“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!
Is Electricity Fire?
Judging Books by Their Covers
“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!
Is Electricity Fire?
In the early fifties I suffered temporarily from a disease of middle age: I used to give philosophical talks about science—how science satisfies curiosity, how it gives you a new world view, how it gives man the ability to do things, how it gives him power—and the question is, in view of the recent development of the atomic bomb, is it a good idea to give man that much power? I also thought about the relation of science and religion, and it was about this time when I was invited to a conference in New York that was going to discuss “the ethics of equality.”
There had already been a conference among the older people, somewhere on Long Island, and this year they decided to have some younger people come in and discuss the position papers they had worked out in the other conference.
Before I got there, they sent around a list of “books you might find interesting to read, and please send us any books you want others to read, and we will store them in the library so that others may read them.”
So here comes this wonderful list of books. I start down the first page: I haven’t read a single one of the books, and I feel very uneasy—I hardly belong. I look at the second page: I haven’t read a single one. I found out, after looking through the whole list, that I haven’t read any of the books. I must be an idiot, an illiterate! There were wonderful books there, like Thomas Jefferson OnFreedom, or something like that, and there were a few authors I had read. There was a book by Heisenberg, one by Schrodinger, and one by Einstein, but they were something like Einstein, MyLaterYears and Schrodinger, WhatIsLife—different from what I had read. So I had a feeling that I was out of my depth, and that I shouldn’t be in this. Maybe I could just sit quietly and listen.
I go to the first big introductory meeting, and a guy gets up and explains that we have two problems to discuss. The first one is fogged up a little bit—something about ethics and equality, but I don’t understand what the problem exactly is. And the second one is, “We are going to demonstrate by our efforts a way that we can have a dialogue among people of different fields.” There was an international lawyer, a historian, a Jesuit priest, a rabbi, a scientist (me), and so on.
Well, right away my logical mind goes like this: The second problem I don’t have to pay any attention to, because if it works, it works; and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work—we don’t have to prove that we can have a dialogue, and discuss that we can have a dialogue, if we haven’t got any dialogue to talk about! So the primary problem is the first one, which I didn’t understand.
I was ready to put my hand up and say, “Would you please define the problem better,” but then I thought, “No, I’m the ignoramus; I’d better listen. I don’t want to start trouble right away.”
The subgroup I was in was supposed to discuss the “ethics of equality in education.” In the meetings of our subgroup the Jesuit priest was always talking about “the fragmentation of knowledge.” He would say, “The real problem in the ethics of equality in education is the fragmentation of knowledge.” This Jesuit was looking back into the thirteenth century when the Catholic Church was in charge of all education, and the whole world was simple. There was God, and everything came from God; it was all organized. But today, it’s not so easy to understand everything. So knowledge has become fragmented. I felt that “the fragmentation of knowledge” had nothing to do with “it,” but “it” had never been defined, so there was no way for me to prove that.
Finally I said, “What is the ethical problem associated with the fragmentation of knowledge?” He would only answer me with great clouds of fog, and I’d say, “I don’t understand,” and everybody else would say they did understand, and they tried to explain it to me, but they couldn’t explain it to me!
So the others in the group told me to write down why I thought the fragmentation of knowledge was not a problem of ethics. I went back to my dormitory room and I wrote out carefully, as best I could, what I thought the subject of “the ethics of equality in education” might be, and I gave some examples of the kinds of problems I thought we might be talking about, For instance, in education, you increase differences. If someone’s good at something, you try to develop his ability, which results in differences, or inequalities. So if education increases inequality, is this ethical? Then, after giving some more examples, I went on to say that while “the fragmentation of knowledge” is a difficulty because the complexity of the world makes it hard to learn things, in light of my definition of the realm of the subject, I couldn’t see how the fragmentation of knowledge had anything to do with anything approximating what the ethics of equality in education might more or less be.
The next day I brought my paper into the meeting, and the guy said, “Yes, Mr. Feynman has brought up some very interesting questions we ought to discuss, and we’ll put them aside for some possible future discussion.” They completely missed the point. I was trying to define the problem, and then show how “the fragmentation of knowledge” didn’t have anything to do with it. And the reason that nobody got anywhere in that conference was that they hadn’t clearly defined the subject of “the ethics of equality in education,” and therefore no one knew exactly what they were supposed to talk about.
There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read—something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself, “I’m gonna stop, and read onesentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means.”
So I stopped—at random—and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”
Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: “Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio,” and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn’t understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.
There was only one thing that happened at that meeting that was pleasant or amusing. At this conference, everyword that every guy said at the plenary session was so important that they had a stenotypist there, typing every goddamn thing. Somewhere on the second day the stenotypist came up to me and said, “What profession are you? Surely not a professor.”
“I am a professor,” I said.
“Of what?”
“Of physics—science.”
“Oh! That must be the reason,” he said.
“Reason for what?”
He said, “You see, I’m a stenotypist, and I type everything that is said here. Now, when the other fellas talk, I type what they say, but I don’t understand what they’re saying. But every time you get up to ask a question or to say something, I understand exactly what you mean—what the question is, and what you’re saying—so I thought you can’t be a professor!”
There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology place, a very nice, very Jewish man, gave a speech. It was a good speech, and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, when I’m telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we have atomic weapons, any war and we’re doomed, so therefore the right way out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we should give up nearly everything to the other countries until we’re all even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses on the way home.
The next day one of the guys in our group said, “I think that speech last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the summary of our conference.”
I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there’s only X amount of stuff in the world, that somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn’t take into account the real reason for the differences between countries—that is, the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn’t the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time.
The conference made me so nervous that a girl I knew in New York had to calm me down. “Look,” she said, “you’re shaking! You’ve gone absolutely nuts! Just take it easy, and don’t take it so seriously. Back away a minute and look at what it is.” So I thought about the conference, how crazy it was, and it wasn’t so bad. But if someone were to ask me to participate in something like that again, I’d shy away from it like mad—I mean zero! No! Absolutely not! And I still get invitations for this kind of thing today.
When it came time to evaluate the conference at the end, the others told how much they got out of it, how successful it was, and so on. When they asked me, I said, “This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There’s a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!
Even worse, at the end of the conference they were going to have another meeting, but this time the public would come, and the guy in charge of our group has the nerve to say that since we’ve worked out so much, there won’t be any time for public discussion, so we’ll just tell the public all the things we’ve worked out. My eyes bugged out: I didn’t think we had worked out a damn thing!
Finally, when we were discussing the question of whether we had developed a way of having a dialogue among people of different disciplines—our second basic “problem”—I said that I noticed something interesting. Each of us talked about what we thought the “ethics of equality” was, from our own point of view, without paying any attention to the other guy’s point of view. For example, the historian proposed that the way to understand ethical problems is to look historically at how they evolved and how they developed; the international lawyer suggested that the way to do it is to see how in fact people actually act in different situations and make their arrangements; the Jesuit priest was always referring to “the fragmentation of knowledge”; and I, as a scientist, proposed that we should isolate the problem in a way analogous to Galileo’s techniques for experiments; and so on. “So, in my opinion,” I said, “we had no dialogue at all. Instead, we had nothing but chaos!”
Of course I was attacked, from all around. “Don’t you think that order can come from chaos?”
“Uh, well, as a general principle, or … I didn’t understand what to do with a question like “Can order come from chaos?” Yes, no, what of it?
There were a lot of fools at that conference—pompous fools—and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible! And that’s what I got at the conference, a bunch of pompous fools, and I got very upset. I’m not going to get upset like that again, so I won’t participate in interdisciplinary conferences any more.
A footnote: While I was at the conference, I stayed at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where young rabbis—I think they were Orthodox—were studying. Since I have a Jewish background, I knew of some of the things they told me about the Talmud, but I had never seen the Talmud. It was very interesting. It’s got big pages, and in a little square in the corner of the page is the original Talmud, and then in a sort of L-shaped margin, all around this square, are commentaries written by different people. The Talmud has evolved, and everything has been discussed again and again, all very carefully, in a medieval kind of reasoning. I think the commentaries were shut down around the thirteen— or fourteen— or fifteen-hundreds—there hasn’t been any modern commentary. The Talmud is a wonderful book, a great, big potpourri of things: trivial questions, and difficult questions—for example, problems of teachers, and how to teach—and then some trivia again, and so on. The students told me that the Talmud was never translated, something I thought was curious, since the book is so valuable,
One day, two or three of the young rabbis came to me and said, “We realize that we can’t study to be rabbis in the modern world without knowing something about science, so we’d like to ask you some questions.”
Of course there are thousands of places to find out about science, and Columbia University was right near there, but I wanted to know what kinds of questions they were interested in.
They said, “Well, for instance, is electricity fire?”
“No,” I said, “but… what is the problem?”
They said, “In the Talmud it says you’re not supposed to make fire on a Saturday, so our question is, can we use electrical things on Saturdays?”
I was shocked. They weren’t interested in science at all! The only way science was influencing their lives was so they might be able to interpret better the Talmud! They weren’t interested in the world outside, in natural phenomena; they were only interested in resolving some question brought up in the Talmud.
And then one day—I guess it was a Saturday—I want to go up in the elevator, and there’s a guy standing near the elevator. The elevator comes, I go in, and he goes in with me. I say, “Which floor?” and my hand’s ready to push one of the buttons.
“No, no!” he says, “I’m supposed to push the buttons for you.”
“What?”
“Yes! The boys here can’t push the buttons on Saturday, so I have to do it for them. You see, I’m not Jewish, so it’s all right for me to push the buttons. I stand near the elevator, and they tell me what floor, and I push the button for them.”
Well, this really bothered me, so I decided to trap the students in a logical discussion. I had been brought up in a Jewish home, so I knew the kind of nitpicking logic to use, and I thought, “Here’s fun!”
My plan went like this: I’d start off by asking, “Is the Jewish viewpoint a viewpoint that any man can have? Because if it is not, then it’s certainly not something that is truly valuable for humanity … yak, yak, yak.” And then they would have to say, “Yes, the Jewish viewpoint is good for any man.”
Then I would steer them around a little more by asking, “Is it ethical for a man to hire another man to do something which is unethical for him to do? Would you hire a man to rob for you, for instance?” And I keep working them into the channel, very slowly, and very carefully until I’ve got them—trapped!
And do you know what happened? They’re rabbinical students, right? They were ten times better than I was! As soon as they saw I could put them in a hole, they went twist, turn, twist—I can’t remember how—and they were free! I thought I had come up with an original idea—phooey! It had been discussed in the Talmud for ages! So they cleaned me up just as easy as pie—they got right out.
Finally I tried to assure the rabbinical students that the electric spark that was bothering them when they pushed the elevator buttons was not fire. I said, “Electricity is not fire. It’s not a chemical process, as fire is.”
“Oh?” they said.
“Of course, there’s electricity in amongst the atoms in a fire.”
“Aha!” they said.
“And in every other phenomenon that occurs in the world.”
I even proposed a practical solution for eliminating the spark. “If that’s what’s bothering you, you can put a condenser across the switch, so the electricity will go on and off without any spark whatsoever—anywhere.” But for some reason, they didn’t like that idea either.
It really was a disappointment. Here they are, slowly coming to life, only to better interpret the Talmud. Imagine! In modern times like this, guys are studying to go into society and do something—to be a rabbi—and the only way they think that science might be interesting is because their ancient, provincial, medieval problems are being confounded slightly by some new phenomena.
Something else happened at that time which is worth mentioning here. One of the questions the rabbinical students and I discussed at some length was why it is that in academic things, such as theoretical physics, there is a higher proportion of Jewish kids than their proportion in the general population. The rabbinical students thought the reason was that the Jews have a history of respecting learning: They respect their rabbis, who are really teachers, and they respect education. The Jews pass on this tradition in their families all the time, so that if a boy is a good student, it’s as good as, if not better than, being a good football player.
It was the same afternoon that I was reminded how true it is. I was invited to one of the rabbinical students’ home, and he introduced me to his mother, who had just come back from Washington, D.C. She clapped her hands together, in ecstasy, and said, “Oh! My day is complete. Today I met a general, and a professor!”
I realized that there are not many people who think it’s just as important, and just as nice, to meet a professor as to meet a general. So I guess there’s something in what they said.
There had already been a conference among the older people, somewhere on Long Island, and this year they decided to have some younger people come in and discuss the position papers they had worked out in the other conference.
Before I got there, they sent around a list of “books you might find interesting to read, and please send us any books you want others to read, and we will store them in the library so that others may read them.”
So here comes this wonderful list of books. I start down the first page: I haven’t read a single one of the books, and I feel very uneasy—I hardly belong. I look at the second page: I haven’t read a single one. I found out, after looking through the whole list, that I haven’t read any of the books. I must be an idiot, an illiterate! There were wonderful books there, like Thomas Jefferson OnFreedom, or something like that, and there were a few authors I had read. There was a book by Heisenberg, one by Schrodinger, and one by Einstein, but they were something like Einstein, MyLaterYears and Schrodinger, WhatIsLife—different from what I had read. So I had a feeling that I was out of my depth, and that I shouldn’t be in this. Maybe I could just sit quietly and listen.
I go to the first big introductory meeting, and a guy gets up and explains that we have two problems to discuss. The first one is fogged up a little bit—something about ethics and equality, but I don’t understand what the problem exactly is. And the second one is, “We are going to demonstrate by our efforts a way that we can have a dialogue among people of different fields.” There was an international lawyer, a historian, a Jesuit priest, a rabbi, a scientist (me), and so on.
Well, right away my logical mind goes like this: The second problem I don’t have to pay any attention to, because if it works, it works; and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work—we don’t have to prove that we can have a dialogue, and discuss that we can have a dialogue, if we haven’t got any dialogue to talk about! So the primary problem is the first one, which I didn’t understand.
I was ready to put my hand up and say, “Would you please define the problem better,” but then I thought, “No, I’m the ignoramus; I’d better listen. I don’t want to start trouble right away.”
The subgroup I was in was supposed to discuss the “ethics of equality in education.” In the meetings of our subgroup the Jesuit priest was always talking about “the fragmentation of knowledge.” He would say, “The real problem in the ethics of equality in education is the fragmentation of knowledge.” This Jesuit was looking back into the thirteenth century when the Catholic Church was in charge of all education, and the whole world was simple. There was God, and everything came from God; it was all organized. But today, it’s not so easy to understand everything. So knowledge has become fragmented. I felt that “the fragmentation of knowledge” had nothing to do with “it,” but “it” had never been defined, so there was no way for me to prove that.
Finally I said, “What is the ethical problem associated with the fragmentation of knowledge?” He would only answer me with great clouds of fog, and I’d say, “I don’t understand,” and everybody else would say they did understand, and they tried to explain it to me, but they couldn’t explain it to me!
So the others in the group told me to write down why I thought the fragmentation of knowledge was not a problem of ethics. I went back to my dormitory room and I wrote out carefully, as best I could, what I thought the subject of “the ethics of equality in education” might be, and I gave some examples of the kinds of problems I thought we might be talking about, For instance, in education, you increase differences. If someone’s good at something, you try to develop his ability, which results in differences, or inequalities. So if education increases inequality, is this ethical? Then, after giving some more examples, I went on to say that while “the fragmentation of knowledge” is a difficulty because the complexity of the world makes it hard to learn things, in light of my definition of the realm of the subject, I couldn’t see how the fragmentation of knowledge had anything to do with anything approximating what the ethics of equality in education might more or less be.
The next day I brought my paper into the meeting, and the guy said, “Yes, Mr. Feynman has brought up some very interesting questions we ought to discuss, and we’ll put them aside for some possible future discussion.” They completely missed the point. I was trying to define the problem, and then show how “the fragmentation of knowledge” didn’t have anything to do with it. And the reason that nobody got anywhere in that conference was that they hadn’t clearly defined the subject of “the ethics of equality in education,” and therefore no one knew exactly what they were supposed to talk about.
There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read—something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself, “I’m gonna stop, and read onesentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means.”
So I stopped—at random—and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”
Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: “Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio,” and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn’t understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.
There was only one thing that happened at that meeting that was pleasant or amusing. At this conference, everyword that every guy said at the plenary session was so important that they had a stenotypist there, typing every goddamn thing. Somewhere on the second day the stenotypist came up to me and said, “What profession are you? Surely not a professor.”
“I am a professor,” I said.
“Of what?”
“Of physics—science.”
“Oh! That must be the reason,” he said.
“Reason for what?”
He said, “You see, I’m a stenotypist, and I type everything that is said here. Now, when the other fellas talk, I type what they say, but I don’t understand what they’re saying. But every time you get up to ask a question or to say something, I understand exactly what you mean—what the question is, and what you’re saying—so I thought you can’t be a professor!”
There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology place, a very nice, very Jewish man, gave a speech. It was a good speech, and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, when I’m telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we have atomic weapons, any war and we’re doomed, so therefore the right way out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we should give up nearly everything to the other countries until we’re all even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses on the way home.
The next day one of the guys in our group said, “I think that speech last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the summary of our conference.”
I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there’s only X amount of stuff in the world, that somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn’t take into account the real reason for the differences between countries—that is, the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn’t the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time.
The conference made me so nervous that a girl I knew in New York had to calm me down. “Look,” she said, “you’re shaking! You’ve gone absolutely nuts! Just take it easy, and don’t take it so seriously. Back away a minute and look at what it is.” So I thought about the conference, how crazy it was, and it wasn’t so bad. But if someone were to ask me to participate in something like that again, I’d shy away from it like mad—I mean zero! No! Absolutely not! And I still get invitations for this kind of thing today.
When it came time to evaluate the conference at the end, the others told how much they got out of it, how successful it was, and so on. When they asked me, I said, “This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There’s a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!
Even worse, at the end of the conference they were going to have another meeting, but this time the public would come, and the guy in charge of our group has the nerve to say that since we’ve worked out so much, there won’t be any time for public discussion, so we’ll just tell the public all the things we’ve worked out. My eyes bugged out: I didn’t think we had worked out a damn thing!
Finally, when we were discussing the question of whether we had developed a way of having a dialogue among people of different disciplines—our second basic “problem”—I said that I noticed something interesting. Each of us talked about what we thought the “ethics of equality” was, from our own point of view, without paying any attention to the other guy’s point of view. For example, the historian proposed that the way to understand ethical problems is to look historically at how they evolved and how they developed; the international lawyer suggested that the way to do it is to see how in fact people actually act in different situations and make their arrangements; the Jesuit priest was always referring to “the fragmentation of knowledge”; and I, as a scientist, proposed that we should isolate the problem in a way analogous to Galileo’s techniques for experiments; and so on. “So, in my opinion,” I said, “we had no dialogue at all. Instead, we had nothing but chaos!”
Of course I was attacked, from all around. “Don’t you think that order can come from chaos?”
“Uh, well, as a general principle, or … I didn’t understand what to do with a question like “Can order come from chaos?” Yes, no, what of it?
There were a lot of fools at that conference—pompous fools—and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible! And that’s what I got at the conference, a bunch of pompous fools, and I got very upset. I’m not going to get upset like that again, so I won’t participate in interdisciplinary conferences any more.
A footnote: While I was at the conference, I stayed at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where young rabbis—I think they were Orthodox—were studying. Since I have a Jewish background, I knew of some of the things they told me about the Talmud, but I had never seen the Talmud. It was very interesting. It’s got big pages, and in a little square in the corner of the page is the original Talmud, and then in a sort of L-shaped margin, all around this square, are commentaries written by different people. The Talmud has evolved, and everything has been discussed again and again, all very carefully, in a medieval kind of reasoning. I think the commentaries were shut down around the thirteen— or fourteen— or fifteen-hundreds—there hasn’t been any modern commentary. The Talmud is a wonderful book, a great, big potpourri of things: trivial questions, and difficult questions—for example, problems of teachers, and how to teach—and then some trivia again, and so on. The students told me that the Talmud was never translated, something I thought was curious, since the book is so valuable,
One day, two or three of the young rabbis came to me and said, “We realize that we can’t study to be rabbis in the modern world without knowing something about science, so we’d like to ask you some questions.”
Of course there are thousands of places to find out about science, and Columbia University was right near there, but I wanted to know what kinds of questions they were interested in.
They said, “Well, for instance, is electricity fire?”
“No,” I said, “but… what is the problem?”
They said, “In the Talmud it says you’re not supposed to make fire on a Saturday, so our question is, can we use electrical things on Saturdays?”
I was shocked. They weren’t interested in science at all! The only way science was influencing their lives was so they might be able to interpret better the Talmud! They weren’t interested in the world outside, in natural phenomena; they were only interested in resolving some question brought up in the Talmud.
And then one day—I guess it was a Saturday—I want to go up in the elevator, and there’s a guy standing near the elevator. The elevator comes, I go in, and he goes in with me. I say, “Which floor?” and my hand’s ready to push one of the buttons.
“No, no!” he says, “I’m supposed to push the buttons for you.”
“What?”
“Yes! The boys here can’t push the buttons on Saturday, so I have to do it for them. You see, I’m not Jewish, so it’s all right for me to push the buttons. I stand near the elevator, and they tell me what floor, and I push the button for them.”
Well, this really bothered me, so I decided to trap the students in a logical discussion. I had been brought up in a Jewish home, so I knew the kind of nitpicking logic to use, and I thought, “Here’s fun!”
My plan went like this: I’d start off by asking, “Is the Jewish viewpoint a viewpoint that any man can have? Because if it is not, then it’s certainly not something that is truly valuable for humanity … yak, yak, yak.” And then they would have to say, “Yes, the Jewish viewpoint is good for any man.”
Then I would steer them around a little more by asking, “Is it ethical for a man to hire another man to do something which is unethical for him to do? Would you hire a man to rob for you, for instance?” And I keep working them into the channel, very slowly, and very carefully until I’ve got them—trapped!
And do you know what happened? They’re rabbinical students, right? They were ten times better than I was! As soon as they saw I could put them in a hole, they went twist, turn, twist—I can’t remember how—and they were free! I thought I had come up with an original idea—phooey! It had been discussed in the Talmud for ages! So they cleaned me up just as easy as pie—they got right out.
Finally I tried to assure the rabbinical students that the electric spark that was bothering them when they pushed the elevator buttons was not fire. I said, “Electricity is not fire. It’s not a chemical process, as fire is.”
“Oh?” they said.
“Of course, there’s electricity in amongst the atoms in a fire.”
“Aha!” they said.
“And in every other phenomenon that occurs in the world.”
I even proposed a practical solution for eliminating the spark. “If that’s what’s bothering you, you can put a condenser across the switch, so the electricity will go on and off without any spark whatsoever—anywhere.” But for some reason, they didn’t like that idea either.
It really was a disappointment. Here they are, slowly coming to life, only to better interpret the Talmud. Imagine! In modern times like this, guys are studying to go into society and do something—to be a rabbi—and the only way they think that science might be interesting is because their ancient, provincial, medieval problems are being confounded slightly by some new phenomena.
Something else happened at that time which is worth mentioning here. One of the questions the rabbinical students and I discussed at some length was why it is that in academic things, such as theoretical physics, there is a higher proportion of Jewish kids than their proportion in the general population. The rabbinical students thought the reason was that the Jews have a history of respecting learning: They respect their rabbis, who are really teachers, and they respect education. The Jews pass on this tradition in their families all the time, so that if a boy is a good student, it’s as good as, if not better than, being a good football player.
It was the same afternoon that I was reminded how true it is. I was invited to one of the rabbinical students’ home, and he introduced me to his mother, who had just come back from Washington, D.C. She clapped her hands together, in ecstasy, and said, “Oh! My day is complete. Today I met a general, and a professor!”
I realized that there are not many people who think it’s just as important, and just as nice, to meet a professor as to meet a general. So I guess there’s something in what they said.
Judging Books by Their Covers
After the war, physicists were often asked to go to Washington and give advice to various sections of the government, especially the military. What happened, I suppose, is that since the scientists had made these bombs that were so important, the military felt we were useful for something.
Once I was asked to serve on a committee which was to evaluate various weapons for the army, and I wrote a letter back which explained that I was only a theoretical physicist, and I didn’t know anything about weapons for the army.
The army responded that they had found in their experience that theoretical physicists were very useful to them in making decisions, so would I please reconsider?
I wrote back again and said I didn’t really know anything, and doubted I could help them.
Finally I got a letter from the Secretary of the Army, which proposed a compromise: I would come to the first meeting, where I could listen and see whether I could make a contribution or not. Then I could decide whether I should continue.
I said I would, of course. What else could I do?
I went down to Washington and the first thing that I went to was a cocktail party to meet everybody. There were generals and other important characters from the army, and everybody talked. It was pleasant enough.
One guy in a uniform came to me and told me that the army was glad that physicists were advising the military because it had a lot of problems. One of the problems was that tanks use up their fuel very quickly and thus can’t go very far. So the question was how to refuel them as they’re going along. Now this guy had the idea that, since the physicists can get energy out of uranium, could I work out a way in which we could use silicon dioxide—sand, dirt—as a fuel? If that were possible, then all this tank would have to do would be to have a little scoop underneath, and as it goes along, it would pick up the dirt and use it for fuel! He thought that was a great idea, and that all I had to do was to work out the details. That was the kind of problem I thought we would be talking about in the meeting the next day.
I went to the meeting and noticed that some guy who had introduced me to all the people at the cocktail party was sitting next to me. He was apparently some flunky assigned to be at my side at all times. On my other side was some super general I had heard of before.
At the first session of the meeting they talked about some technical matters, and I made a few comments. But later on, near the end of the meeting, they began to discuss some problem of logistics, about which I knew nothing. It had to do with figuring out how much stuff you should have at different places at different times. And although I tried to keep my trap shut, when you get into a situation like that, where you’re sitting around a table with all these “important people” discussing these “important problems,” you can’t keep your mouth shut, even if you know nothing whatsoever! So I made some comments in that discussion, too.
During the next coffee break the guy who had been assigned to shepherd me around said, “I was very impressed by the things you said during the discussion. They certainly were an important contribution.”
I stopped and thought about my “contribution” to the logistics problem, and realized that a man like the guy who orders the stuff for Christmas at Macy’s would be better able to figure out how to handle problems like that than I. So I concluded: a) if I had made an important contribution, it was sheer luck; b) anybody else could have done as well, but most people could have done better, and c) this flattery should wake me up to the fact that I am not capable of contributing much.
Right after that they decided, in the meeting, that they could do better discussing the organization of scientific research (such as, should scientific development be under the Corps of Engineers or the Quartermaster Division?) than specific technical matters. I knew that if there was to be any hope of my making a real contribution, it would be only on some specific technical matter, and surely not on how to organize research in the army.
Until then I didn’t let on any of my feelings about the situation to the chairman of the meeting—the big shot who had invited me in the first place. As we were packing our bags to leave, he said to me, all smiles, “You’ll be joining us, then, for the next meeting..
“No, I won’t.” I could see his face change suddenly. He was very surprised that I would say no, after making those “contributions.”
In the early sixties, a lot of my friends were still giving advice to the government. Meanwhile, I was having no feeling of social responsibility and resisting, as much as possible, offers to go to Washington, which took a certain amount of courage in those times.
I was giving a series of freshman physics lectures at that time, and after one of them, Tom Harvey, who assisted me in putting on the demonstrations, said, “You oughta see what’s happening to mathematics in schoolbooks! My daughter comes home with a lot of crazy stuff!”
I didn’t pay much attention to what he said.
But the next day I got a telephone call from a pretty famous lawyer here in Pasadena, Mr. Norris, who was at that time on the State Board of Education. He asked me if I would serve on the State Curriculum Commission, which had to choose the new schoolbooks for the state of California. You see, the state had a law that all of the schoolbooks used by all of the kids in all of the public schools have to be chosen by the State Board of Education, so they have a committee to look over the books and to give them advice on which books to take.
It happened that a lot of the books were on a new method of teaching arithmetic that they called “new math,” and since usually the only people to look at the books were schoolteachers or administrators in education, they thought it would be a good idea to have somebody who uses mathematics scientifically, who knows what the end product is and what we’re trying to teach it for, to help in the evaluation of the schoolbooks.
I must have had, by this time, a guilty feeling about not cooperating with the government, because I agreed to get on this committee.
Immediately I began getting letters and telephone calls from book publishers. They said things like, “We’re very glad to hear you’re on the committee because we really wanted a scientific guy … and “It’s wonderful to have a scientist on the committee, because our books are scientifically oriented …”
But they also said things like, “We’d like to explain to you what our book is about …” and “We’ll be very glad to help you in any way we can to judge our books …”
That seemed to me kind of crazy. I’m an objective scientist, and it seemed to me that since the only thing the kids in school are going to get is the books (and the teachers get the teacher’s manual, which I would also get), any extra explanation from the company was a distortion. So I didn’t want to speak to any of the publishers and always replied, “You don’t have to explain; I’m sure the books will speak for themselves.”
I represented a certain district, which comprised most of the Los Angeles area except for the city of Los Angeles, which was represented by a very nice lady from the L.A. school system named Mrs. Whitehouse. Mr. Norris suggested that I meet her and find out what the committee did and how it worked.
Mrs. Whitehouse started out telling me about the stuff they were going to talk about in the next meeting (they had already had one meeting; I was appointed late). “They’re going to talk about the counting numbers.” I didn’t know what that was, but it turned out they were what I used to call integers. They had different names for everything, so I had a lot of trouble right from the start.
She told me how the members of the commission normally rated the new schoolbooks. They would get a relatively large number of copies of each book and would give them to various teachers and administrators in their district. Then they would get reports back on what these people thought about the books. Since I didn’t know a lot of teachers or administrators, and since I felt that I could, by reading the books myself, make up my mind as to how they looked to me, I chose to read all the books myself. (There were some people in my district who had expected to look at the books and wanted a chance to give their opinion. Mrs. Whitehouse offered to put their reports in with hers so they would feel better and I wouldn’t have to worry about their complaints. They were satisfied, and I didn’t get much trouble.)
A few days later a guy from the book depository called me up and said, “We’re ready to send you the books, Mr. Feynman; there are three hundred pounds.”
I was overwhelmed.
“It’s all right, Mr. Feynman; we’ll get someone to help you read them.”
I couldn’t figure out how you do that: you either read them or you don’t read them. I had a special bookshelf put in my study downstairs (the books took up seventeen feet), and began reading all the books that were going to be discussed in the next meeting. We were going to start out with the elementary schoolbooks.
It was a pretty big job, and I worked all the time at it down in the basement. My wife says that during this period it was like living over a volcano. It would be quiet for a while, but then all of a sudden, “BLLLLLOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!”—there would be a big explosion from the “volcano” below. The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for “sets”) which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren’t accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous—they weren’t smart enough to understand what was meant by “rigor.” They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn’t understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child.
Once I was asked to serve on a committee which was to evaluate various weapons for the army, and I wrote a letter back which explained that I was only a theoretical physicist, and I didn’t know anything about weapons for the army.
The army responded that they had found in their experience that theoretical physicists were very useful to them in making decisions, so would I please reconsider?
I wrote back again and said I didn’t really know anything, and doubted I could help them.
Finally I got a letter from the Secretary of the Army, which proposed a compromise: I would come to the first meeting, where I could listen and see whether I could make a contribution or not. Then I could decide whether I should continue.
I said I would, of course. What else could I do?
I went down to Washington and the first thing that I went to was a cocktail party to meet everybody. There were generals and other important characters from the army, and everybody talked. It was pleasant enough.
One guy in a uniform came to me and told me that the army was glad that physicists were advising the military because it had a lot of problems. One of the problems was that tanks use up their fuel very quickly and thus can’t go very far. So the question was how to refuel them as they’re going along. Now this guy had the idea that, since the physicists can get energy out of uranium, could I work out a way in which we could use silicon dioxide—sand, dirt—as a fuel? If that were possible, then all this tank would have to do would be to have a little scoop underneath, and as it goes along, it would pick up the dirt and use it for fuel! He thought that was a great idea, and that all I had to do was to work out the details. That was the kind of problem I thought we would be talking about in the meeting the next day.
I went to the meeting and noticed that some guy who had introduced me to all the people at the cocktail party was sitting next to me. He was apparently some flunky assigned to be at my side at all times. On my other side was some super general I had heard of before.
At the first session of the meeting they talked about some technical matters, and I made a few comments. But later on, near the end of the meeting, they began to discuss some problem of logistics, about which I knew nothing. It had to do with figuring out how much stuff you should have at different places at different times. And although I tried to keep my trap shut, when you get into a situation like that, where you’re sitting around a table with all these “important people” discussing these “important problems,” you can’t keep your mouth shut, even if you know nothing whatsoever! So I made some comments in that discussion, too.
During the next coffee break the guy who had been assigned to shepherd me around said, “I was very impressed by the things you said during the discussion. They certainly were an important contribution.”
I stopped and thought about my “contribution” to the logistics problem, and realized that a man like the guy who orders the stuff for Christmas at Macy’s would be better able to figure out how to handle problems like that than I. So I concluded: a) if I had made an important contribution, it was sheer luck; b) anybody else could have done as well, but most people could have done better, and c) this flattery should wake me up to the fact that I am not capable of contributing much.
Right after that they decided, in the meeting, that they could do better discussing the organization of scientific research (such as, should scientific development be under the Corps of Engineers or the Quartermaster Division?) than specific technical matters. I knew that if there was to be any hope of my making a real contribution, it would be only on some specific technical matter, and surely not on how to organize research in the army.
Until then I didn’t let on any of my feelings about the situation to the chairman of the meeting—the big shot who had invited me in the first place. As we were packing our bags to leave, he said to me, all smiles, “You’ll be joining us, then, for the next meeting..
“No, I won’t.” I could see his face change suddenly. He was very surprised that I would say no, after making those “contributions.”
In the early sixties, a lot of my friends were still giving advice to the government. Meanwhile, I was having no feeling of social responsibility and resisting, as much as possible, offers to go to Washington, which took a certain amount of courage in those times.
I was giving a series of freshman physics lectures at that time, and after one of them, Tom Harvey, who assisted me in putting on the demonstrations, said, “You oughta see what’s happening to mathematics in schoolbooks! My daughter comes home with a lot of crazy stuff!”
I didn’t pay much attention to what he said.
But the next day I got a telephone call from a pretty famous lawyer here in Pasadena, Mr. Norris, who was at that time on the State Board of Education. He asked me if I would serve on the State Curriculum Commission, which had to choose the new schoolbooks for the state of California. You see, the state had a law that all of the schoolbooks used by all of the kids in all of the public schools have to be chosen by the State Board of Education, so they have a committee to look over the books and to give them advice on which books to take.
It happened that a lot of the books were on a new method of teaching arithmetic that they called “new math,” and since usually the only people to look at the books were schoolteachers or administrators in education, they thought it would be a good idea to have somebody who uses mathematics scientifically, who knows what the end product is and what we’re trying to teach it for, to help in the evaluation of the schoolbooks.
I must have had, by this time, a guilty feeling about not cooperating with the government, because I agreed to get on this committee.
Immediately I began getting letters and telephone calls from book publishers. They said things like, “We’re very glad to hear you’re on the committee because we really wanted a scientific guy … and “It’s wonderful to have a scientist on the committee, because our books are scientifically oriented …”
But they also said things like, “We’d like to explain to you what our book is about …” and “We’ll be very glad to help you in any way we can to judge our books …”
That seemed to me kind of crazy. I’m an objective scientist, and it seemed to me that since the only thing the kids in school are going to get is the books (and the teachers get the teacher’s manual, which I would also get), any extra explanation from the company was a distortion. So I didn’t want to speak to any of the publishers and always replied, “You don’t have to explain; I’m sure the books will speak for themselves.”
I represented a certain district, which comprised most of the Los Angeles area except for the city of Los Angeles, which was represented by a very nice lady from the L.A. school system named Mrs. Whitehouse. Mr. Norris suggested that I meet her and find out what the committee did and how it worked.
Mrs. Whitehouse started out telling me about the stuff they were going to talk about in the next meeting (they had already had one meeting; I was appointed late). “They’re going to talk about the counting numbers.” I didn’t know what that was, but it turned out they were what I used to call integers. They had different names for everything, so I had a lot of trouble right from the start.
She told me how the members of the commission normally rated the new schoolbooks. They would get a relatively large number of copies of each book and would give them to various teachers and administrators in their district. Then they would get reports back on what these people thought about the books. Since I didn’t know a lot of teachers or administrators, and since I felt that I could, by reading the books myself, make up my mind as to how they looked to me, I chose to read all the books myself. (There were some people in my district who had expected to look at the books and wanted a chance to give their opinion. Mrs. Whitehouse offered to put their reports in with hers so they would feel better and I wouldn’t have to worry about their complaints. They were satisfied, and I didn’t get much trouble.)
A few days later a guy from the book depository called me up and said, “We’re ready to send you the books, Mr. Feynman; there are three hundred pounds.”
I was overwhelmed.
“It’s all right, Mr. Feynman; we’ll get someone to help you read them.”
I couldn’t figure out how you do that: you either read them or you don’t read them. I had a special bookshelf put in my study downstairs (the books took up seventeen feet), and began reading all the books that were going to be discussed in the next meeting. We were going to start out with the elementary schoolbooks.
It was a pretty big job, and I worked all the time at it down in the basement. My wife says that during this period it was like living over a volcano. It would be quiet for a while, but then all of a sudden, “BLLLLLOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!”—there would be a big explosion from the “volcano” below. The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for “sets”) which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren’t accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous—they weren’t smart enough to understand what was meant by “rigor.” They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn’t understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child.