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us, and none of my tricks worked. I remember distinctly one young man they
were afraid to tie down because he was so terrified: his face was pale
yellow-green and he was shaking. I found out later he was from Europe --
this was in the early thirties -- and he didn't realize that these guys all
tied down to the floor was some kind of a joke; he knew what kinds of things
were going on in Europe. The guy was frightening to look at, he was so
scared.
By the time the night was over, there were only three sophomores
guarding twenty of us freshmen, but we didn't know that. The sophomores had
driven their cars in and out a few times to make it sound as if there was a
lot of activity, and we didn't notice it was always the same cars and the
same people. So we didn't win that one.
My father and mother happened to come up that morning to see how their
son was doing in Boston, and the fraternity kept putting them off until we
came back from being kidnapped. I was so bedraggled and dirty from
struggling so hard to escape and from lack of sleep that they were really
horrified to discover what their son looked like at MIT!
I had also gotten a stiff neck, and I remember standing in line for
inspection that afternoon at ROTC, not being able to look straight forward.
The commander grabbed my head and turned it, shouting, "Straighten up!"
I winced, as my shoulders went at an angle: "I can't help it, sir!"
"Oh, excuse me!" he said, apologetically.
Anyway, the fact that I fought so long and hard not to be tied up gave
me a terrific reputation, and I never had to worry about that sissy business
again -- a tremendous relief.
I often listened to my roommates -- they were both seniors -- studying
for their theoretical physics course. One day they were working pretty hard
on something that seemed pretty clear to me, so I said, "Why don't you use
the Baronallai's equation?"
"What's that!" they exclaimed. "What are you talking about!"
I explained to them what I meant and how it worked in this case, and it
solved the problem. It turned out it was Bernoulli's equation that I meant,
but I had read all this stuff in the encyclopedia without talking to anybody
about it, so I didn't know how to pronounce anything.
But my roommates were very excited, and from then on they discussed
their physics problems with me -- I wasn't so lucky with many of them -- and
the next year, when I took the course, I advanced rapidly. That was a very
good way to get educated, working on the senior problems and learning how to
pronounce things.
I liked to go to a place called the Raymor and Playmore Ballroom -- two
ballrooms that were connected together -- on Tuesday nights. My fraternity
brothers didn't go to these "open" dances; they preferred their own dances,
where the girls they brought were upper crust ones they had met "properly."
I didn't care, when I met somebody, where they were from, or what their
background was, so I would go to these dances -- even though my fraternity
brothers disapproved (I was a junior by this time, and they couldn't stop
me) -- and I had a very good time.
One time I danced with a certain girl a few times, and didn't say much.
Finally, she said to me, "Who hants vewwy nice-ee."
I couldn't quite make it out -- she had some difficulty in speech --
but I thought she said, "You dance very nicely."
"Thank you," I said. "It's been an honor."
We went over to a table where a friend of hers had found a boy she was
dancing with and we sat, the four of us, together. One girl was very hard of
hearing, and the other girl was nearly deaf.
When the two girls conversed they would do a large amount of signaling
very rapidly back and forth, and grunt a little bit. It didn't bother me;
the girl danced well, and she was a nice person.
After a few more dances, we're sitting at the table again, and there's
a large amount of signaling back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,
until finally she says something to me which I gathered means, she'd like us
to take them to some hotel.
I ask the other guy if he wants to go.
"What do they want us to go to this hotel for?" he asks.
"Hell, I don't know. We didn't talk well enough!" But I don't have to
know. It's just fun, seeing what's going to happen; it's an adventure!
The other guy's afraid, so he says no. So I take the two girls in a
taxi to the hotel, and discover that there's a dance organized by the deaf
and dumb, believe it or not. They all belonged to a club. It turns out many
of them can feel the rhythm enough to dance to the music and applaud the
band at the end of each number.
It was very, very interesting! I felt as if I was in a foreign country
and couldn't speak the language: I could speak, but nobody could hear me.
Everybody was talking with signs to everybody else, and I couldn't
understand anything! I asked my girl to teach me some signs and I learned a
few, like you learn a foreign language, just for fun.
Everyone was so happy and relaxed with each other, making jokes and
smiling all the time; they didn't seem to have any real difficulty of any
kind communicating with each other. It was the same as with any other
language, except for one thing: as they're making signs to each other, their
heads were always turning from one side to the other. I realized what that
was. When someone wants to make a side remark or interrupt you, he can't
yell, "Hey, Jack!" He can only make a signal, which you won't catch unless
you're in the habit of looking around all the time.
They were completely comfortable with each other. It was my problem to
be comfortable. It was a wonderful experience.
The dance went on for a long time, and when it closed down we went to a
cafeteria. They were all ordering things by pointing to them. I remember
somebody asking in signs, "Where-are-you-from?" and my girl spelling out
"N-e-w Y-o-r-k." I still remember a guy signing to me "Good sport!" -- he
holds his thumb up, and then touches an imaginary lapel, for "sport." It's a
nice system.
Everybody was sitting around, making jokes, and getting me into their
world very nicely. I wanted to buy a bottle of milk, so I went up to the guy
at the counter and mouthed the word "milk" without saying anything.
The guy didn't understand.
I made the symbol for "milk," which is two fists moving as if you're
milking a cow, and he didn't catch that either.
I tried to point to the sign that showed the price of milk, but he
still didn't catch on.
Finally, some stranger nearby ordered milk, and I pointed to it.
"Oh! Milk!" he said, as I nodded my head yes.
He handed me the bottle, and I said, "Thank you very much!"
"You SON of a GUN!" he said, smiling.
I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in
mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of
plastic for drawing smooth curves -- a curly, funny-looking thing) and said,
"I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?"
I thought for a moment and said, "Sure they do. The curves are very
special curves. Lemme show ya," and I picked up my French curve and began to
turn it slowly. "The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on
each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal."
All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at
different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and
laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is
horizontal. They were all excited by this "discovery" -- even though they
had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already
"learned" that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any
curve is zero (horizontal). They didn't put two and two together. They
didn't even know what they "knew."
I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by
understanding; they learn by some other way -- by rote, or something. Their
knowledge is so fragile!
I did the same kind of trick four years later at Princeton when I was
talking with an experienced character, an assistant of Einstein, who was
surely working with gravity all the time. I gave him a problem: You blast
off in a rocket which has a clock on board, and there's a clock on the
ground. The idea is that you have to be back when the clock on the ground
says one hour has passed. Now you want it so that when you come back, your
clock is as far ahead as possible. According to Einstein, if you go very
high, your clock will go faster, because the higher something is in a
gravitational field, the faster its clock goes. But if you try to go too
high, since you've only got an hour, you have to go so fast to get there
that the speed slows your clock down. So you can't go too high. The question
is, exactly what program of speed and height should you make so that you get
the maximum time on your clock?
This assistant of Einstein worked on it for quite a bit before he
realized that the answer is the real motion of matter. If you shoot
something up in a normal way, so that the time it takes the shell to go up
and come down is an hour, that's the correct motion. It's the fundamental
principle of Einstein's gravity -- that is, what's called the "proper time"
is at a maximum for the actual curve. But when I put it to him, about a
rocket with a clock, he didn't recognize it. It was just like the guys in
mechanical drawing class, but this time it wasn't dumb freshmen. So this
kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people.
When I was a junior or senior I used to eat at a certain restaurant in
Boston. I went there by myself, often on successive evenings. People got to
know me, and I had the same waitress all the time.
I noticed that they were always in a hurry, rushing around, so one day,
just for fun, I left my tip, which was usually ten cents (normal for those
days), in two nickels, under two glasses: I filled each glass to the very
top, dropped a nickel in, and with a card over it, turned it over so it was
upside down on the table. Then I slipped out the card (no water leaks out
because no air can come in -- the rim is too close to the table for that).
I put the tip under two glasses because I knew they were always in a
hurry. If the tip was a dime in one glass, the waitress, in her haste to get
the table ready for the next customer, would pick up the glass, the water
would spill out, and that would be the end of it. But after she does that
with the first glass, what the hell is she going to do with the second one?
She can't just have the nerve to lift it up now!
On the way out I said to my waitress, "Be careful, Sue. There's
something funny about the glasses you gave me -- they're filled in on the
top, and there's a hole on the bottom!"
The next day I came back, and I had a new waitress. My regular waitress
wouldn't have anything to do with me. "Sue's very angry at you," my new
waitress said. "After she picked up the first glass and water went all over
the place, she called the boss out. They studied it a little bit, but they
couldn't spend all day figuring out what to do, so they finally picked up
the other one, and water went out again, all over the floor. It was a
terrible mess; Sue slipped later in the water. They're all mad at you."
I laughed.
She said, "It's not funny! How would you like it if someone did that to
you -- what would you do?"
"I'd get a soup plate and then slide the glass very carefully over to
the edge of the table, and let the water run into the soup plate -- it
doesn't have to run onto the floor. Then I'd take the nickel out."
"Oh, that's a goood idea," she said.
That evening I left my tip under a coffee cup, which I left upside down
on the table.
The next night I came and I had the same new waitress.
"What's the idea of leaving the cup upside down last time?"
"Well, I thought that even though you were in a hurry, you'd have to go
back into the kitchen and get a soup plate; then you'd have to sloooowly and
carefully slide the cup over to the edge of the table..."
"I did that," she complained, "but there was no water in it!"
My masterpiece of mischief happened at the fraternity. One morning I
woke up very early, about five o'clock, and couldn't go back to sleep, so I
went downstairs from the sleeping rooms and discovered some signs hanging on
strings which said things like "DOOR! DOOR! WHO STOLE THE DOOR?" I saw that
someone had taken a door off its hinges, and in its place they hung a sign
that said, "PLEASE CLOSE THE DOOR!" -- the sign that used to be on the door
that was missing.
I immediately figured out what the idea was. In that room a guy named
Pete Bernays and a couple of other guys liked to work very hard, and always
wanted it quiet. If you wandered into their room looking for something, or
to ask them how they did problem such and such, when you would leave you
would always hear these guys scream, "Please close the door!"
Somebody had gotten tired of this, no doubt, and had taken the door
off. Now this room, it so happened, had two doors, the way it was built, so
I got an idea: I took the other door off its hinges, carried it downstairs,
and hid it in the basement behind the oil tank. Then I quietly went back
upstairs and went to bed.
Later in the morning I made believe I woke up and came downstairs a
little late. The other guys were milling around, and Pete and his friends
were all upset: The doors to their room were missing, and they had to study,
blah, blah, blah, blah. I was coming down the stairs and they said,
"Feynman! Did you take the doors?"
"Oh, yeah!" I said. "I took the door. You can see the scratches on my
knuckles here, that I got when my hands scraped against the wall as I was
carrying it down into the basement."
They weren't satisfied with my answer; in fact, they didn't believe me.
The guys who took the first door had left so many clues -- the
handwriting on the signs, for instance -- that they were soon found out. My
idea was that when it was found out who stole the first door, everybody
would think they also stole the other door. It worked perfectly: The guys
who took the first door were pummeled and tortured and worked on by
everybody, until finally, with much pain and difficulty, they convinced
their tormentors that they had only taken one door, unbelievable as it might
be.
I listened to all this, and I was happy.
The other door stayed missing for a whole week, and it became more and
more important to the guys who were trying to study in that room that the
other door be found.
Finally, in order to solve the problem, the president of the fraternity
says at the dinner table, "We have to solve this problem of the other door.
I haven't been able to solve the problem myself, so I would like suggestions
from the rest of you as to how to straighten this out, because Pete and the
others are trying to study."
Somebody makes a suggestion, then someone else.
After a little while, I get up and make a suggestion. "All right," I
say in a sarcastic voice, "whoever you are who stole the door, we know
you're wonderful. You're so clever! We can't figure out who you are, so you
must be some sort of super-genius. You don't have to tell us who you are;
all we want to know is where the door is. So if you will leave a note
somewhere, telling us where the door is, we will honor you and admit forever
that you are a super-marvel, that you are so smart that you could take the
other door without our being able to figure out who you are. But for God's
sake, just leave the note somewhere, and we will be forever grateful to you
for it."
The next guy makes his suggestion: "I have another idea," he says. "I
think that you, as president, should ask each man on his word of honor
towards the fraternity to say whether he took the door or not."
The president says, "That's a very good idea. On the fraternity word of
honor!" So he goes around the table, and asks each guy, one by one: "Jack,
did you take the door?"
"No, sir, I did not take the door."
"Tim: Did you take the door?"
"No, sir! I did not take the door!"
"Maurice. Did you take the door?"
"No, I did not take the door, sir."
"Feynman, did you take the door?"
"Yeah, I took the door."
"Cut it out, Feynman; this is serious! Sam! Did you take the door..."
-- it went all the way around. Everyone was shocked. There must be some real
rat in the fraternity who didn't respect the fraternity word of honor!
That night I left a note with a little picture of the oil tank and the
door next to it, and the next day they found the door and put it back.
Sometime later I finally admitted to taking the other door, and I was
accused by everybody of lying. They couldn't remember what I had said. All
they could remember was their conclusion after the president of the
fraternity had gone around the table and asked everybody, that nobody
admitted taking the door. The idea they remembered, but not the words.
People often think I'm a faker, but I'm usually honest, in a certain
way -- in such a way that often nobody believes me!
--------
There was an Italian radio station in Brooklyn, and as a boy I used to
listen to it all the time. I LOVed the ROLLing SOUNds going over me, as if I
was in the ocean, and the waves weren't very high. I used to sit there and
have the water come over me, in this BEAUtiful iTALian. In the Italian
programs there was always some kind of family situation where there were
discussions and arguments between the mother and father:
High voice: "Nio teco TIEto capeto TUtto..."
Loud, low voice: "DRO tone pala TUtto!!" (with hand slapping).
It was great! So I learned to make all these emotions: I could cry; I
could laugh; all this stuff. Italian is a lovely language.
There were a number of Italian people living near us in New York. Once
while I was riding my bicycle, some Italian truck driver got upset at me,
leaned out of his truck, and, gesturing, yelled something like, "Me aRRUcha
LAMpe etta TIche!"
I felt like a crapper. What did he say to me? What should I yell back?
So I asked an Italian friend of mine at school, and he said, "Just say,
'A te! A te!' -- which means 'The same to you! The same to you!' "
I thought it was a great idea. I would say "A te! A te!"
back-gesturing, of course. Then, as I gained confidence, I developed my
abilities further. I would be riding my bicycle, and some lady would be
driving in her car and get in the way, and I'd say, "PUzzia a la maLOche!"
-- and she'd shrink! Some terrible Italian boy had cursed a terrible curse
at her!
It was not so easy to recognize it as fake Italian. Once, when I was at
Princeton, as I was going into the parking lot at Palmer Laboratory on my
bicycle, somebody got in the way. My habit was always the same: I gesture to
the guy, "oREzze caBONca MIche!", slapping the back of one hand against the
other.
And way up on the other side of a long area of grass, there's an
Italian gardner putting in some plants. He stops, waves, and shouts happily,
"REzza ma LIa!"
I call back, "RONte BALta!", returning the greeting. He didn't know I
didn't know, and I didn't know what he said, and he didn't know what I said.
But it was OK! It was great! It works! After all, when they hear the
intonation, they recognize it immediately as Italian -- maybe it's Milano
instead of Romano, what the hell. But he's an iTALian! So it's just great.
But you have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing
will happen.
One time I came home from college for a vacation, and my sister was
sort of unhappy, almost crying: her Girl Scouts were having a
father-daughter banquet, but our father was out on the road, selling
uniforms. So I said I would take her, being the brother (I'm nine years
older, so it wasn't so crazy).
When we got there, I sat among the fathers for a while, but soon became
sick of them. All these fathers bring their daughters to this nice little
banquet, and all they talked about was the stock market -- they don't know
how to talk to their own children, much less their children's friends.
During the banquet the girls entertained us by doing little skits,
reciting poetry, and so on. Then all of a sudden they bring out this
funny-looking apronlike thing, with a hole at the top to put your head
through. The girls announce that the fathers are now going to entertain
them.
So each father has to get up and stick his head through and say
something -- one guy recites "Mary Had a Little Lamb" -- and they don't know
what to do. I didn't know what to do either, but by the time I got up there,
I told them that I was going to recite a little poem, and I'm sorry that
it's not in English, but I'm sure they will appreciate it anyway:
A TUZZO LANTO
--Poici di Pare
TANto SAca TULna TI, na PUta TUchi PUti TI la.
RUNto CAta CHANto CHANta MANto CHI la TI da.
YALta CAra SULda MI la CHAta PIcha PIno TIto BRALda
pe te CHIna nana CHUNda lala CHINda lala CHUNda!
RONto piti CA le, a TANto CHINto quinta LALda
O la TINta dalla LALta, YENta PUcha lalla TALta!
I do this for three or four stanzas, going through all the emotions
that I heard on Italian radio, and the kids are unraveled, rolling in the
aisles, laughing with happiness.
After the banquet was over, the scoutmaster and a schoolteacher came
over and told me they had been discussing my poem. One of them thought it
was Italian, and the other thought it was Latin. The schoolteacher asks,
"Which one of us is right?"
I said, "You'll have to go ask the girls -- they understood what
language it was right away."
--------
When I was a student at MIT I was interested only in science; I was no
good at anything else. But at MIT there was a rule: You have to take some
humanities courses to get more "culture." Besides the English classes
required were two electives, so I looked through the list, and right away I
found astronomy -- as a humanities course! So that year I escaped with
astronomy. Then next year I looked further down the list, past French
literature and courses like that, and found philosophy. It was the closest
thing to science I could find.
Before I tell you what happened in philosophy, let me tell you about
the English class. We had to write a number of themes. For instance, Mill
had written something on liberty, and we had to criticize it. But instead of
addressing myself to political liberty, as Mill did, I wrote about liberty
in social occasions -- the problem of having to fake and lie in order to be
polite, and does this perpetual game of faking in social situations lead to
the "destruction of the moral fiber of society." An interesting question,
but not the one we were supposed to discuss.
Another essay we had to criticize was by Huxley, "On a Piece of Chalk,"
in which he describes how an ordinary piece of chalk he is holding is the
remains from animal bones, and the forces inside the earth lifted it up so
that it became part of the White Cliffs, and then it was quarried and is now
used to convey ideas through writing on the blackboard.
But again, instead of criticizing the essay assigned to us, I wrote a
parody called, "On a Piece of Dust," about how dust makes the colors of the
sunset and precipitates the rain, and so on. I was always a faker, always
trying to escape.
But when we had to write a theme on Goethe's Faust, it was hopeless!
The work was too long to make a parody of it or to invent something else. I
was storming back and forth in the fraternity saying, "I can't do it. I'm
just not gonna do it. I ain't gonna do it!"
One of my fraternity brothers said, "OK, Feynman, you're not gonna do
it. But the professor will think you didn't do it because you don't want to
do the work. You oughta write a theme on something -- same number of words
-- and hand it in with a note saying that you just couldn't understand the
Faust, you haven't got the heart for it, and that it's impossible for you to
write a theme on it."
So I did that. I wrote a long theme, "On the Limitations of Reason." I
had thought about scientific techniques for solving problems, and how there
are certain limitations: moral values cannot be decided by scientific
methods, yak, yak, yak, and so on.
Then another fraternity brother offered some more advice. "Feynman," he
said, "it ain't gonna work, handing in a theme that's got nothing to do with
Faust. What you oughta do is work that thing you wrote into the Faust."
"Ridiculous!" I said.
But the other fraternity guys think it's a good idea.
"All right, all right!" I say, protesting. "I'll try."
So I added half a page to what I had already written, and said that
Mephistopheles represents reason, and Faust represents the spirit, and
Goethe is trying to show the limitations of reason. I stirred it up, cranked
it all in, and handed in my theme.
The professor had us each come in individually to discuss our theme. I
went in expecting the worst.
He said, "The introductory material is fine, but the Faust material is
a bit too brief. Otherwise, it's very good -- B+ ." I escaped again!
Now to the philosophy class. The course was taught by an old bearded
professor named Robinson, who always mumbled. I would go to the class, and
he would mumble along, and I couldn't understand a thing. The other people
in the class seemed to understand him better, but they didn't seem to pay
any attention. I happened to have a small drill, about one-sixteenth-inch,
and to pass the time in that class, I would twist it between my fingers and
drill holes in the sole of my shoe, week after week.
Finally one day at the end of the class, Professor Robinson went "wugga
mugga mugga wugga wugga..." and everybody got excited! They were all talking
to each other and discussing, so I figured he'd said something interesting,
thank God! I wondered what it was?
I asked somebody, and they said, "We have to write a theme, and hand it
in in four weeks."
"A theme on what?"
"On what he's been talking about all year."
I was stuck. The only thing that I had heard during that entire term
that I could remember was a moment when there came this upwelling,
"muggawuggastreamofconsciousnessmuggawugga," and phoom! -- it sank back into
chaos.
This "stream of consciousness" reminded me of a problem my father had
given to me many years before. He said, "Suppose some Martians were to come
down to earth, and Martians never slept, but instead were perpetually
active. Suppose they didn't have this crazy phenomenon that we have, called
sleep. So they ask you the question: 'How does it feel to go to sleep? What
happens when you go to sleep? Do your thoughts suddenly stop, or do they
move less aanndd lleeessss rraaaaapppppiidddddllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyyyy? How
does the mind actually turn off?"
I got interested. Now I had to answer this question: How does the
stream of consciousness end, when you go to sleep?
So every afternoon for the next four weeks I would work on my theme. I
would pull down the shades in my room, turn off the lights, and go to sleep.
And I'd watch what happened, when I went to sleep.
Then at night, I'd go to sleep again, so I had two times each day when
I could make observations -- it was very good!
At first I noticed a lot of subsidiary things that had little to do
with falling asleep. I noticed, for instance, that I did a lot of thinking
by speaking to myself internally. I could also imagine things visually.
Then, when I was getting tired, I noticed that I could think of two
things at once. I discovered this when I was talking internally to myself
about something, and while I was doing this, I was idly imagining two ropes
connected to the end of my bed, going through some pulleys, and winding
around a turning cylinder, slowly lifting the bed. I wasn't aware that I was
imagining these ropes until I began to worry that one rope would catch on
the other rope, and they wouldn't wind up smoothly. But I said, internally,
"Oh, the tension will take care of that," and this interrupted the first
thought I was having, and made me aware that I was thinking of two things at
once.
I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they
become less and less logically interconnected. You don't notice that they're
not logically connected until you ask yourself, "What made me think of
that?" and you try to work your way back, and often you can't remember what
the hell did make you think of that!
So you get every illusion of logical connection, but the actual fact is
that the thoughts become more and more cockeyed until they're completely
disjointed, and beyond that, you fall asleep.
After four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and
explained the observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out
that all of these observations were made while I was watching myself fall
asleep, and I don't really know what it's like to fall asleep when I'm not
watching myself. I concluded the theme with a little verse I made up, which
pointed out this problem of introspection:
I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!
We hand in our themes, and the next time our class meets, the professor
reads one of them: "Mum bum wugga mum bum..." I can't tell what the guy
wrote.
He reads another theme: "Mugga wugga mum bum wugga wugga..." I don't
know what that guy wrote either, but at the end of it, he goes:
Uh wugga wuh. Uh wugga wuh.
Uh wugga wugga wugga.
I wugga wuh uh wugga wuh
Uh wugga wugga wugga.
"Aha!" I say. "That's my theme!" I honestly didn't recognize it until
the end.
After I had written the theme I continued to be curious, and I kept
practicing this watching myself as I went to sleep. One night, while I was
having a dream, I realized I was observing myself in the dream. I had gotten
all the way down, into the sleep itself!
In the first part of the dream I'm on top of a train and we're
approaching a tunnel. I get scared, pull myself down, and we go into the
tunnel -- whoosh! I say to myself, "So you can get the feeling of fear, and
you can hear the sound change when you go into the tunnel."
I also noticed that I could see colors. Some people had said that you
dream in black and white, but no, I was dreaming in color.
By this time I was inside one of the train cars, and I can feel the
train lurching about. I say to myself, "So you can get kinesthetic feelings
in a dream." I walk with some difficulty down to the end of the car, and I
see a big window, like a store window. Behind it there are -- not
mannequins, but three live girls in bathing suits, and they look pretty
good!
I continue walking into the next car, hanging onto the straps overhead
as I go, when I say to myself, "Hey! It would be interesting to get excited
-- sexually -- so I think I'll go back into the other car." I discovered
that I could turn around, and walk back through the train -- I could control
the direction of my dream. I get back to the car with the special window,
and I see three old guys playing violins -- but they turned back into girls!
So I could modify the direction of my dream, but not perfectly.
Well, I began to get excited, intellectually as well as sexually,
saying things like, "Wow! It's working!" and I woke up.
I made some other observations while dreaming. Apart from always asking
myself, "Am I really dreaming in color?" I wondered, "How accurately do you
see something?"
The next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass, and
she had red hair. I tried to see if I could see each hair. You know how
there's a little area of color just where the sun is reflecting -- the
diffraction effect, I could see that! I could see each hair as sharp as you
want: perfect vision!
Another time I had a dream in which a thumbtack was stuck in a
doorframe. I see the tack, run my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the
tack. So the "seeing department" arid the "feeling department" of the brain
seem to be connected. Then I say to myself, Could it be that they don't have
to be connected? I look at the doorframe again, and there's no thumbtack. I
run my finger down the doorframe, and I feel the tack!
Another time I'm dreaming and I hear "knock-knock; knock-knock."
Something was happening in the dream that made this knocking fit, but not
perfectly -- it seemed sort of foreign. I thought: "Absolutely guaranteed
that this knocking is coming from outside my dream, and I've invented this
part of the dream to fit with it. I've got to wake up and find out what the
hell it is."
The knocking is still going, I wake up, and... Dead silence. There was
nothing. So it wasn't connected to the outside.
Other people have told me that they have incorporated external noises
into their dreams, but when I had this experience, carefully "watching from
below," and sure the noise was coming from outside the dream, it wasn't.
During the time of making observations in my dreams, the process of
waking up was a rather fearful one. As you're beginning to wake up there's a
moment when you feel rigid and tied down, or underneath many layers of
cotton batting. It's hard to explain, but there's a moment when you get the
feeling you can't get out; you're not sure you can wake up. So I would have
to tell myself -- after I was awake -- that that's ridiculous. There's no
disease I know of where a person falls asleep naturally and can't wake up.
You can always wake up. And after talking to myself many times like that, I
became less and less afraid, and in fact I found the process of waking up
rather thrilling -- something like a roller coaster: After a while you're
not so scared, and you begin to enjoy it a little bit.
You might like to know how this process of observing my dreams stopped
(which it has for the most part; it's happened just a few times since). I'm
dreaming one night as usual, making observations, and I see on the wall in
front of me a pennant. I answer for the twenty-fifth time, "Yes, I'm
dreaming in color," and then I realize that I've been sleeping with the back
of my head against a brass rod. I put my hand behind my head and I feel that
the back of my head is soft. I think, "Aha! That's why I've been able to
make all these observations in my dreams: the brass rod has disturbed my
visual cortex. All I have to do is sleep with a brass rod under my head, and
I can make these observations any time I want. So I think I'll stop making
observations on this one, and go into deeper sleep."
When I woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was the back of my
head soft. Somehow I had become tired of making these observations, and my
brain had invented some false reasons as to why I shouldn't do it any more.
As a result of these observations I began to get a little theory. One
of the reasons that I liked to look at dreams was that I was curious as to
how you can see an image, of a person, for example, when your eyes are
closed, and nothing's coming in. You say it might be random, irregular nerve
discharges, but you can't get the nerves to discharge in exactly the same
delicate patterns when you are sleeping as when you are awake, looking at
something. Well then, how could I "see" in color, and in better detail, when
I was asleep?
I decided there must be an "interpretation department." When you are
actually looking at something -- a man, a lamp, or a wall -- you don't just
see blotches of color. Something tells you what it is; it has to be
interpreted. When you're dreaming, this interpretation department is still
operating, but it's all slopped up. It's telling you that you're seeing a
human hair in the greatest detail, when it isn't true. It's interpreting the
random junk entering the brain as a clear image.
One other thing about dreams. I had a friend named Deutsch, whose wife
was from a family of psychoanalysts in Vienna. One evening, during a long
discussion about dreams, he told me that dreams have significance: there are
symbols in dreams that can be interpreted psychoanalytically. I didn't
believe most of this stuff, but that night I had an interesting dream: We're
playing a game on a billiard table with three balls -- a white ball, a green
ball, and a gray ball -- and the name of the game is "titsies." There was
something about trying to get the balls into the pocket: the white ball and
the green ball are easy to sink into the pocket, but the gray one, I can't
get to it.
I wake up, and the dream is very easy to interpret: the name of the
game gives it away, of course -- them's girls! The white ball was easy to
figure out, because I was going out, sneakily, with a married woman who
worked at the time as a cashier in a cafeteria and wore a white uniform. The
green one was also easy, because I had gone out about two nights before to a
drive-in movie with a girl in a green dress. But the gray one -- what the
hell was the gray one? I knew it had to be somebody; I felt it. It's like
when you're trying to remember a name, and it's on the tip of your tongue,
but you can't get it.
It took me half a day before I remembered that I had said goodbye to a
girl I liked very much, who had gone to Italy about two or three months
before. She was a very nice girl, and I had decided that when she came back
I was going to see her again. I don't know if she wore a gray suit, but it
was perfectly clear, as soon as I thought of her, that she was the gray one.
I went back to my friend Deutsch, and I told him he must be right --
there is something to analyzing dreams. But when he heard about my
interesting dream, he said, "No, that one was too perfect -- too cut and
dried. Usually you have to do a bit more analysis."
--------
After I finished at MIT I wanted to get a summer job. I had applied two
or three times to the Bell Labs, and had gone out a few times to visit. Bill
Shockley, who knew me from the lab at MIT, would show me around each time,
and I enjoyed those visits terrifically, but I never got a job there.
I had letters from some of my professors to two specific companies. One
was to the Bausch and Lomb Company for tracing rays through lenses; the
other was to Electrical Testing Labs in New York. At that time nobody knew
what a physicist even was, and there weren't any positions in industry for
physicists. Engineers, OK; but physicists -- nobody knew how to use them.
It's interesting that very soon, after the war, it was the exact opposite:
people wanted physicists everywhere. So I wasn't getting anywhere as a
physicist looking for a job late in the Depression.
About that time I met an old friend of mine on the beach at our home
town of Far Rockaway, where we grew up together. We had gone to school
together when we were about eleven or twelve, and were very good friends. We
were both scientifically minded. He had a "laboratory," and I had a
"laboratory." We often played together, and discussed things together.
We used to put on magic shows -- chemistry magic -- for the kids on the
block. My friend was a pretty good showman, and I kind of liked that too. We
did our tricks on a little table, with Bunsen burners at each end going all
the time. On the burners we had watch glass plates (flat glass discs) with
iodine on them, which made a beautiful purple vapor that went up on each
side of the table while the show went on. It was great! We did a lot of
tricks, such as turning "wine" into water, and other chemical color changes.
For our finale, we did a trick that used something which we had discovered.
I would put my hands (secretly) first into a sink of water, and then into
benzine. Then I would "accidentally" brush by one of the Bunsen burners, and
one hand would light up. I'd clap my hands, and both hands would then be
burning. (It doesn't hurt because it burns fast and the water keeps it
cool.) Then I'd wave my hands, running around yelling, "FIRE! FIRE!" and
everybody would get all excited. They'd run out of the room, and that was
the end of the show!
Later on I told this story at college to my fraternity brothers and
they said, "Nonsense! You can't do that!"
(I often had this problem of demonstrating to these fellas something
that they didn't believe -- like the time we got into an argument as to
whether urine just ran out of you by gravity, and I had to demonstrate that
that wasn't the case by showing them that you can pee standing on your head.
Or the time when somebody claimed that if you took aspirin and Coca-Cola
you'd fall over in a dead faint directly. I told them I thought it was a lot
of baloney, and offered to take aspirin and Coca-Cola together. Then they
got into an argument whether you should have the aspirin before the Coke,
just after the Coke, or mixed in the Coke. So I had six aspirin and three
Cokes, one right after the other. First, I took aspirins and then a Coke,
then we dissolved two aspirins in a Coke and I took that, and then I took a
Coke and two aspirins. Each time the idiots who believed it were standing
around me, waiting to catch me when I fainted. But nothing happened. I do
remember that I didn't sleep very well that night, so I got up and did a lot
of figuring, and worked out some of the formulas for what is called the
Riemann-Zeta function.)
"All right, guys," I said. "Let's go out and get some benzine."
They got the benzine ready, I stuck my hand in the water in the sink
and then into the benzine and lit it... and it hurt like hell! You see, in
the meantime I had grown hairs on the back of my hand, which acted like
wicks and held the benzine in place while it burned, whereas when I had done
it earlier I had no hairs on the back of my hand. After I did the experiment
for my fraternity brothers, I didn't have any hairs on the back of my hands
either.
Well, my pal and I met on the beach, and he told me that he had a
process for metal-plating plastics. I said that was impossible, because
there's no conductivity; you can't attach a wire. But he said he could
metal-plate anything, and I still remember him picking up a peach pit that
was in the sand, and saying he could metal-plate that -- trying to impress
me.
What was nice was that he offered me a job at his little company, which
was on the top floor of a building in New York. There were only about four
people in the company. His father was the one who was getting the money
together and was, I think, the "president." He was the "vice-president,"
along with another fella who was a salesman. I was the "chief research
chemist," and my friend's brother, who was not very clever, was the
bottle-washer. We had six metal-plating baths.
They had this process for metal-plating plastics, and the scheme was:
First, deposit silver on the object by precipitating silver from a silver
nitrate bath with a reducing agent (like you make mirrors); then stick the
object, with silver on it as a conductor, into an electroplating bath, and
the silver gets plated.
The problem was, does the silver stick to the object?
It doesn't. It peels off easily. So there was a step in between, to
make the silver stick better to the object. It depended on the material. For
things like Bakelite, which was an important plastic in those days, my
friend had found that if he sandblasted it first, and then soaked it for
many hours in stannous hydroxide, which got into the pores of the Bakelite,
were afraid to tie down because he was so terrified: his face was pale
yellow-green and he was shaking. I found out later he was from Europe --
this was in the early thirties -- and he didn't realize that these guys all
tied down to the floor was some kind of a joke; he knew what kinds of things
were going on in Europe. The guy was frightening to look at, he was so
scared.
By the time the night was over, there were only three sophomores
guarding twenty of us freshmen, but we didn't know that. The sophomores had
driven their cars in and out a few times to make it sound as if there was a
lot of activity, and we didn't notice it was always the same cars and the
same people. So we didn't win that one.
My father and mother happened to come up that morning to see how their
son was doing in Boston, and the fraternity kept putting them off until we
came back from being kidnapped. I was so bedraggled and dirty from
struggling so hard to escape and from lack of sleep that they were really
horrified to discover what their son looked like at MIT!
I had also gotten a stiff neck, and I remember standing in line for
inspection that afternoon at ROTC, not being able to look straight forward.
The commander grabbed my head and turned it, shouting, "Straighten up!"
I winced, as my shoulders went at an angle: "I can't help it, sir!"
"Oh, excuse me!" he said, apologetically.
Anyway, the fact that I fought so long and hard not to be tied up gave
me a terrific reputation, and I never had to worry about that sissy business
again -- a tremendous relief.
I often listened to my roommates -- they were both seniors -- studying
for their theoretical physics course. One day they were working pretty hard
on something that seemed pretty clear to me, so I said, "Why don't you use
the Baronallai's equation?"
"What's that!" they exclaimed. "What are you talking about!"
I explained to them what I meant and how it worked in this case, and it
solved the problem. It turned out it was Bernoulli's equation that I meant,
but I had read all this stuff in the encyclopedia without talking to anybody
about it, so I didn't know how to pronounce anything.
But my roommates were very excited, and from then on they discussed
their physics problems with me -- I wasn't so lucky with many of them -- and
the next year, when I took the course, I advanced rapidly. That was a very
good way to get educated, working on the senior problems and learning how to
pronounce things.
I liked to go to a place called the Raymor and Playmore Ballroom -- two
ballrooms that were connected together -- on Tuesday nights. My fraternity
brothers didn't go to these "open" dances; they preferred their own dances,
where the girls they brought were upper crust ones they had met "properly."
I didn't care, when I met somebody, where they were from, or what their
background was, so I would go to these dances -- even though my fraternity
brothers disapproved (I was a junior by this time, and they couldn't stop
me) -- and I had a very good time.
One time I danced with a certain girl a few times, and didn't say much.
Finally, she said to me, "Who hants vewwy nice-ee."
I couldn't quite make it out -- she had some difficulty in speech --
but I thought she said, "You dance very nicely."
"Thank you," I said. "It's been an honor."
We went over to a table where a friend of hers had found a boy she was
dancing with and we sat, the four of us, together. One girl was very hard of
hearing, and the other girl was nearly deaf.
When the two girls conversed they would do a large amount of signaling
very rapidly back and forth, and grunt a little bit. It didn't bother me;
the girl danced well, and she was a nice person.
After a few more dances, we're sitting at the table again, and there's
a large amount of signaling back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,
until finally she says something to me which I gathered means, she'd like us
to take them to some hotel.
I ask the other guy if he wants to go.
"What do they want us to go to this hotel for?" he asks.
"Hell, I don't know. We didn't talk well enough!" But I don't have to
know. It's just fun, seeing what's going to happen; it's an adventure!
The other guy's afraid, so he says no. So I take the two girls in a
taxi to the hotel, and discover that there's a dance organized by the deaf
and dumb, believe it or not. They all belonged to a club. It turns out many
of them can feel the rhythm enough to dance to the music and applaud the
band at the end of each number.
It was very, very interesting! I felt as if I was in a foreign country
and couldn't speak the language: I could speak, but nobody could hear me.
Everybody was talking with signs to everybody else, and I couldn't
understand anything! I asked my girl to teach me some signs and I learned a
few, like you learn a foreign language, just for fun.
Everyone was so happy and relaxed with each other, making jokes and
smiling all the time; they didn't seem to have any real difficulty of any
kind communicating with each other. It was the same as with any other
language, except for one thing: as they're making signs to each other, their
heads were always turning from one side to the other. I realized what that
was. When someone wants to make a side remark or interrupt you, he can't
yell, "Hey, Jack!" He can only make a signal, which you won't catch unless
you're in the habit of looking around all the time.
They were completely comfortable with each other. It was my problem to
be comfortable. It was a wonderful experience.
The dance went on for a long time, and when it closed down we went to a
cafeteria. They were all ordering things by pointing to them. I remember
somebody asking in signs, "Where-are-you-from?" and my girl spelling out
"N-e-w Y-o-r-k." I still remember a guy signing to me "Good sport!" -- he
holds his thumb up, and then touches an imaginary lapel, for "sport." It's a
nice system.
Everybody was sitting around, making jokes, and getting me into their
world very nicely. I wanted to buy a bottle of milk, so I went up to the guy
at the counter and mouthed the word "milk" without saying anything.
The guy didn't understand.
I made the symbol for "milk," which is two fists moving as if you're
milking a cow, and he didn't catch that either.
I tried to point to the sign that showed the price of milk, but he
still didn't catch on.
Finally, some stranger nearby ordered milk, and I pointed to it.
"Oh! Milk!" he said, as I nodded my head yes.
He handed me the bottle, and I said, "Thank you very much!"
"You SON of a GUN!" he said, smiling.
I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in
mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of
plastic for drawing smooth curves -- a curly, funny-looking thing) and said,
"I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?"
I thought for a moment and said, "Sure they do. The curves are very
special curves. Lemme show ya," and I picked up my French curve and began to
turn it slowly. "The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on
each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal."
All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at
different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and
laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is
horizontal. They were all excited by this "discovery" -- even though they
had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already
"learned" that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any
curve is zero (horizontal). They didn't put two and two together. They
didn't even know what they "knew."
I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by
understanding; they learn by some other way -- by rote, or something. Their
knowledge is so fragile!
I did the same kind of trick four years later at Princeton when I was
talking with an experienced character, an assistant of Einstein, who was
surely working with gravity all the time. I gave him a problem: You blast
off in a rocket which has a clock on board, and there's a clock on the
ground. The idea is that you have to be back when the clock on the ground
says one hour has passed. Now you want it so that when you come back, your
clock is as far ahead as possible. According to Einstein, if you go very
high, your clock will go faster, because the higher something is in a
gravitational field, the faster its clock goes. But if you try to go too
high, since you've only got an hour, you have to go so fast to get there
that the speed slows your clock down. So you can't go too high. The question
is, exactly what program of speed and height should you make so that you get
the maximum time on your clock?
This assistant of Einstein worked on it for quite a bit before he
realized that the answer is the real motion of matter. If you shoot
something up in a normal way, so that the time it takes the shell to go up
and come down is an hour, that's the correct motion. It's the fundamental
principle of Einstein's gravity -- that is, what's called the "proper time"
is at a maximum for the actual curve. But when I put it to him, about a
rocket with a clock, he didn't recognize it. It was just like the guys in
mechanical drawing class, but this time it wasn't dumb freshmen. So this
kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people.
When I was a junior or senior I used to eat at a certain restaurant in
Boston. I went there by myself, often on successive evenings. People got to
know me, and I had the same waitress all the time.
I noticed that they were always in a hurry, rushing around, so one day,
just for fun, I left my tip, which was usually ten cents (normal for those
days), in two nickels, under two glasses: I filled each glass to the very
top, dropped a nickel in, and with a card over it, turned it over so it was
upside down on the table. Then I slipped out the card (no water leaks out
because no air can come in -- the rim is too close to the table for that).
I put the tip under two glasses because I knew they were always in a
hurry. If the tip was a dime in one glass, the waitress, in her haste to get
the table ready for the next customer, would pick up the glass, the water
would spill out, and that would be the end of it. But after she does that
with the first glass, what the hell is she going to do with the second one?
She can't just have the nerve to lift it up now!
On the way out I said to my waitress, "Be careful, Sue. There's
something funny about the glasses you gave me -- they're filled in on the
top, and there's a hole on the bottom!"
The next day I came back, and I had a new waitress. My regular waitress
wouldn't have anything to do with me. "Sue's very angry at you," my new
waitress said. "After she picked up the first glass and water went all over
the place, she called the boss out. They studied it a little bit, but they
couldn't spend all day figuring out what to do, so they finally picked up
the other one, and water went out again, all over the floor. It was a
terrible mess; Sue slipped later in the water. They're all mad at you."
I laughed.
She said, "It's not funny! How would you like it if someone did that to
you -- what would you do?"
"I'd get a soup plate and then slide the glass very carefully over to
the edge of the table, and let the water run into the soup plate -- it
doesn't have to run onto the floor. Then I'd take the nickel out."
"Oh, that's a goood idea," she said.
That evening I left my tip under a coffee cup, which I left upside down
on the table.
The next night I came and I had the same new waitress.
"What's the idea of leaving the cup upside down last time?"
"Well, I thought that even though you were in a hurry, you'd have to go
back into the kitchen and get a soup plate; then you'd have to sloooowly and
carefully slide the cup over to the edge of the table..."
"I did that," she complained, "but there was no water in it!"
My masterpiece of mischief happened at the fraternity. One morning I
woke up very early, about five o'clock, and couldn't go back to sleep, so I
went downstairs from the sleeping rooms and discovered some signs hanging on
strings which said things like "DOOR! DOOR! WHO STOLE THE DOOR?" I saw that
someone had taken a door off its hinges, and in its place they hung a sign
that said, "PLEASE CLOSE THE DOOR!" -- the sign that used to be on the door
that was missing.
I immediately figured out what the idea was. In that room a guy named
Pete Bernays and a couple of other guys liked to work very hard, and always
wanted it quiet. If you wandered into their room looking for something, or
to ask them how they did problem such and such, when you would leave you
would always hear these guys scream, "Please close the door!"
Somebody had gotten tired of this, no doubt, and had taken the door
off. Now this room, it so happened, had two doors, the way it was built, so
I got an idea: I took the other door off its hinges, carried it downstairs,
and hid it in the basement behind the oil tank. Then I quietly went back
upstairs and went to bed.
Later in the morning I made believe I woke up and came downstairs a
little late. The other guys were milling around, and Pete and his friends
were all upset: The doors to their room were missing, and they had to study,
blah, blah, blah, blah. I was coming down the stairs and they said,
"Feynman! Did you take the doors?"
"Oh, yeah!" I said. "I took the door. You can see the scratches on my
knuckles here, that I got when my hands scraped against the wall as I was
carrying it down into the basement."
They weren't satisfied with my answer; in fact, they didn't believe me.
The guys who took the first door had left so many clues -- the
handwriting on the signs, for instance -- that they were soon found out. My
idea was that when it was found out who stole the first door, everybody
would think they also stole the other door. It worked perfectly: The guys
who took the first door were pummeled and tortured and worked on by
everybody, until finally, with much pain and difficulty, they convinced
their tormentors that they had only taken one door, unbelievable as it might
be.
I listened to all this, and I was happy.
The other door stayed missing for a whole week, and it became more and
more important to the guys who were trying to study in that room that the
other door be found.
Finally, in order to solve the problem, the president of the fraternity
says at the dinner table, "We have to solve this problem of the other door.
I haven't been able to solve the problem myself, so I would like suggestions
from the rest of you as to how to straighten this out, because Pete and the
others are trying to study."
Somebody makes a suggestion, then someone else.
After a little while, I get up and make a suggestion. "All right," I
say in a sarcastic voice, "whoever you are who stole the door, we know
you're wonderful. You're so clever! We can't figure out who you are, so you
must be some sort of super-genius. You don't have to tell us who you are;
all we want to know is where the door is. So if you will leave a note
somewhere, telling us where the door is, we will honor you and admit forever
that you are a super-marvel, that you are so smart that you could take the
other door without our being able to figure out who you are. But for God's
sake, just leave the note somewhere, and we will be forever grateful to you
for it."
The next guy makes his suggestion: "I have another idea," he says. "I
think that you, as president, should ask each man on his word of honor
towards the fraternity to say whether he took the door or not."
The president says, "That's a very good idea. On the fraternity word of
honor!" So he goes around the table, and asks each guy, one by one: "Jack,
did you take the door?"
"No, sir, I did not take the door."
"Tim: Did you take the door?"
"No, sir! I did not take the door!"
"Maurice. Did you take the door?"
"No, I did not take the door, sir."
"Feynman, did you take the door?"
"Yeah, I took the door."
"Cut it out, Feynman; this is serious! Sam! Did you take the door..."
-- it went all the way around. Everyone was shocked. There must be some real
rat in the fraternity who didn't respect the fraternity word of honor!
That night I left a note with a little picture of the oil tank and the
door next to it, and the next day they found the door and put it back.
Sometime later I finally admitted to taking the other door, and I was
accused by everybody of lying. They couldn't remember what I had said. All
they could remember was their conclusion after the president of the
fraternity had gone around the table and asked everybody, that nobody
admitted taking the door. The idea they remembered, but not the words.
People often think I'm a faker, but I'm usually honest, in a certain
way -- in such a way that often nobody believes me!
--------
There was an Italian radio station in Brooklyn, and as a boy I used to
listen to it all the time. I LOVed the ROLLing SOUNds going over me, as if I
was in the ocean, and the waves weren't very high. I used to sit there and
have the water come over me, in this BEAUtiful iTALian. In the Italian
programs there was always some kind of family situation where there were
discussions and arguments between the mother and father:
High voice: "Nio teco TIEto capeto TUtto..."
Loud, low voice: "DRO tone pala TUtto!!" (with hand slapping).
It was great! So I learned to make all these emotions: I could cry; I
could laugh; all this stuff. Italian is a lovely language.
There were a number of Italian people living near us in New York. Once
while I was riding my bicycle, some Italian truck driver got upset at me,
leaned out of his truck, and, gesturing, yelled something like, "Me aRRUcha
LAMpe etta TIche!"
I felt like a crapper. What did he say to me? What should I yell back?
So I asked an Italian friend of mine at school, and he said, "Just say,
'A te! A te!' -- which means 'The same to you! The same to you!' "
I thought it was a great idea. I would say "A te! A te!"
back-gesturing, of course. Then, as I gained confidence, I developed my
abilities further. I would be riding my bicycle, and some lady would be
driving in her car and get in the way, and I'd say, "PUzzia a la maLOche!"
-- and she'd shrink! Some terrible Italian boy had cursed a terrible curse
at her!
It was not so easy to recognize it as fake Italian. Once, when I was at
Princeton, as I was going into the parking lot at Palmer Laboratory on my
bicycle, somebody got in the way. My habit was always the same: I gesture to
the guy, "oREzze caBONca MIche!", slapping the back of one hand against the
other.
And way up on the other side of a long area of grass, there's an
Italian gardner putting in some plants. He stops, waves, and shouts happily,
"REzza ma LIa!"
I call back, "RONte BALta!", returning the greeting. He didn't know I
didn't know, and I didn't know what he said, and he didn't know what I said.
But it was OK! It was great! It works! After all, when they hear the
intonation, they recognize it immediately as Italian -- maybe it's Milano
instead of Romano, what the hell. But he's an iTALian! So it's just great.
But you have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing
will happen.
One time I came home from college for a vacation, and my sister was
sort of unhappy, almost crying: her Girl Scouts were having a
father-daughter banquet, but our father was out on the road, selling
uniforms. So I said I would take her, being the brother (I'm nine years
older, so it wasn't so crazy).
When we got there, I sat among the fathers for a while, but soon became
sick of them. All these fathers bring their daughters to this nice little
banquet, and all they talked about was the stock market -- they don't know
how to talk to their own children, much less their children's friends.
During the banquet the girls entertained us by doing little skits,
reciting poetry, and so on. Then all of a sudden they bring out this
funny-looking apronlike thing, with a hole at the top to put your head
through. The girls announce that the fathers are now going to entertain
them.
So each father has to get up and stick his head through and say
something -- one guy recites "Mary Had a Little Lamb" -- and they don't know
what to do. I didn't know what to do either, but by the time I got up there,
I told them that I was going to recite a little poem, and I'm sorry that
it's not in English, but I'm sure they will appreciate it anyway:
A TUZZO LANTO
--Poici di Pare
TANto SAca TULna TI, na PUta TUchi PUti TI la.
RUNto CAta CHANto CHANta MANto CHI la TI da.
YALta CAra SULda MI la CHAta PIcha PIno TIto BRALda
pe te CHIna nana CHUNda lala CHINda lala CHUNda!
RONto piti CA le, a TANto CHINto quinta LALda
O la TINta dalla LALta, YENta PUcha lalla TALta!
I do this for three or four stanzas, going through all the emotions
that I heard on Italian radio, and the kids are unraveled, rolling in the
aisles, laughing with happiness.
After the banquet was over, the scoutmaster and a schoolteacher came
over and told me they had been discussing my poem. One of them thought it
was Italian, and the other thought it was Latin. The schoolteacher asks,
"Which one of us is right?"
I said, "You'll have to go ask the girls -- they understood what
language it was right away."
--------
When I was a student at MIT I was interested only in science; I was no
good at anything else. But at MIT there was a rule: You have to take some
humanities courses to get more "culture." Besides the English classes
required were two electives, so I looked through the list, and right away I
found astronomy -- as a humanities course! So that year I escaped with
astronomy. Then next year I looked further down the list, past French
literature and courses like that, and found philosophy. It was the closest
thing to science I could find.
Before I tell you what happened in philosophy, let me tell you about
the English class. We had to write a number of themes. For instance, Mill
had written something on liberty, and we had to criticize it. But instead of
addressing myself to political liberty, as Mill did, I wrote about liberty
in social occasions -- the problem of having to fake and lie in order to be
polite, and does this perpetual game of faking in social situations lead to
the "destruction of the moral fiber of society." An interesting question,
but not the one we were supposed to discuss.
Another essay we had to criticize was by Huxley, "On a Piece of Chalk,"
in which he describes how an ordinary piece of chalk he is holding is the
remains from animal bones, and the forces inside the earth lifted it up so
that it became part of the White Cliffs, and then it was quarried and is now
used to convey ideas through writing on the blackboard.
But again, instead of criticizing the essay assigned to us, I wrote a
parody called, "On a Piece of Dust," about how dust makes the colors of the
sunset and precipitates the rain, and so on. I was always a faker, always
trying to escape.
But when we had to write a theme on Goethe's Faust, it was hopeless!
The work was too long to make a parody of it or to invent something else. I
was storming back and forth in the fraternity saying, "I can't do it. I'm
just not gonna do it. I ain't gonna do it!"
One of my fraternity brothers said, "OK, Feynman, you're not gonna do
it. But the professor will think you didn't do it because you don't want to
do the work. You oughta write a theme on something -- same number of words
-- and hand it in with a note saying that you just couldn't understand the
Faust, you haven't got the heart for it, and that it's impossible for you to
write a theme on it."
So I did that. I wrote a long theme, "On the Limitations of Reason." I
had thought about scientific techniques for solving problems, and how there
are certain limitations: moral values cannot be decided by scientific
methods, yak, yak, yak, and so on.
Then another fraternity brother offered some more advice. "Feynman," he
said, "it ain't gonna work, handing in a theme that's got nothing to do with
Faust. What you oughta do is work that thing you wrote into the Faust."
"Ridiculous!" I said.
But the other fraternity guys think it's a good idea.
"All right, all right!" I say, protesting. "I'll try."
So I added half a page to what I had already written, and said that
Mephistopheles represents reason, and Faust represents the spirit, and
Goethe is trying to show the limitations of reason. I stirred it up, cranked
it all in, and handed in my theme.
The professor had us each come in individually to discuss our theme. I
went in expecting the worst.
He said, "The introductory material is fine, but the Faust material is
a bit too brief. Otherwise, it's very good -- B+ ." I escaped again!
Now to the philosophy class. The course was taught by an old bearded
professor named Robinson, who always mumbled. I would go to the class, and
he would mumble along, and I couldn't understand a thing. The other people
in the class seemed to understand him better, but they didn't seem to pay
any attention. I happened to have a small drill, about one-sixteenth-inch,
and to pass the time in that class, I would twist it between my fingers and
drill holes in the sole of my shoe, week after week.
Finally one day at the end of the class, Professor Robinson went "wugga
mugga mugga wugga wugga..." and everybody got excited! They were all talking
to each other and discussing, so I figured he'd said something interesting,
thank God! I wondered what it was?
I asked somebody, and they said, "We have to write a theme, and hand it
in in four weeks."
"A theme on what?"
"On what he's been talking about all year."
I was stuck. The only thing that I had heard during that entire term
that I could remember was a moment when there came this upwelling,
"muggawuggastreamofconsciousnessmuggawugga," and phoom! -- it sank back into
chaos.
This "stream of consciousness" reminded me of a problem my father had
given to me many years before. He said, "Suppose some Martians were to come
down to earth, and Martians never slept, but instead were perpetually
active. Suppose they didn't have this crazy phenomenon that we have, called
sleep. So they ask you the question: 'How does it feel to go to sleep? What
happens when you go to sleep? Do your thoughts suddenly stop, or do they
move less aanndd lleeessss rraaaaapppppiidddddllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyyyy? How
does the mind actually turn off?"
I got interested. Now I had to answer this question: How does the
stream of consciousness end, when you go to sleep?
So every afternoon for the next four weeks I would work on my theme. I
would pull down the shades in my room, turn off the lights, and go to sleep.
And I'd watch what happened, when I went to sleep.
Then at night, I'd go to sleep again, so I had two times each day when
I could make observations -- it was very good!
At first I noticed a lot of subsidiary things that had little to do
with falling asleep. I noticed, for instance, that I did a lot of thinking
by speaking to myself internally. I could also imagine things visually.
Then, when I was getting tired, I noticed that I could think of two
things at once. I discovered this when I was talking internally to myself
about something, and while I was doing this, I was idly imagining two ropes
connected to the end of my bed, going through some pulleys, and winding
around a turning cylinder, slowly lifting the bed. I wasn't aware that I was
imagining these ropes until I began to worry that one rope would catch on
the other rope, and they wouldn't wind up smoothly. But I said, internally,
"Oh, the tension will take care of that," and this interrupted the first
thought I was having, and made me aware that I was thinking of two things at
once.
I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they
become less and less logically interconnected. You don't notice that they're
not logically connected until you ask yourself, "What made me think of
that?" and you try to work your way back, and often you can't remember what
the hell did make you think of that!
So you get every illusion of logical connection, but the actual fact is
that the thoughts become more and more cockeyed until they're completely
disjointed, and beyond that, you fall asleep.
After four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and
explained the observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out
that all of these observations were made while I was watching myself fall
asleep, and I don't really know what it's like to fall asleep when I'm not
watching myself. I concluded the theme with a little verse I made up, which
pointed out this problem of introspection:
I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!
We hand in our themes, and the next time our class meets, the professor
reads one of them: "Mum bum wugga mum bum..." I can't tell what the guy
wrote.
He reads another theme: "Mugga wugga mum bum wugga wugga..." I don't
know what that guy wrote either, but at the end of it, he goes:
Uh wugga wuh. Uh wugga wuh.
Uh wugga wugga wugga.
I wugga wuh uh wugga wuh
Uh wugga wugga wugga.
"Aha!" I say. "That's my theme!" I honestly didn't recognize it until
the end.
After I had written the theme I continued to be curious, and I kept
practicing this watching myself as I went to sleep. One night, while I was
having a dream, I realized I was observing myself in the dream. I had gotten
all the way down, into the sleep itself!
In the first part of the dream I'm on top of a train and we're
approaching a tunnel. I get scared, pull myself down, and we go into the
tunnel -- whoosh! I say to myself, "So you can get the feeling of fear, and
you can hear the sound change when you go into the tunnel."
I also noticed that I could see colors. Some people had said that you
dream in black and white, but no, I was dreaming in color.
By this time I was inside one of the train cars, and I can feel the
train lurching about. I say to myself, "So you can get kinesthetic feelings
in a dream." I walk with some difficulty down to the end of the car, and I
see a big window, like a store window. Behind it there are -- not
mannequins, but three live girls in bathing suits, and they look pretty
good!
I continue walking into the next car, hanging onto the straps overhead
as I go, when I say to myself, "Hey! It would be interesting to get excited
-- sexually -- so I think I'll go back into the other car." I discovered
that I could turn around, and walk back through the train -- I could control
the direction of my dream. I get back to the car with the special window,
and I see three old guys playing violins -- but they turned back into girls!
So I could modify the direction of my dream, but not perfectly.
Well, I began to get excited, intellectually as well as sexually,
saying things like, "Wow! It's working!" and I woke up.
I made some other observations while dreaming. Apart from always asking
myself, "Am I really dreaming in color?" I wondered, "How accurately do you
see something?"
The next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass, and
she had red hair. I tried to see if I could see each hair. You know how
there's a little area of color just where the sun is reflecting -- the
diffraction effect, I could see that! I could see each hair as sharp as you
want: perfect vision!
Another time I had a dream in which a thumbtack was stuck in a
doorframe. I see the tack, run my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the
tack. So the "seeing department" arid the "feeling department" of the brain
seem to be connected. Then I say to myself, Could it be that they don't have
to be connected? I look at the doorframe again, and there's no thumbtack. I
run my finger down the doorframe, and I feel the tack!
Another time I'm dreaming and I hear "knock-knock; knock-knock."
Something was happening in the dream that made this knocking fit, but not
perfectly -- it seemed sort of foreign. I thought: "Absolutely guaranteed
that this knocking is coming from outside my dream, and I've invented this
part of the dream to fit with it. I've got to wake up and find out what the
hell it is."
The knocking is still going, I wake up, and... Dead silence. There was
nothing. So it wasn't connected to the outside.
Other people have told me that they have incorporated external noises
into their dreams, but when I had this experience, carefully "watching from
below," and sure the noise was coming from outside the dream, it wasn't.
During the time of making observations in my dreams, the process of
waking up was a rather fearful one. As you're beginning to wake up there's a
moment when you feel rigid and tied down, or underneath many layers of
cotton batting. It's hard to explain, but there's a moment when you get the
feeling you can't get out; you're not sure you can wake up. So I would have
to tell myself -- after I was awake -- that that's ridiculous. There's no
disease I know of where a person falls asleep naturally and can't wake up.
You can always wake up. And after talking to myself many times like that, I
became less and less afraid, and in fact I found the process of waking up
rather thrilling -- something like a roller coaster: After a while you're
not so scared, and you begin to enjoy it a little bit.
You might like to know how this process of observing my dreams stopped
(which it has for the most part; it's happened just a few times since). I'm
dreaming one night as usual, making observations, and I see on the wall in
front of me a pennant. I answer for the twenty-fifth time, "Yes, I'm
dreaming in color," and then I realize that I've been sleeping with the back
of my head against a brass rod. I put my hand behind my head and I feel that
the back of my head is soft. I think, "Aha! That's why I've been able to
make all these observations in my dreams: the brass rod has disturbed my
visual cortex. All I have to do is sleep with a brass rod under my head, and
I can make these observations any time I want. So I think I'll stop making
observations on this one, and go into deeper sleep."
When I woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was the back of my
head soft. Somehow I had become tired of making these observations, and my
brain had invented some false reasons as to why I shouldn't do it any more.
As a result of these observations I began to get a little theory. One
of the reasons that I liked to look at dreams was that I was curious as to
how you can see an image, of a person, for example, when your eyes are
closed, and nothing's coming in. You say it might be random, irregular nerve
discharges, but you can't get the nerves to discharge in exactly the same
delicate patterns when you are sleeping as when you are awake, looking at
something. Well then, how could I "see" in color, and in better detail, when
I was asleep?
I decided there must be an "interpretation department." When you are
actually looking at something -- a man, a lamp, or a wall -- you don't just
see blotches of color. Something tells you what it is; it has to be
interpreted. When you're dreaming, this interpretation department is still
operating, but it's all slopped up. It's telling you that you're seeing a
human hair in the greatest detail, when it isn't true. It's interpreting the
random junk entering the brain as a clear image.
One other thing about dreams. I had a friend named Deutsch, whose wife
was from a family of psychoanalysts in Vienna. One evening, during a long
discussion about dreams, he told me that dreams have significance: there are
symbols in dreams that can be interpreted psychoanalytically. I didn't
believe most of this stuff, but that night I had an interesting dream: We're
playing a game on a billiard table with three balls -- a white ball, a green
ball, and a gray ball -- and the name of the game is "titsies." There was
something about trying to get the balls into the pocket: the white ball and
the green ball are easy to sink into the pocket, but the gray one, I can't
get to it.
I wake up, and the dream is very easy to interpret: the name of the
game gives it away, of course -- them's girls! The white ball was easy to
figure out, because I was going out, sneakily, with a married woman who
worked at the time as a cashier in a cafeteria and wore a white uniform. The
green one was also easy, because I had gone out about two nights before to a
drive-in movie with a girl in a green dress. But the gray one -- what the
hell was the gray one? I knew it had to be somebody; I felt it. It's like
when you're trying to remember a name, and it's on the tip of your tongue,
but you can't get it.
It took me half a day before I remembered that I had said goodbye to a
girl I liked very much, who had gone to Italy about two or three months
before. She was a very nice girl, and I had decided that when she came back
I was going to see her again. I don't know if she wore a gray suit, but it
was perfectly clear, as soon as I thought of her, that she was the gray one.
I went back to my friend Deutsch, and I told him he must be right --
there is something to analyzing dreams. But when he heard about my
interesting dream, he said, "No, that one was too perfect -- too cut and
dried. Usually you have to do a bit more analysis."
--------
After I finished at MIT I wanted to get a summer job. I had applied two
or three times to the Bell Labs, and had gone out a few times to visit. Bill
Shockley, who knew me from the lab at MIT, would show me around each time,
and I enjoyed those visits terrifically, but I never got a job there.
I had letters from some of my professors to two specific companies. One
was to the Bausch and Lomb Company for tracing rays through lenses; the
other was to Electrical Testing Labs in New York. At that time nobody knew
what a physicist even was, and there weren't any positions in industry for
physicists. Engineers, OK; but physicists -- nobody knew how to use them.
It's interesting that very soon, after the war, it was the exact opposite:
people wanted physicists everywhere. So I wasn't getting anywhere as a
physicist looking for a job late in the Depression.
About that time I met an old friend of mine on the beach at our home
town of Far Rockaway, where we grew up together. We had gone to school
together when we were about eleven or twelve, and were very good friends. We
were both scientifically minded. He had a "laboratory," and I had a
"laboratory." We often played together, and discussed things together.
We used to put on magic shows -- chemistry magic -- for the kids on the
block. My friend was a pretty good showman, and I kind of liked that too. We
did our tricks on a little table, with Bunsen burners at each end going all
the time. On the burners we had watch glass plates (flat glass discs) with
iodine on them, which made a beautiful purple vapor that went up on each
side of the table while the show went on. It was great! We did a lot of
tricks, such as turning "wine" into water, and other chemical color changes.
For our finale, we did a trick that used something which we had discovered.
I would put my hands (secretly) first into a sink of water, and then into
benzine. Then I would "accidentally" brush by one of the Bunsen burners, and
one hand would light up. I'd clap my hands, and both hands would then be
burning. (It doesn't hurt because it burns fast and the water keeps it
cool.) Then I'd wave my hands, running around yelling, "FIRE! FIRE!" and
everybody would get all excited. They'd run out of the room, and that was
the end of the show!
Later on I told this story at college to my fraternity brothers and
they said, "Nonsense! You can't do that!"
(I often had this problem of demonstrating to these fellas something
that they didn't believe -- like the time we got into an argument as to
whether urine just ran out of you by gravity, and I had to demonstrate that
that wasn't the case by showing them that you can pee standing on your head.
Or the time when somebody claimed that if you took aspirin and Coca-Cola
you'd fall over in a dead faint directly. I told them I thought it was a lot
of baloney, and offered to take aspirin and Coca-Cola together. Then they
got into an argument whether you should have the aspirin before the Coke,
just after the Coke, or mixed in the Coke. So I had six aspirin and three
Cokes, one right after the other. First, I took aspirins and then a Coke,
then we dissolved two aspirins in a Coke and I took that, and then I took a
Coke and two aspirins. Each time the idiots who believed it were standing
around me, waiting to catch me when I fainted. But nothing happened. I do
remember that I didn't sleep very well that night, so I got up and did a lot
of figuring, and worked out some of the formulas for what is called the
Riemann-Zeta function.)
"All right, guys," I said. "Let's go out and get some benzine."
They got the benzine ready, I stuck my hand in the water in the sink
and then into the benzine and lit it... and it hurt like hell! You see, in
the meantime I had grown hairs on the back of my hand, which acted like
wicks and held the benzine in place while it burned, whereas when I had done
it earlier I had no hairs on the back of my hand. After I did the experiment
for my fraternity brothers, I didn't have any hairs on the back of my hands
either.
Well, my pal and I met on the beach, and he told me that he had a
process for metal-plating plastics. I said that was impossible, because
there's no conductivity; you can't attach a wire. But he said he could
metal-plate anything, and I still remember him picking up a peach pit that
was in the sand, and saying he could metal-plate that -- trying to impress
me.
What was nice was that he offered me a job at his little company, which
was on the top floor of a building in New York. There were only about four
people in the company. His father was the one who was getting the money
together and was, I think, the "president." He was the "vice-president,"
along with another fella who was a salesman. I was the "chief research
chemist," and my friend's brother, who was not very clever, was the
bottle-washer. We had six metal-plating baths.
They had this process for metal-plating plastics, and the scheme was:
First, deposit silver on the object by precipitating silver from a silver
nitrate bath with a reducing agent (like you make mirrors); then stick the
object, with silver on it as a conductor, into an electroplating bath, and
the silver gets plated.
The problem was, does the silver stick to the object?
It doesn't. It peels off easily. So there was a step in between, to
make the silver stick better to the object. It depended on the material. For
things like Bakelite, which was an important plastic in those days, my
friend had found that if he sandblasted it first, and then soaked it for
many hours in stannous hydroxide, which got into the pores of the Bakelite,