method. I was surprised that only about eight out of the eighty or so students turned in the first assignment. So I gave a strong lecture about having to actually try it, not just sit back and watch me do it.
   After the lecture some students came up to me in a little delegation, and told me that I didn’t understand the backgrounds that they have, that they can study without doing the problems, that they have already learned arithmetic, and that this stuff was beneath them.
   So I kept going with the class, and no matter how complicated or obviously advanced the work was becoming, they were never handing a damn thing in. Of course I realized what it was: They couldn’t do it!
   One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: “If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘What are you wasting our time for in the class? We’re trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking a question’.”
   It was a kind of one-upmanship, where nobody knows what’s going on, and they’d put the other one down as if they did know. They all fake that they know, and if one student admits for a moment that something is confusing by asking a question, the others take a high-handed attitude, acting as if it’s not confusing at all, telling him that he’s wasting their time.
   I explained how useful it was to work together, to discuss the questions, to talk it over, but they wouldn’t do that either, because they would be losing face if they had to ask someone else. It was pitiful! All the work they did, intelligent people, but they got themselves into this funny state of mind, this strange kind of self-propagating “education” which is meaningless, utterly meaningless!
   At the end of the academic year, the students asked me to give a talk about my experiences of teaching in Brazil. At the talk there would be not only students, but professors and government officials, so I made them promise that I could say whatever I wanted. They said, “Sure. Of course. It’s a free country.”
   So I came in, carrying the elementary physics textbook that they used in the first year of college. They thought this book was especially good because it had different kinds of typeface—bold black for the most important things to remember, lighter for less important things, and so on.
   Right away somebody said, “You’re not going to say anything bad about the textbook, are you? The man who wrote it is here, and everybody thinks it’s a good textbook.”
   “You promised I could say whatever I wanted.”
   The lecture hall was full. I started out by defining science as an understanding of the behavior of nature. Then I asked, “What is a good reason for teaching science? Of course, no country can consider itself civilized unless … yak, yak, yak.” They were all sitting there nodding, because I know that’s the way they think.
   Then I say, “That, of course, is absurd, because why should we feel we have to keep up with another country? We have to do it for a good reason, a sensible reason; not just because other countries do.” Then I talked about the utility of science, and its contribution to the improvement of the human condition, and all that—I really teased them a little bit.
   Then I say, “The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that no science is being taught in Brazil!”
   I can see them stir, thinking, “What? No science? This is absolutely crazy! We have all these classes.”
   So I tell them that one of the first things to strike me when I came to Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much earlier than kids do in the United States, that it’s amazing you don’t find many physicists in Brazil—why is that? So many kids are working so hard, and nothing comes of it.
   Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren’t many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek—even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, “What were Socrates’ ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?”—and the student can’t answer. Then he asks the student, What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?” the student lights up and goes, “Brrrrrrrrr -up ”—he tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.
   But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!
   What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them into words the students can understand.
   I said, “That’s how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids ‘science’ here in Brazil.” (Big blast, right?)
   Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using. “There are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one place where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and so on. The numbers have ‘errors’ in them—that is, if you look at them, you think you’re looking at experimental results, because the numbers are a little above, or a little below, the theoretical values. The book even talks about having to correct the experimental errors—very fine. The trouble is, when you calculate the value of the acceleration constant from these values, you get the right answer. But a ball rolling down an inclined plane, if it is actually done, has an inertia to get it to turn, and will, if you do the experiment, produce five-sevenths of the right answer, because of the extra energy needed to go into the rotation of the ball. Therefore this single example of experimental ‘results’ is obtained from a fake experiment. Nobody had rolled such a ball, or they would never have gotten those results!
   “I have discovered something else,” I continued. “By flipping the pages at random, and putting my finger in and reading the sentences on that page, I can show you what’s the matter—how it’s not science, but memorizing, in every circumstance. Therefore I am brave enough to flip through the pages now, in front of this audience, to put my finger in, to read, and to show you.”
   So I did it. Brrrrrrrup–I stuck my finger in, and I started to read: “Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the light emitted when crystals are crushed..
   I said, “And there, have you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You haven’t told anything about nature-what crystals produce light when you crush them, why they produce light. Did you see any student go home and try it? He can’t.
   “But if, instead, you were to write, ‘When you take a lump of sugar and crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called “triboluminescence.”‘ Then someone will go home and try it. Then there’s an experience of nature.” I used that example to show them, but it didn’t make any difference where I would have put my finger in the book; it was like that everywhere.
   Finally, I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could he educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything. “However,” I said, “I must be wrong. There were two students in my class who did very well, and one of the physicists I know was educated entirely in Brazil. Thus, it must be possible for some people to work their way through the system, had as it is.”
   Well, after I gave the talk, the head of the science education department got up and said, “Mr. Feynman has told us some things that are very hard for us to hear, but it appears to be that he really loves science, and is sincere in his criticism. Therefore, I think we should listen to him. I came here knowing we have some sickness in our system of education; what I have learned is that we have a cancer!”—and he sat down.
   That gave other people the freedom to speak out, and there was a big excitement. Everybody was getting up and making suggestions. The students got some committee together to mimeograph the lectures in advance, and they got other committees organized to do this and that.
   Then something happened which was totally unexpected for me. One of the students got up and said, “I’m one of the two students whom Mr. Feynman referred to at the end of his talk. I was not educated in Brazil; I was educated in Germany, and I’ve just come to Brazil this year.”
   The other student who had done well in class had a similar thing to say. And the professor I had mentioned got up and said, “I was educated here in Brazil during the war, when, fortunately, all of the professors had left the university, so I learned everything by reading alone. Therefore I was not really educated under the Brazilian system.”
   I didn’t expect that. I knew the system was bad, but 100 percent—it was terrible!
   Since I had gone to Brazil under a program sponsored by the United States Government, I was asked by the State Department to write a report about my experiences in Brazil, so I wrote out the essentials of the speech I had just given. I found out later through the grapevine that the reaction of somebody in the State Department was, “That shows you how dangerous it is to send somebody to Brazil who is so naive. Foolish fellow; he can only cause trouble. He didn’t understand the problems.” Quite the contrary! I think this person in the State Department was naive to think that because he saw a university with a list of courses and descriptions, that’s what it was.

Man of a Thousand Tongues

   When I was in Brazil I had struggled to learn the local language, and decided to give my physics lectures in Portuguese. Soon after I came to Caltech, I was invited to a party hosted by Professor Bacher. Before I arrived at the party, Bacher told the guests, “This guy Feynman thinks he’s smart because he learned a little Portuguese, so let’s fix him good: Mrs. Smith, here (she’s completely Caucasian), grew up in China. Let’s have her greet Feynman in Chinese.”
   I walk into the party innocently, and Bacher introduces me to all these people: “Mr. Feynman, this is Mr. So-and-so.”
   “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Feynman.”
   “And this is Mr. Such-and-such.”
   “My pleasure, Mr. Feynman.”
   “And this is Mrs. Smith.”
   “Ai, choong, ngong jia! ” she says, bowing.
   This is such a surprise to me that I figure the only thing to do is to reply in the same spirit. I bow politely to her, and with complete confidence I say, “Ah ching, jong jien! ”
   “Oh, my God!” she exclaims, losing her own composure. “I knew this would happen—I speak Mandarin and he speaks Cantonese!”

Certainly, Mr. Big!

   I used to cross the United States in my automobile every summer, trying to make it to the Pacific Ocean. But, for various reasons, I would always get stuck somewhere-usually in Las Vegas.
   I remember the first time, particularly, I liked it very much. Then, as now, Las Vegas made its money on the people who gamble, so the whole problem for the hotels was to get people to come there to gamble. So they had shows and dinners which were very inexpensive—almost free. You didn’t have to make any reservations for anything: you could walk in, sit down at one of the many empty tables, and enjoy the show. It was just wonderful for a man who didn’t gamble, because I was enjoying all the advantages—the rooms were inexpensive, the meals were next to nothing, the shows were good, and I liked the girls.
   One day I was lying around the pool at my motel, and some guy came up and started to talk to me. I can’t remember how he got started, but his idea was that I presumably worked for a living, and it was really quite silly to do that. Look how easy it is for me,” he said. “I just hang around the pool all the time and enjoy life in Las Vegas.”
   “How the hell do you do that without working?”
   “Simple: I bet on the horses.”
   “I don’t know anything about horses, but I don’t see how you can make a living betting on the horses,” I said, skeptically.
   “Of course you can,” he said. “That’s how I live! I’ll tell you what: I’ll teach you how to do it. We’ll go down and I’ll guarantee that you’ll win a hundred dollars.”
   “How can you do that?”
   “I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that you’ll win,” he said. “So if you win it doesn’t cost you anything, and if you lose, you get a hundred dollars!”
   So I think, “Gee! That’s right! If I win a hundred dollars on the horses and I have to pay him, I don’t lose anything; it’s just an exercise—it’s just proof that his system works. And if he fails, I win a hundred dollars. It’s quite wonderful!”
   He takes me down to some betting place where they have a list of horses and racetracks all over the country. He introduces me to other people who say, “Geez, he’s great! I won a hundred dollars!”
   I gradually realize that I have to put up some of my own money for the bets, and I begin to get a little nervous. “How much money do I have to bet?” I ask.
   “Oh, three or four hundred dollars.”
   I haven’t got that much. Besides, it begins to worry me: Suppose I lose all the bets?
   So then he says, “I’ll tell you what: My advice will cost you only fifty dollars, and onlyifitworks. If it doesn’t work, I’ll give you the hundred dollars you would have won anyway.”
   I figure, “Wow! Now I win both ways—either fifty or a hundred dollars! How the heck can he do that?” Then I realize that if you have a reasonably even game—forget the little losses from the take for the moment in order to understand it—the chance that you’ll win a hundred dollars versus losing your four hundred dollars is four to one. So out of five times that he tries this on somebody, four times they’re going to win a hundred dollars, he gets two hundred (and he points out to them how smart he is); the fifth time he has to pay a hundred dollars. So he receives two hundred, on the average, when he’s paying out one hundred! So I finally understood how he could do that.
   This process went on for a few days. He would invent some scheme that sounded like a terrific deal at first, but after I thought about it for a while I’d slowly figure out how it worked. Finally, in some sort of desperation he says, “All right, I’ll tell you what: You pay me fifty dollars for the advice, and if you lose, I’ll pay you back all your money.”
   Now I can’tlose on that! So I say, “All right, you’ve got a deal!”
   “Fine,” he says. “But unfortunately, I have to go to San Francisco this weekend, so you just mail me the results, and if you lose your four hundred dollars, I’ll send you the money.
   The first schemes were designed to make him money by honest arithmetic. Now, he’s going to be out of town. The only way he’s going to make money on this scheme is not to send it—to be a realcheat.
   So I never accepted any of his offers. But it was very entertaining to see how he operated.
   The other thing that was fun in Las Vegas was meeting show girls. I guess they were supposed to hang around the bar between shows to attract customers. I met several of them that way, and talked to them, and found them to be nice people. People who say, “Show girls, eh?” have already made up their mind what they are! But in any group, if you look at it, there’s all kinds of variety. For example, there was the daughter of a dean of an Eastern university. She had a talent for dancing and liked to dance; she had the summer off and dancing jobs were hard to find, so she worked as a chorus girl in Las Vegas. Most of the show girls were very nice, friendly people. They were all beautiful, and I just love beautiful girls. In fact, show girls were my real reason for liking Las Vegas so much.
   At first I was a little bit afraid: the girls were so beautiful, they had such a reputation, and so forth. I would try to meet them, and I’d choke a little bit when I talked. It was difficult at first, but gradually it got easier, and finally I had enough confidence that I wasn’t afraid of anybody.
   I had a way of having adventures which is hard to explain: it’s like fishing, where you put a line out and then you have to have patience. When I would tell someone about some of my adventures, they might say, “Oh, come on—let’s do that!” So we would go to a bar to see if something will happen, and they would lose patience after twenty minutes or so. You have to spend a couple of days before something happens, on average. I spent a lot of time talking to show girls. One would introduce me to another, and after a while, something interesting would often happen.
   I remember one girl who liked to drink Gibsons. She danced at the Flamingo Hotel, and I got to know her rather well. When I’d come into town, I’d order a Gibson put at her table before she sat down, to announce my arrival.
   One time I went over and sat next to her and she said, “I’m with a man tonight—a high-roller from Texas.” (I had already heard about this guy. Whenever he’d play at the craps table, everybody would gather around to see him gamble.) He came back to the table where we were sitting, and my show girl friend introduced me to him.
   The first thing he said to me was, “You know somethin’? I lost sixty thousand dollars here last night.”
   I knew what to do: I turned to him, completely unimpressed, and I said, “Is that supposed to be smart, or stupid?”
   We were eating breakfast in the dining room. He said, “Here, let me sign your check. They don’t charge me for all these things because I gamble so much here.”
   “I’ve got enough money that I don’t need to worry about who pays for my breakfast, thank you.” I kept putting him down each time he tried to impress me.
   He tried everything: how rich he was, how much oil he had in Texas, and nothing worked, because I knew the formula!
   We ended up having quite a bit of fun together.
   One time when we were sitting at the bar he said to me, “You see those girls at the table over there? They’re whores from Los Angeles.”
   They looked very nice; they had a certain amount of class.
   He said, “Tell you what I’ll do: I’ll introduce them to you, and then I’ll pay for the one you want.”
   I didn’t feel like meeting the girls, and I knew he was saying that to impress me, so I began to tell him no. But then I thought, “This is something! This guy is trying so hard to impress me, he’s willing to buy this for me. If I’m ever going to tell the story … So I said to him, “Well, OK, introduce me.”
   We went over to their table and he introduced me to the girls and then went off for a moment. A waitress came around and asked us what we wanted to drink. I ordered some water, and the girl next to me said, “Is it all right if I have a champagne?”
   “You can have whatever you want,” I replied, coolly, ‘cause you’re payin’ for it.”
   “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Cheapskate, or something?”
   “That’s right.”
   “You’re certainly not a gentleman!” she said indignantly.
   “You figured me out immediately!” I replied. I had learned in New Mexico many years before not to be a gentleman.
   Pretty soon they were offering to buy me drinks—the tables were turned completely! (By the way, the Texas oilman never came back.)
   After a while, one of the girls said, “Let’s go over to the El Rancho. Maybe things are livelier over there.” We got in their car. It was a nice car, and they were nice people. On the way, they asked me my name.
   “Dick Feynman.”
   “Where are you from, Dick? What do you do?”
   “I’m from Pasadena; I work at Caltech.”
   One of the girls said, “Oh, isn’t that the place where that scientist Pauling comes from?”
   I had been in Las Vegas many times, over and over, and there was nobody who ever knew anything about science. I had talked to businessmen of all kinds, and to them, a scientist was a nobody. “Yeah!” I said, astonished.
   “And there’s a fella named Gellan, or something like that—a physicist.” I couldn’t believe it. I was riding in a car full of prostitutes and they know all this stuff!
   “Yeah! His name is Gell-Mann! How did you happen to know that?”
   “Your pictures were in Time magazine.” It’s true, they had pictures of ten U.S. scientists in Time magazine, for some reason. I was in it, and so were Pauling and Gell-Mann.
   “How did you remember the names?” I asked.
   “Well, we were looking through the pictures, and we picked out the youngest and the handsomest!” (Gell-Mann is younger than I am.)
   We got to the El Rancho Hotel and the girls continued this game of acting towards me like everybody normally acts towards them: “Would you like to gamble?” they asked. I gambled a little bit with their money and we all had a good time.
   After a while they said, “Look, we see a live one, so we’ll have to leave you now,” and they went back to work.
   One time I was sitting at a bar and I noticed two girls with an older man. Finally he walked away, and they came over and sat next to me: the prettier and more active one next to me, and her duller friend, named Pam, on the other side.
   Things started going along very nicely right away. She was very friendly. Soon she was leaning against me, and I put my arm around her. Two men came in and sat at a table nearby. Then, before the waitress came, they walked out.
   “Did you see those men?” my new-found friend said.
   “Yeah.”
   “They’re friends of my husband.”
   “Oh? What is this?”
   “You see, I just married John Big”—she mentioned a very famous name—”and we’ve had a little argument. We’re on our honeymoon, and John is always gambling. He doesn’t pay any attention to me, so I go off and enjoy myself, but he keeps sending spies around to check on what I’m doing.”
   She asked me to take her to her motel room, so we went in my car. On the way I asked her, “Well, what about John?”
   She said, “Don’t worry. Just look around for a big red car with two antennas. If you don’t see it, he’s not around.”
   The next night I took the “Gibson girl” and a friend of hers to the late show at the Silver Slipper, which had a show later than all the hotels. The girls who worked in the other shows liked to go there, and the master of ceremonies announced the arrival of the various dancers as they came in. So in I went with these two lovely dancers on my arm, and he said, “And here comes Miss So-and-so and Miss So-and-so from the Flamingo!” Everybody looked around to see who was coming in. I felt great!
   We sat down at a table near the bar, and after a little while there was a bit of a flurry—waiters moving tables around, security guards, with guns, coming in. They were making room for a celebrity. JOHN BIG was coming in!
   He came over to the bar, right next to our table, and right away two guys wanted to dance with the girls I brought. They went off to dance, and I was sitting alone at the table when John came over and sat down at my table. “How are yah?” he said. “Whattya doin’ in Vegas?”
   I was sure he’d found out about me and his wife. “Just foolin’ around …” (I’ve gotta act tough, right?)
   “How long ya been here?”
   “Four or five nights.”
   “I know ya,” he said. “Didn’t I see you in Florida?”
   “Well, I really don’t know..
   He tried this place and that place, and I didn’t know what he was getting at. “I know,” he said; “It was in El Morocco.” (El Morocco was a big nightclub in New York, where a lot of big operators go—like professors of theoretical physics, right?)
   “That must have been it,” I said. I was wondering when he was going to get to it. Finally he leaned over to me and said, “Hey, will you introduce me to those girls you’re with when they come back from dancing?”
   That’s all he wanted; he didn’t know me from a hole in the wall! So I introduced him, but my show girl friends said they were tired and wanted to go home.
   The next afternoon, I saw John Big at the Flamingo, standing at the bar, talking to the bartender about cameras and taking pictures. He must be an amateur photographer: He’s got all these bulbs and cameras, but he says the dumbest things about them. I decided he wasn’t an amateur photographer after all; he was just a rich guy who bought himself some cameras.
   I figured by that time that he didn’t know I had been fooling around with his wife; he only wanted to talk to me because of the girls I had. So I thought I would play a game. I’d invent a part for myself: John Big’s assistant.
   “Hi, John,” I said. “Let’s take some pictures. I’ll carry your flashbulbs.”
   I put the flashbulbs in my pocket, and we started off taking pictures. I’d hand him flashbulbs and give him advice here and there; he likes that stuff.
   We went over to the Last Frontier to gamble, and he started to win. The hotels don’t like a high roller to leave, but I could see he wanted to go. The problem was how to do it gracefully.
   “John, we have to leave now,” I said in a serious voice.
   “But I’m winning.”
   “Yes, but we have made an appointment this afternoon.”
   “OK, get my car.”
   “Certainly, Mr. Big!” He handed me the keys and told me what it looked like (I didn’t let on that I knew).
   I went out to the parking lot, and sure enough, there was this big, fat, wonderful car with the two antennas. I climbed into it and turned the key—and it wouldn’t start. It had an automatic transmission; they had just come out and I didn’t know anything about them. After a bit I accidentally shifted it into PARK and it started. I drove it very carefully, like a million-dollar car, to the hotel entrance, where I got out and went inside to the table where he was still gambling, and said, “Your car is ready, sir!”
   “I have to quit,” he announced, and we left.
   He had me drive the car. “I want to go to the El Rancho,” he said. “Do you know any girls there?”
   I knew one girl there rather well, so I said “Yeah.” By this time I felt confident enough that the only reason he was going along with this game I had invented was that he wanted to meet some girls, so I brought up a delicate subject: “I met your wife the other night..
   “My wife? My wife’s not here in Las Vegas.”
   I told him about the girl I met in the bar.
   “Oh! I know who you mean; I met that girl and her friend in Los Angeles and brought them to Las Vegas. The first thing they did was use my phone for an hour to talk to their friends in Texas. I got mad and threw ‘em out! So she’s been going around telling everybody that she’s my wife, eh?”
   So that was cleared up.
   We went into the El Rancho, and the show was going to start in about fifteen minutes. The place was packed; there wasn’t a seat in the house. John went over to the majordomo and said, “I want a table.”
   “Yes, sir, Mr. Big! It will be ready in a few minutes.”
   John tipped him and went off to gamble. Meanwhile I went around to the back, where the girls were getting ready for the show, and asked for my friend. She came out and I explained to her that John Big was with me, and he’d like some company after the show.
   “Certainly, Dick,” she said. “I’ll bring some friends and we’ll see you after the show.”
   I went around to the front to find John. He was still gambling. “Just go in without me,” he said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
   There were two tables, at the very front, right at the edge of the stage. Every other table in the place was packed. I sat down by myself. The show started before John came in, and the show girls came out. They could see me at the table, all by myself. Before, they thought I was some small-time. professor; now they see I’m a BIG OPERATOR.
   Finally John came in, and soon afterwards some people sat down at the table next to us—John’s “wife” and her friend Pam, with two men!
   I leaned over to John: “She’s at the other table.”
   “Yeah.”
   She saw I was taking care of John, so she leaned over to me from the other table and asked, “Could I talk to John?”
   I didn’t say a word. John didn’t say anything either.
   I waited a little while, then I leaned over to John: “She wants to talk to you.”
   Then he waited a little bit. “All right,” he said.
   I waited a little more, and then I leaned over to her: “John will speak to you now.”
   She came over to our table. She started working on “Johnnie,” sitting very close to him. Things were beginning to get straightened out a little bit, I could tell.
   I love to be mischievous, so every time they got things straightened out a little bit, I reminded John of something: “The telephone, John …”
   “Yeah!” he said. “What’s the idea, spending an hour on the telephone?”
   She said it was Pam who did the calling.
   Things improved a little bit more, so I pointed out that it was her idea to bring Pam.
   “Yeah!” he said. (I was having a great time playing this game; it went on for quite a while.)
   When the show was over, the girls from the El Rancho came over to our table and we talked to them until they had to go back for the next show. Then John said, “I know a nice little bar not too far away from here. Let’s go over there.”
   I drove him over to the bar and we went in. “See that woman over there?” he said. “She’s a really good lawyer. Come on, I’ll introduce you to her.”
   John introduced us and excused himself to go to the restroom. He never came back. I think he wanted to get back with his “wife” and I was beginning to interfere.
   I said, “Hi” to the woman and ordered a drink for myself (still playing this game of not being impressed and not being a gentleman).
   “You know,” she said to me, “I’m one of the better lawyers here in Las Vegas.”
   “Oh, no, you’re not,” I replied coolly. “You might be a lawyer during the day, but you know what you are right now? You’re just a barfly in a small bar in Vegas.”
   She liked me, and we went to a few places dancing. She danced very well, and I love to dance, so we had a great time together.
   Then, all of a sudden in the middle of a dance, my back began to hurt. It was some kind of big pain, and it started suddenly. I know now what it was: I had been up for three days and nights having these crazy adventures, and I was completely exhausted.
   She said she would take me home. As soon as I got into her bed I went BONGO! I was out.
   The next morning I woke up in this beautiful bed. The sun was shining, and there was no sign of her. Instead, there was a maid. “Sir,” she said, “are you awake? I’m ready with breakfast.”
   “Well, uh …”
   “I’ll bring it to you. What would you like?” and she went through a whole menu of breakfasts.
   I ordered breakfast and had it in bed—in the bed of a woman I didn’t know; I didn’t know who she was or where she came from!
   I asked the maid a few questions, and she didn’t know anything about this mysterious woman either: She had just been hired, and it was her first day on the job. She thought I was the man of the house, and found it curious that I was asking her questions. I got dressed, finally, and left. I never saw the mysterious woman again.


   The first time I was in Las Vegas I sat down and figured out the odds for everything, and I discovered that the odds for the crap table were something like.493. If I bet a dollar, it would only cost me 1.4 cents. So I thought to myself, “Why am I so reluctant to bet? It hardly costs anything!”
   So I started betting, and right away I lost five dollars in succession—one, two, three, four, five. I was supposed to be out only seven cents; instead, I was five dollars behind! I’ve never gambled since then (with my own money, that is). I’m very lucky that I started off losing.
   One time I was eating lunch with one of the show girls. It was a quiet time in the afternoon; there was not the usual big bustle, and she said, “See that man over there, walking across the lawn? That’s Nick the Greek. He’s a professional gambler.”
   Now I knew damn well what all the odds were in Las Vegas, so I said, “How can he be a professional gambler?”
   “I’ll call him over.”
   Nick came over and she introduced us.” Marilyn tells me that you’re a professional gambler.”
   “That’s correct.”
   “Well, I’d like to know how it’s possible to make your living gambling, because at the table, the odds are.493.”
   “You’re right,” he said, “and I’ll explain it to you. I don’t bet on the table, or things like that. I only bet when the odds are in my favor.”
   “Huh? When are the odds ever in your favor?” I asked incredulously.
   “It’s really quite easy,” he said. “I’m standing around a table, when some guy says, ‘It’s comin’ out nine! It’s gotta be a nine!’ The guy’s excited; he thinks it’s going to be a nine, and he wants to bet. Now I know the odds for all the numbers inside out, so I say to him, ‘I’ll bet you four to three it’s not a nine,’ and I win in the long run. I don’t bet on the table; instead, I bet with people around the table who have prejudices—superstitious ideas about lucky numbers.”
   Nick continued: “Now that I’ve got a reputation, it’s even easier, because people will bet with me even when they know the odds aren’t very good, just to have the chance of telling the story, if they win, of how they beat Nick the Greek. So I really do make a living gambling, and it’s wonderful!”
   So Nick the Greek was really an educated character. He was a very nice and engaging man. I thanked him for the explanation; now I understood it. I have to understand the world, you see.

An Offer You Must Refuse

   Cornell had all kinds of departments that I didn’t have much interest in. (That doesn’t mean there was anything wrong with them; it’s just that I didn’t happen to have much interest in them.) There was domestic science, philosophy (the guys from this department were particularly inane), and there were the cultural things—music and so on. There were quite a few people I did enjoy talking to, of course. In the math department there was Professor Kac and Professor Feller; in chemistry, Professor Calvin; and a great guy in the zoology department, Dr. Griffin, who found out that bats navigate by making echoes. But it was hard to find enough of these guys to talk to, and there was all this other stuff which I thought was low-level baloney. And Ithaca was a small town.
   The weather wasn’t really very good. One day I was driving in the car, and there came one of those quick snow flurries that you don’t expect, so you’re not ready for it, and you figure, “Oh, it isn’t going to amount to much; I’ll keep on going.”
   But then the snow gets deep enough that the car begins to skid a little bit, so you have to put the chains on. You get out of the car, put the chains out on the snow, and it’s cold, and you’re beginning to shiver. Then you roll the car back onto the chains, and you have this problem—or we had it in those days; I don’t know what there is now—that there’s a hook on the inside that you have to hook first. And because the chains have to go on pretty tight, it’s hard to get the hook to hook. Then you have to push this clamp down with your fingers, which by this time are nearly frozen. And because you’re on the outside of the tire, and the hook is on the inside, and your hands are cold, it’s very difficult to control. It keeps slipping, and it’s cold, and the snow’s coming down, and you’re trying to push this clamp, and your hand’s hurting, and the damn thing’s not going down—well, I remember that that was the moment when I decided that this is insane; there must be a part of the world that doesn’t have this problem.
   I remembered the couple of times I had visited Caltech, at the invitation of Professor Bacher, who had previously been at Cornell. He was very smart when I visited. He knew me inside out, so he said, “Feynman, I have this extra car, which I’m gonna lend you. Now here’s how you go to Hollywood and the Sunset Strip. Enjoy yourself.”
   So I drove his car every night down to the Sunset Strip—to the nightclubs and the bars and the action. It was the kind of stuff I liked from Las Vegas—pretty girls, big operators, and so on. So Bacher knew how to get me interested in Caltech.
   You know the story about the donkey who is standing exactly in the middle of two piles of hay, and doesn’t go to either one, because it’s balanced? Well, that’s nothing. Cornell and Caltech started making me offers, and as soon as I would move, figuring that Caltech was really better, they would up their offer at Cornell; and when I thought I’d stay at Cornell, they’d up something at Caltech. So you can imagine this donkey between the two piles of hay, with the extra complication that as soon as he moves toward one, the other one gets higher. That makes it very difficult!
   The argument that finally convinced me was my sabbatical leave. I wanted to go to Brazil again, this time for ten months, and I had just earned my sabbatical leave from Cornell. I didn’t want to lose that, so now that I had invented a reason to come to a decision, I wrote Bacher and told him what I had decided.
   Caltech wrote back: “We’ll hire you immediately, and we’ll give you your first year as a sabbatical year.” That’s the way they were acting: no matter what I decided to do, they’d screw it up. So my first year at Caltech was really spent in Brazil. I came to Caltech to teach on my second year. That’s how it happened.
   Now that I have been at Caltech since 1951, I’ve been very happy here. It’s exactly the thing for a one-sided guy like me. There are all these people who are close to the top, who are very interested in what they are doing, and who I can talk to. So I’ve been very comfortable.
   But one day, when I hadn’t been at Caltech very long, we had a bad attack of smog. It was worse then than it is now—at least your eyes smarted much more. I was standing on a corner, and my eyes were watering, and I thought to myself, “This is crazy! This is absolutely INSANE! It was all right back at Cornell. I’m getting out of here.”
   So I called up Cornell, and asked them if they thought it was possible for me to come back. They said, “Sure! We’ll set it up and call you back tomorrow.”
   The next day, I had the greatest luck in making a decision. God must have set it up to help me decide. I was walking to my office, and a guy came running up to me and said, “Hey, Feynman! Did you hear what happened? Baade found that there are two different populations of stars! All the measurements we had been making of the distances to the galaxies had been based on Cephid variables of one type, but there’s another type, so the universe is twice, or three, or even four times as old as we thought!”
   I knew the problem. In those days, the earth appeared to be older than the universe. The earth was four and a half billion, and the universe was only a couple, or three billion years old. It was a great puzzle. And this discovery resolved all that: The universe was now demonstrably older than was previously thought. And I got this information right away—the guy came running up to me to tell me all this.
   I didn’t even make it across the campus to get to my office, when another guy came up—Matt Meselson, a biologist who had minored in physics. (I had been on his committee for his Ph.D.) He had built the first of what they call a density gradient centrifuge-it could measure the density of molecules. He said, “Look at the results of the experiment I’ve been doing!”
   He had proved that when a bacterium makes a new one, there’s a whole molecule, intact, which is passed from one bacterium to another—a molecule we now know as DNA. You see, we always think of everything dividing, dividing. So we think everything in the bacterium divides and gives half of it to the new bacterium. But that’s impossible: Somewhere, the smallest molecule that contains genetic information can’t divide in half; it has to make a copy of itself, and send one copy to the new bacterium, and keep one copy for the old one. And he had proved it in this way: He first grew the bacteria in heavy nitrogen, and later grew them all in ordinary nitrogen. As he went along, he weighed the molecules in his density gradient centrifuge.
   The first generation of new bacteria had all of their chromosome molecules at a weight exactly in between the weight of molecules made with heavy, and molecules made with ordinary, nitrogen—a result that could occur if everything divided, including the chromosome molecules.
   But in succeeding generations, when one might expect that the weight of the chromosome molecules would be one-fourth, one-eighth, and one-sixteenth of the difference between the heavy and ordinary molecules, the weights of the molecules fell into only two groups. One group was the same weight as the first new generation (halfway between the heavier and the lighter molecules), and the other group was lighter—the weight of molecules made in ordinary nitrogen. The percentage of heavier molecules was cut in half in each succeeding generation, but not their weights. That was tremendously exciting, and very important—it was a fundamental discovery. And I realized, as I finally got to my office, that this is where I’ve got to be. Where people from all different fields of science would tell me stuff, and it was all exciting. It was exactly what I wanted, really.
   So when Cornell called a little later, and said they were setting everything up, and it was nearly ready, I said, “I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind again.” But I decided then never to decide again. Nothing—absolutely nothing—would ever change my mind again.
   When you’re young, you have all these things to worry about—should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It’s much easier to just plain decide. Never mind—nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again—I had the solution to that problem. Anyway, I decided it would always be Caltech.
   One time someone tried to change my mind about Caltech. Fermi had just died a short time before, and the faculty at Chicago were looking for someone to take his place. Two people from Chicago came out and asked to visit me at my home—I didn’t know what it was about. They began telling me all the good reasons why I ought to go to Chicago: I could do this, I could do that, they had lots of great people there, I had the opportunity to do all kinds of wonderful things. I didn’t ask them how much they would pay, and they kept hinting that they would tell me if I asked. Finally, they asked me if I wanted to know the salary. “Oh, no!” I said. “I’ve already decided to stay at Caltech. My wife Mary Lou is in the other room, and if she hears how much the salary is, we’ll get into an argument. Besides, I’ve decided not to decide any more; I’m staying at Caltech for good.” So I didn’t let them tell me the salary they were offering.
   About a month later I was at a meeting, and Leona Marshall came over and said, “It’s funny you didn’t accept our offer at Chicago. We were so disappointed, and we couldn’t understand how you could turn down such a terrific offer.”
   “It was easy,” I said, “because I never let them tell me what the offer was.”
   A week later I got a letter from her. I opened it, and the first sentence said, “The salary they were offering was—,” a tremendous amount of money, three or four times what I was making. Staggering! Her letter continued, “I told you the salary before you could read any further. Maybe now you want to reconsider, because they’ve told me the position is still open, and we’d very much like to have you.”
   So I wrote them back a letter that said, “After reading the salary, I’ve decided that I must refuse. The reason I have to refuse a salary like that is I would be able to do what I’ve always wanted to do—get a wonderful mistress, put her up in an apartment, buy her nice things... With the salary you have offered, I could actually do that, and I know what would happen to me. I’d worry about her, what she’s doing; I’d get into arguments when I come home, and so on. All this bother would make me uncomfortable and unhappy. I wouldn’t be able to do physics well, and it would be a bigmess! What I’ve always wanted to do would be bad for me, so I’ve decided that I can’t accept your offer.”

Part 5.
The World of One Physicist

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 he 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 he 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 an-ion 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 glanceat 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 whichway? 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-C (Feynman—Gell-Mann) theory of beta decay is no F-C.”
   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 PhysicalReview–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 wholeworks 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 he 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 goodone.” 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 justwonderful!” 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 somuch 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 he 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!