I understood what they were trying to do. Many people thought we were behind the Russians after Sputnik, and some mathematicians were asked to give advice on how to teach math by using some of the rather interesting modern concepts of mathematics. The purpose was to enhance mathematics for the children who found it dull.
I’ll give you an example: They would talk about different bases of numbers—five, six, and so on—to show the possibilities. That would be interesting for a kid who could understand base ten—something to entertain his mind. But what they had turned it into, in these books, was that every child had to learn another base! And then the usual horror would come: “Translate these numbers, which are written in base seven, to base five.” Translating from one base to another is an utterlyuseless thing. If you can do it, maybe it’s entertaining; if you can’t do it, forget it. There’s no point to it.
Anyhow, I’m looking at all these books, all these books, and none of them has said anything about using arithmetic in science. If there are any examples on the use of arithmetic at all (most of the time it’s this abstract new modern nonsense), they are about things like buying stamps.
Finally I come to a book that says, “Mathematics is used in science in many ways. We will give you an example from astronomy, which is the science of stars.” I turn the page, and it says, “Red stars have a temperature of four thousand degrees, yellow stars have a temperature of five thousand degrees …”—so far, so good. It continues: “Green stars have a temperature of seven thousand degrees, blue stars have a temperature of ten thousand degrees, and violet stars have a temperature of … (some big number).” There are no green or violet stars, but the figures for the others are roughly correct. It’s vaguely right—but already, trouble! That’s the way everything was: Everything was written by somebody who didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, so it was a little bit wrong, always! And how we are going to teach well by using books written by people who don’t quite understand what they’re talking about, I cannot understand. I don’t know why, but the books are lousy; UNIVERSALLY LOUSY!
Anyway, I’m happy with this book, because it’s the first example of applying arithmetic to science. I’m a bit unhappy when I read about the stars’ temperatures, but I’m not very unhappy because it’s more or less right—it’s just an example of error. Then comes the list of problems. It says, “John and his father go out to look at the stars. John sees two blue stars and a red star. His father sees a green star, a violet star, and two yellow stars. What is the total temperature of the stars seen by John and his father?”—and I would explode in horror.
My wife would talk about the volcano downstairs. That’s only an example: it was perpetually like that. Perpetual absurdity! There’s no purpose whatsoever in adding the temperature of two stars. Nobody ever does that except, maybe, to then take the average temperature of the stars, but not to find out the total temperature of all the stars! It was awful! All it was was a game to get you to add, and they didn’t understand what they were talking about. It was like reading sentences with a few typographical errors, and then suddenly a whole sentence is written backwards. The mathematics was like that. Just hopeless!
Then I came to my first meeting. The other members had given some kind of ratings to some of the books, and they asked me what my ratings were. My rating was often different from theirs, and they would ask, “Why did you rate that book low?”
I would say the trouble with that book was this and this on page so-and-so—I had my notes.
They discovered that I was kind of a goldmine: I would tell them, in detail, what was good and bad in all the books; I had a reason for every rating.
I would ask them why they had rated this book so high, and they would say, “Let us hear what you thought about such and such a book.” I would never find out why they rated anything the way they did. Instead, they kept asking me what I thought.
We came to a certain book, part of a set of three supplementary books published by the same company, and they asked me what I thought about it.
I said, “The book depository didn’t send me that book, but the other two were nice.”
Someone tried repeating the question: “What do you think about that book?”
“I said they didn’t send me that one, so I don’t have any judgment on it.”
The man from the book depository was there, and he said, “Excuse me; I can explain that. I didn’t send it to you because that book hadn’t been completed yet. There’s a rule that you have to have every entry in by a certain time, and the publisher was a few days late with it. So it was sent to us with just the covers, and it’s blank in between. The company sent a note excusing themselves and hoping they could have their set of three books considered, even though the third one would be late.”
It turned out that the blank book had a rating by some of the other members! They couldn’t believe it was blank, because they had a rating. In fact, the rating for the missing book was a little bit higher than for the two others. The fact that there was nothing in the book had nothing to do with the rating.
I believe the reason for all this is that the system works this way: When you give books all over the place to people, they’re busy; they’re careless; they think, “Well, a lot of people are reading this book, SO it doesn’t make any difference.” And they put in some kind of number—some of them, at least; not all of them, but some of them. Then when you receive your reports, you don’t know why this particular book has fewer reports than the other books—that is, perhaps one book has ten, and this one only has six people reporting—so you average the rating of those who reported; you don’t average the ones who didn’t report, so you get a reasonable number. This process of averaging all the time misses the fact that there is absolutely nothing between the covers of the book!
I made that theory up because I saw what happened in the curriculum commission: For the blank book, only six out of the ten members were reporting, whereas with the other books, eight or nine out of the ten were reporting. And when they averaged the six, they got as good an average as when they averaged with eight or nine. They were very embarrassed to discover they were giving ratings to that book, and it gave me a little bit more confidence. It turned out the other members of the committee had done a lot of work in giving out the books and collecting reports, and had gone to sessions in which the book publishers would explain the books before they read them; I was the only guy on that commission who read all the books and didn’t get any information from the book publishers except what was in the books themselves, the things that would ultimately go to the schools.
This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by looking at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who looked at it carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China’s nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China’s nose is, and you average it. And that would be very “accurate” because you averaged so many people. But it’s no way to find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it, you don’t improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging.
At first we weren’t supposed to talk about the cost of the books. We were told how many books we could choose, so we designed a program which used a lot of supplementary books, because all the new textbooks had failures of one kind or another. The most serious failures were in the “new math” books: there were no applications; not enough word problems. There was no talk of selling stamps; instead there was too much talk about commutation and abstract things and not enough translation to situations in the world. What do you do: add, subtract, multiply, or divide? So we suggested some books which had some of that as supplementary—one or two for each classroom—in addition to a textbook for each student. We had it all worked out to balance everything, after much discussion.
When we took our recommendations to the Board of Education, they told us they didn’t have as much money as they had thought, so we’d have to go over the whole thing and cut out this and that, now taking the cost into consideration, and ruining what was a fairly balanced program, in which there was a chance for a teacher to find examples of the things (s)he needed.
Now that they changed the rules about how many books we could recommend and we had no more chance to balance, it was a pretty lousy program. When the senate budget committee got to it, the program was emasculated still further. Now it was really lousy! I was asked to appear before the state senators when the issue was being discussed, but I declined: By that time, having argued this stuff so much, I was tired. We had prepared our recommendations for the Board of Education, and I figured it was their job to present it to the state—which was legally right, but not politically sound. I shouldn’t have given up so soon, but to have worked so hard and discussed so much about all these books to make a fairly balanced program, and then to have the whole thing scrapped at the end—that was discouraging! The whole thing was an unnecessary effort that could have been turned around and done the opposite way: start with the cost of the books, and buy what you can afford.
What finally clinched it, and made me ultimately resign, was that the following year we were going to discuss science books. I thought maybe the science would be different, so I looked at a few of them.
The same thing happened: something would look good at first and then turn out to be horrifying. For example, there was a book that started out with four pictures: first there was a wind-up toy; then there was an automobile; then there was a boy riding a bicycle; then there was something else. And underneath each picture it said, “What makes it go?”
I thought, “I know what it is: They’re going to talk about mechanics, how the springs work inside the toy; about chemistry, how the engine of the automobile works; and biology, about how the muscles work.”
It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: “What makes it go? Everything goes because the sun is shining.” And then we would have fun discussing it:
“No, the toy goes because the spring is wound up,” I would say.
“How did the spring get wound up?” he would ask.
“I wound it up.”
“And how did you get moving?”
“From eating.”
“And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it’s because the sun is shining that all these things are moving.” That would get the concept across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun’s power.
I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, “Energy makes it go.” And for the boy on the bicycle, “Energy makes it go.” For everything, “Energy makes it go.”
Now that doesn’t mean anything. Suppose it’s “Wakalixes.” That’s the general principle: “Wakalixes makes it go.” There’s no knowledge coming in. The child doesn’t learn anything; it’s just a word!
What they should have done is to look at the wind-up toy, see that there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never mind “energy.” Later on, when the children know something about how the toy actually works, they can discuss the more general principles of energy.
It’s also not even true that “energy makes it go,” because if it stops, you could say, “energy makes it stop” just as well, What they’re talking about is concentrated energy being transformed into more dilute forms, which is a very subtle aspect of energy. Energy is neither increased nor decreased in these examples; it’s just changed from one form to another. And when the things stop, the energy is changed into heat, into general chaos.
But that’s the way all the books were: They said things that were useless, mixed-up, ambiguous, confusing, and partially incorrect. How anybody can learn science from these books, I don’t know, because it’s not science.
So when I saw all these horrifying books with the same kind of trouble as the math books had, I saw my volcano process starting again. Since I was exhausted from reading all the math books, and discouraged from its all being a wasted effort, I couldn’t face another year of that, and had to resign.
Sometime later I heard that the energy-makes-it-go book was going to be recommended by the curriculum commission to the Board of Education, so I made one last effort. At each meeting of the commission the public was allowed to make comments, so I got up and said why I thought the book was bad.
The man who replaced me on the commission said, “That book was approved by sixty-five engineers at the Such-and-such Aircraft Company!”
I didn’t doubt that the company had some pretty good engineers, but to take sixty-five engineers is to take a wide range of ability—and to necessarily include some pretty poor guys! It was once again the problem of averaging the length of the emperor’s nose, or the ratings on a book with nothing between the covers. It would have been far better to have the company decide who their better engineers were, and to have them look at the book. I couldn’t claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys—but the average of sixty five other guys, certainly!
I couldn’t get through to him, and the book was approved by the board.
When I was still on the commission, I had to go to San Francisco a few times for some of the meetings, and when I returned to Los Angeles from the first trip, I stopped in the commission office to get reimbursed for my expenses.
“How much did it cost, Mr. Feynman?”
“Well, I flew to San Francisco, so it’s the airfare, plus the parking at the airport while I was away.”
“Do you have your ticket?”
I happened to have the ticket.
“Do you have a receipt for the parking?”
“No, but it cost $2.35 to park my car.”
“But we have to have a receipt.”
“I told you how much it cost. If you don’t trust me, why do you let me tell you what I think is good and bad about the schoolbooks?”
There was a big stew about that. Unfortunately, I had been used to giving lectures for some company or university or for ordinary people, not for the government. I was used to, “What were your expenses?”—”So-and-so much.”—”Here you are, Mr. Feynman.”
I then decided I wasn’t going to give them a receipt for anything.
After the second trip to San Francisco they again asked me for my ticket and receipts.
“I haven’t got any.”
“This can’t go on, Mr. Feynman.”
“When I accepted to serve on the commission, I was told you were going to pay my expenses.”
“But we expected to have some receipts to prove the expenses.”
“I have nothing to prove it, but you know I live in Los Angeles and I go to these other towns; how the hell do you think I get there?”
They didn’t give in, and neither did I. I feel when you’re in a position like that, where you choose not to buckle down to the System, you must pay the consequences if it doesn’t work. So I’m perfectly satisfied, but I never did get compensation for the trips.
It’s one of those games I play. They want a receipt? I’m not giving them a receipt. Then you’re not going to get the money. OK, then I’m not taking the money. They don’t trust me? The hell with it; they don’t have to pay me. Of course it’s absurd! I know that’s the way the government works; well, screw the government! I feel that human beings should treat human beings like human beings. And unless I’m going to be treated like one, I’m not going to have anything to do with them! They feel bad? They feel bad. I feel bad, too. We’ll just let it go. I know they’re “protecting the taxpayer,” but see how well you think the taxpayer was being protected in the following situation.
There were two books that we were unable to come to a decision about after much discussion; they were extremely close. So we left it open to the Board of Education to decide. Since the board was now taking the cost into consideration, and since the two books were so evenly matched, the board decided to open the bids and take the lower one.
Then the question came up, “Will the schools be getting the books at the regular time, or could they, perhaps, get them a little earlier, in time for the coming term?”
One publisher’s representative got up and said, “We are happy that you accepted our bid; we can get it out in time for the next term.”
A representative of the publisher that lost out was also there, and he got up and said, “Since our bids were submitted based on the later deadline, I think we should have a chance a bid again for the earlier deadline, because we too can meet the earlier deadline.”
Mr. Norris, the Pasadena lawyer on the board, asked the guy from the other publisher, “And how much would it cost for us to get your books at the earlier date?”
And he gave a number: It was less!
The first guy got up: “If he changes his bid, I have the right to change my bid!”—and his bid is still less!
Norris asked, “Well how is that—we get the books earlier and it’s cheaper?”
“Yes,” one guy says. “We can use a special offset method we wouldn’t normally use …”—some excuse why it came out cheaper.
The other guy agreed: “When you do it quicker, it costs less!”
That was really a shock. It ended up two million dollars cheaper. Norris was really incensed by this sudden change.
What happened, of course, was that the uncertainty about the date had opened the possibility that these guys could bid against each other. Normally, when books were supposed to be chosen without taking the cost into consideration, there was no reason to lower the price; the book publishers could put the prices at any place they wanted to. There was no advantage in competing by lowering the price; the way you competed was to impress the members of the curriculum commission.
By the way, whenever our commission had a meeting, there were book publishers entertaining curriculum commission members by taking them to lunch and talking to them about their books. I never went.
It seems obvious now, but I didn’t know what was happening the time I got a package of dried fruit and whatnot delivered by Western Union with a message that read, “From our family to yours, Happy Thanksgiving—The Pamilios.”
It was from a family I had never heard of in Long Beach, obviously someone wanting to send this to his friend’s family who got the name and address wrong, so I thought I’d better straighten it out. I called up Western Union, got the telephone number of the people who sent the stuff, and I called them.
“Hello, my name is Mr. Feynman. I received a package …”
“Oh, hello, Mr. Feynman, this is Pete Pamilio” and he says it in such a friendly way that I think I’m supposed to know who he is! I’m normally such a dunce that I can’t remember who anyone is.
So I said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Pamilio, but I don’t quite remember who you are …”
It turned out he was a representative of one of the publishers whose books I had to judge on the curriculum commission.
“I see. But this could be misunderstood.”
“It’s only family to family.”
“Yes, but I’m judging a book that you’re publishing, and maybe someone might misinterpret your kindness!” I knew what was happening, but I made it sound like I was a complete idiot.
Another thing like this happened when one of the publishers sent me a leather briefcase with my name nicely written in gold on it. I gave them the same stuff: “I can’t accept it; I’m judging some of the books you’re publishing. I don’t think you understand that!”
One commissioner, who had been there for the greatest length of time, said, “I never accept the stuff; it makes me very upset. But it just goes on.”
But I really missed one opportunity. If I had only thought fast enough, I could have had a very good time on that commission. I got to the hotel in San Francisco in the evening to attend my very first meeting the next day, and I decided to go out to wander in the town and eat something. I came out of the elevator, and sitting on a bench in the hotel lobby were two guys who jumped up and said, “Good evening, Mr. Feynman. Where are you going? Is there something we can show you in San Francisco?” They were from a publishing company, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with them.
“I’m going out to eat.”
“We can take you out to dinner.”
“No, I want to be alone.”
“Well, whatever you want, we can help you.”
I couldn’t resist. I said, “Well, I’m going out to get myself in trouble.”
“I think we can help you in that, too.”
“No, I think I’ll take care of that myself.” Then I thought, “What an error! I should have let all that stuff operate and keep a diary, so the people of the state of California could find out how far the publishers will go!” And when I found out about the two-million-dollar difference, God knows what the pressures are!
Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake
Bringing Culture to the Physicists
I’ll give you an example: They would talk about different bases of numbers—five, six, and so on—to show the possibilities. That would be interesting for a kid who could understand base ten—something to entertain his mind. But what they had turned it into, in these books, was that every child had to learn another base! And then the usual horror would come: “Translate these numbers, which are written in base seven, to base five.” Translating from one base to another is an utterlyuseless thing. If you can do it, maybe it’s entertaining; if you can’t do it, forget it. There’s no point to it.
Anyhow, I’m looking at all these books, all these books, and none of them has said anything about using arithmetic in science. If there are any examples on the use of arithmetic at all (most of the time it’s this abstract new modern nonsense), they are about things like buying stamps.
Finally I come to a book that says, “Mathematics is used in science in many ways. We will give you an example from astronomy, which is the science of stars.” I turn the page, and it says, “Red stars have a temperature of four thousand degrees, yellow stars have a temperature of five thousand degrees …”—so far, so good. It continues: “Green stars have a temperature of seven thousand degrees, blue stars have a temperature of ten thousand degrees, and violet stars have a temperature of … (some big number).” There are no green or violet stars, but the figures for the others are roughly correct. It’s vaguely right—but already, trouble! That’s the way everything was: Everything was written by somebody who didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, so it was a little bit wrong, always! And how we are going to teach well by using books written by people who don’t quite understand what they’re talking about, I cannot understand. I don’t know why, but the books are lousy; UNIVERSALLY LOUSY!
Anyway, I’m happy with this book, because it’s the first example of applying arithmetic to science. I’m a bit unhappy when I read about the stars’ temperatures, but I’m not very unhappy because it’s more or less right—it’s just an example of error. Then comes the list of problems. It says, “John and his father go out to look at the stars. John sees two blue stars and a red star. His father sees a green star, a violet star, and two yellow stars. What is the total temperature of the stars seen by John and his father?”—and I would explode in horror.
My wife would talk about the volcano downstairs. That’s only an example: it was perpetually like that. Perpetual absurdity! There’s no purpose whatsoever in adding the temperature of two stars. Nobody ever does that except, maybe, to then take the average temperature of the stars, but not to find out the total temperature of all the stars! It was awful! All it was was a game to get you to add, and they didn’t understand what they were talking about. It was like reading sentences with a few typographical errors, and then suddenly a whole sentence is written backwards. The mathematics was like that. Just hopeless!
Then I came to my first meeting. The other members had given some kind of ratings to some of the books, and they asked me what my ratings were. My rating was often different from theirs, and they would ask, “Why did you rate that book low?”
I would say the trouble with that book was this and this on page so-and-so—I had my notes.
They discovered that I was kind of a goldmine: I would tell them, in detail, what was good and bad in all the books; I had a reason for every rating.
I would ask them why they had rated this book so high, and they would say, “Let us hear what you thought about such and such a book.” I would never find out why they rated anything the way they did. Instead, they kept asking me what I thought.
We came to a certain book, part of a set of three supplementary books published by the same company, and they asked me what I thought about it.
I said, “The book depository didn’t send me that book, but the other two were nice.”
Someone tried repeating the question: “What do you think about that book?”
“I said they didn’t send me that one, so I don’t have any judgment on it.”
The man from the book depository was there, and he said, “Excuse me; I can explain that. I didn’t send it to you because that book hadn’t been completed yet. There’s a rule that you have to have every entry in by a certain time, and the publisher was a few days late with it. So it was sent to us with just the covers, and it’s blank in between. The company sent a note excusing themselves and hoping they could have their set of three books considered, even though the third one would be late.”
It turned out that the blank book had a rating by some of the other members! They couldn’t believe it was blank, because they had a rating. In fact, the rating for the missing book was a little bit higher than for the two others. The fact that there was nothing in the book had nothing to do with the rating.
I believe the reason for all this is that the system works this way: When you give books all over the place to people, they’re busy; they’re careless; they think, “Well, a lot of people are reading this book, SO it doesn’t make any difference.” And they put in some kind of number—some of them, at least; not all of them, but some of them. Then when you receive your reports, you don’t know why this particular book has fewer reports than the other books—that is, perhaps one book has ten, and this one only has six people reporting—so you average the rating of those who reported; you don’t average the ones who didn’t report, so you get a reasonable number. This process of averaging all the time misses the fact that there is absolutely nothing between the covers of the book!
I made that theory up because I saw what happened in the curriculum commission: For the blank book, only six out of the ten members were reporting, whereas with the other books, eight or nine out of the ten were reporting. And when they averaged the six, they got as good an average as when they averaged with eight or nine. They were very embarrassed to discover they were giving ratings to that book, and it gave me a little bit more confidence. It turned out the other members of the committee had done a lot of work in giving out the books and collecting reports, and had gone to sessions in which the book publishers would explain the books before they read them; I was the only guy on that commission who read all the books and didn’t get any information from the book publishers except what was in the books themselves, the things that would ultimately go to the schools.
This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by looking at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who looked at it carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China’s nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China’s nose is, and you average it. And that would be very “accurate” because you averaged so many people. But it’s no way to find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it, you don’t improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging.
At first we weren’t supposed to talk about the cost of the books. We were told how many books we could choose, so we designed a program which used a lot of supplementary books, because all the new textbooks had failures of one kind or another. The most serious failures were in the “new math” books: there were no applications; not enough word problems. There was no talk of selling stamps; instead there was too much talk about commutation and abstract things and not enough translation to situations in the world. What do you do: add, subtract, multiply, or divide? So we suggested some books which had some of that as supplementary—one or two for each classroom—in addition to a textbook for each student. We had it all worked out to balance everything, after much discussion.
When we took our recommendations to the Board of Education, they told us they didn’t have as much money as they had thought, so we’d have to go over the whole thing and cut out this and that, now taking the cost into consideration, and ruining what was a fairly balanced program, in which there was a chance for a teacher to find examples of the things (s)he needed.
Now that they changed the rules about how many books we could recommend and we had no more chance to balance, it was a pretty lousy program. When the senate budget committee got to it, the program was emasculated still further. Now it was really lousy! I was asked to appear before the state senators when the issue was being discussed, but I declined: By that time, having argued this stuff so much, I was tired. We had prepared our recommendations for the Board of Education, and I figured it was their job to present it to the state—which was legally right, but not politically sound. I shouldn’t have given up so soon, but to have worked so hard and discussed so much about all these books to make a fairly balanced program, and then to have the whole thing scrapped at the end—that was discouraging! The whole thing was an unnecessary effort that could have been turned around and done the opposite way: start with the cost of the books, and buy what you can afford.
What finally clinched it, and made me ultimately resign, was that the following year we were going to discuss science books. I thought maybe the science would be different, so I looked at a few of them.
The same thing happened: something would look good at first and then turn out to be horrifying. For example, there was a book that started out with four pictures: first there was a wind-up toy; then there was an automobile; then there was a boy riding a bicycle; then there was something else. And underneath each picture it said, “What makes it go?”
I thought, “I know what it is: They’re going to talk about mechanics, how the springs work inside the toy; about chemistry, how the engine of the automobile works; and biology, about how the muscles work.”
It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: “What makes it go? Everything goes because the sun is shining.” And then we would have fun discussing it:
“No, the toy goes because the spring is wound up,” I would say.
“How did the spring get wound up?” he would ask.
“I wound it up.”
“And how did you get moving?”
“From eating.”
“And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it’s because the sun is shining that all these things are moving.” That would get the concept across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun’s power.
I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, “Energy makes it go.” And for the boy on the bicycle, “Energy makes it go.” For everything, “Energy makes it go.”
Now that doesn’t mean anything. Suppose it’s “Wakalixes.” That’s the general principle: “Wakalixes makes it go.” There’s no knowledge coming in. The child doesn’t learn anything; it’s just a word!
What they should have done is to look at the wind-up toy, see that there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never mind “energy.” Later on, when the children know something about how the toy actually works, they can discuss the more general principles of energy.
It’s also not even true that “energy makes it go,” because if it stops, you could say, “energy makes it stop” just as well, What they’re talking about is concentrated energy being transformed into more dilute forms, which is a very subtle aspect of energy. Energy is neither increased nor decreased in these examples; it’s just changed from one form to another. And when the things stop, the energy is changed into heat, into general chaos.
But that’s the way all the books were: They said things that were useless, mixed-up, ambiguous, confusing, and partially incorrect. How anybody can learn science from these books, I don’t know, because it’s not science.
So when I saw all these horrifying books with the same kind of trouble as the math books had, I saw my volcano process starting again. Since I was exhausted from reading all the math books, and discouraged from its all being a wasted effort, I couldn’t face another year of that, and had to resign.
Sometime later I heard that the energy-makes-it-go book was going to be recommended by the curriculum commission to the Board of Education, so I made one last effort. At each meeting of the commission the public was allowed to make comments, so I got up and said why I thought the book was bad.
The man who replaced me on the commission said, “That book was approved by sixty-five engineers at the Such-and-such Aircraft Company!”
I didn’t doubt that the company had some pretty good engineers, but to take sixty-five engineers is to take a wide range of ability—and to necessarily include some pretty poor guys! It was once again the problem of averaging the length of the emperor’s nose, or the ratings on a book with nothing between the covers. It would have been far better to have the company decide who their better engineers were, and to have them look at the book. I couldn’t claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys—but the average of sixty five other guys, certainly!
I couldn’t get through to him, and the book was approved by the board.
When I was still on the commission, I had to go to San Francisco a few times for some of the meetings, and when I returned to Los Angeles from the first trip, I stopped in the commission office to get reimbursed for my expenses.
“How much did it cost, Mr. Feynman?”
“Well, I flew to San Francisco, so it’s the airfare, plus the parking at the airport while I was away.”
“Do you have your ticket?”
I happened to have the ticket.
“Do you have a receipt for the parking?”
“No, but it cost $2.35 to park my car.”
“But we have to have a receipt.”
“I told you how much it cost. If you don’t trust me, why do you let me tell you what I think is good and bad about the schoolbooks?”
There was a big stew about that. Unfortunately, I had been used to giving lectures for some company or university or for ordinary people, not for the government. I was used to, “What were your expenses?”—”So-and-so much.”—”Here you are, Mr. Feynman.”
I then decided I wasn’t going to give them a receipt for anything.
After the second trip to San Francisco they again asked me for my ticket and receipts.
“I haven’t got any.”
“This can’t go on, Mr. Feynman.”
“When I accepted to serve on the commission, I was told you were going to pay my expenses.”
“But we expected to have some receipts to prove the expenses.”
“I have nothing to prove it, but you know I live in Los Angeles and I go to these other towns; how the hell do you think I get there?”
They didn’t give in, and neither did I. I feel when you’re in a position like that, where you choose not to buckle down to the System, you must pay the consequences if it doesn’t work. So I’m perfectly satisfied, but I never did get compensation for the trips.
It’s one of those games I play. They want a receipt? I’m not giving them a receipt. Then you’re not going to get the money. OK, then I’m not taking the money. They don’t trust me? The hell with it; they don’t have to pay me. Of course it’s absurd! I know that’s the way the government works; well, screw the government! I feel that human beings should treat human beings like human beings. And unless I’m going to be treated like one, I’m not going to have anything to do with them! They feel bad? They feel bad. I feel bad, too. We’ll just let it go. I know they’re “protecting the taxpayer,” but see how well you think the taxpayer was being protected in the following situation.
There were two books that we were unable to come to a decision about after much discussion; they were extremely close. So we left it open to the Board of Education to decide. Since the board was now taking the cost into consideration, and since the two books were so evenly matched, the board decided to open the bids and take the lower one.
Then the question came up, “Will the schools be getting the books at the regular time, or could they, perhaps, get them a little earlier, in time for the coming term?”
One publisher’s representative got up and said, “We are happy that you accepted our bid; we can get it out in time for the next term.”
A representative of the publisher that lost out was also there, and he got up and said, “Since our bids were submitted based on the later deadline, I think we should have a chance a bid again for the earlier deadline, because we too can meet the earlier deadline.”
Mr. Norris, the Pasadena lawyer on the board, asked the guy from the other publisher, “And how much would it cost for us to get your books at the earlier date?”
And he gave a number: It was less!
The first guy got up: “If he changes his bid, I have the right to change my bid!”—and his bid is still less!
Norris asked, “Well how is that—we get the books earlier and it’s cheaper?”
“Yes,” one guy says. “We can use a special offset method we wouldn’t normally use …”—some excuse why it came out cheaper.
The other guy agreed: “When you do it quicker, it costs less!”
That was really a shock. It ended up two million dollars cheaper. Norris was really incensed by this sudden change.
What happened, of course, was that the uncertainty about the date had opened the possibility that these guys could bid against each other. Normally, when books were supposed to be chosen without taking the cost into consideration, there was no reason to lower the price; the book publishers could put the prices at any place they wanted to. There was no advantage in competing by lowering the price; the way you competed was to impress the members of the curriculum commission.
By the way, whenever our commission had a meeting, there were book publishers entertaining curriculum commission members by taking them to lunch and talking to them about their books. I never went.
It seems obvious now, but I didn’t know what was happening the time I got a package of dried fruit and whatnot delivered by Western Union with a message that read, “From our family to yours, Happy Thanksgiving—The Pamilios.”
It was from a family I had never heard of in Long Beach, obviously someone wanting to send this to his friend’s family who got the name and address wrong, so I thought I’d better straighten it out. I called up Western Union, got the telephone number of the people who sent the stuff, and I called them.
“Hello, my name is Mr. Feynman. I received a package …”
“Oh, hello, Mr. Feynman, this is Pete Pamilio” and he says it in such a friendly way that I think I’m supposed to know who he is! I’m normally such a dunce that I can’t remember who anyone is.
So I said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Pamilio, but I don’t quite remember who you are …”
It turned out he was a representative of one of the publishers whose books I had to judge on the curriculum commission.
“I see. But this could be misunderstood.”
“It’s only family to family.”
“Yes, but I’m judging a book that you’re publishing, and maybe someone might misinterpret your kindness!” I knew what was happening, but I made it sound like I was a complete idiot.
Another thing like this happened when one of the publishers sent me a leather briefcase with my name nicely written in gold on it. I gave them the same stuff: “I can’t accept it; I’m judging some of the books you’re publishing. I don’t think you understand that!”
One commissioner, who had been there for the greatest length of time, said, “I never accept the stuff; it makes me very upset. But it just goes on.”
But I really missed one opportunity. If I had only thought fast enough, I could have had a very good time on that commission. I got to the hotel in San Francisco in the evening to attend my very first meeting the next day, and I decided to go out to wander in the town and eat something. I came out of the elevator, and sitting on a bench in the hotel lobby were two guys who jumped up and said, “Good evening, Mr. Feynman. Where are you going? Is there something we can show you in San Francisco?” They were from a publishing company, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with them.
“I’m going out to eat.”
“We can take you out to dinner.”
“No, I want to be alone.”
“Well, whatever you want, we can help you.”
I couldn’t resist. I said, “Well, I’m going out to get myself in trouble.”
“I think we can help you in that, too.”
“No, I think I’ll take care of that myself.” Then I thought, “What an error! I should have let all that stuff operate and keep a diary, so the people of the state of California could find out how far the publishers will go!” And when I found out about the two-million-dollar difference, God knows what the pressures are!
Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake
In Canada they have a big association of physics students. They have meetings; they give papers, and so on. One time the Vancouver chapter wanted to have me come and talk to them. The girl in charge of it arranged with my secretary to fly all the way to Los Angeles without telling me. She just walked into my office. She was really cute, a beautiful blonde. (That helped; it’s not supposed to, but it did.) And I was impressed that the students in Vancouver had financed the whole thing. They treated me so nicely in Vancouver that now I know the secret of how to really be entertained and give talks: Wait for the students to ask you.
One time, a few years after I had won the Nobel Prize, some kids from the Irvine students’ physics club came around and wanted me to talk. I said, “I’d love to do it. What I want to do is talk just to the physics club. But—I don’t want to be immodest—I’ve learned from experience that there’ll be trouble.”
I told them how I used to go over to a local high school every year to talk to the physics club about relativity, or whatever they asked about. Then, after I got the Prize, I went over there again, as usual, with no preparation, and they stuck me in front of an assembly of three hundred kids. It was a mess!
I got that shock about three or four times, being an idiot and not catching on right away. When I was invited to Berkeley to give a talk on something in physics, I prepared something rather technical, expecting to give it to the usual physics department group. But when I got there, this tremendous lecture hall is full of people! And I know there’s not that many people in Berkeley who know the level at which I prepared my talk. My problem is, I like to please the people who come to hear me, and I can’t do it if everybody and his brother wants to hear: I don’t know my audience then.
After the students understood that I can’t just easily go over somewhere and give a talk to the physics club, I said, “Let’s cook up a dull-sounding title and a dull-sounding professor’s name, and then only the kids who are really interested in physics will bother to come, and those are the ones we want, OK? You don’t have to sell anything.”
A few posters appeared on the Irvine campus: Professor Henry Warren from the University of Washington is going to talk about the structure of the proton on May 17th at 3:00 in Room D102.
Then I came and said, “Professor Warren had some personal difficulties and was unable to come and speak to you today, so he telephoned me and asked me if I would talk to you about the subject, since I’ve been doing some work in the field. So here I am.” It worked great.
But then, somehow or other, the faculty adviser of the club found out about the trick, and he got very angry at them. He said, “You know, if it were known that Professor Feynman was coming down here, a lot of people would like to have listened to him.”
The students explained, “That’s just it!” But the adviser was mad that he hadn’t been allowed in on the joke.
Hearing that the students were in real trouble, I decided to write a letter to the adviser and explained that it was all my fault, that I wouldn’t have given the talk unless this arrangement had been made; that I had told the students not to tell anyone; I’m very sorry; please excuse me, blah, blah, blah …” That’s the kind of stuff I have to go through on account of that damn prize!
Just last year I was invited by the students at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks to talk, and had a wonderful time, except for the interviews on local television. I don’t need interviews; there’s no point to it. I came to talk to the physics students, and that’s it. If everybody in town wants to know that, let the school newspaper tell them. It’s on account of the Nobel Prize that I’ve got to have an interview—I’m a big shot, right?
A friend of mine who’s a rich man—he invented some kind of simple digital switch—tells me about these people who contribute money to make prizes or give lectures: “You always look at them carefully to find out what crookery they’re trying to absolve their conscience of.”
My friend Matt Sands was once going to write a book to be called Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake.
For many years I would look, when the time was coming around to give out the Prize, at who might get it. But after a while I wasn’t even aware of when it was the right “season.” I therefore had no idea why someone would be calling me at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning.
“Professor Feynman?”
“Hey! Why are you bothering me at this time in the morning?”
“I thought you’d like to know that you’ve won the Nobel Prize.”
“Yeah, but I’m sleeping! It would have been better if you had called me in the morning.”—and I hung up.
My wife said, “Who was that?”
“They told me I won the Nobel Prize.”
“Oh, Richard, who was it?” I often kid around and she is so smart that she never gets fooled, but this time I caught her.
The phone rings again: “Professor Feynman, have you heard …”
(In a disappointed voice) “Yeah.”
Then I began to think, “How can I turn this all off? I don’t want any of this!” So the first thing was to take the telephone off the hook, because calls were coming one right after the other. I tried to go back to sleep, but found it was impossible.
I went down to the study to think: What am I going to do? Maybe I won’t accept the Prize. What would happen then? Maybe that’s impossible.
I put the receiver back on the hook and the phone rang right away. It was a guy from Time magazine. I said to him, “Listen, I’ve got a problem, so I want this off the record. I don’t know how to get out of this thing. Is there some way not to accept the Prize?”
He said, “I’m afraid, sir, that there isn’t any way you can do it without making more of a fuss than if you leave it alone.” It was obvious. We had quite a conversation, about fifteen or twenty minutes, and the Time guy never published anything about it.
I said thank you very much to the Time guy and hung up. The phone rang immediately: it was the newspaper.
“Yes, you can come up to the house. Yes, it’s all right. Yes, Yes, Yes …”
One of the phone calls was a guy from the Swedish consulate. He was going to have a reception in Los Angeles.
I figured that since I decided to accept the Prize, I’ve got to go through with all this stuff.
The consul said, “Make a list of the people you would like to invite, and we’ll make a list of the people we are inviting. Then I’ll come to your office and we’ll compare the lists to see if there are any duplicates, and we’ll make up the invitations …”
So I made up my list. It had about eight people-my neighbor from across the street, my artist friend Zorthian, and so on.
The consul came over to my office with his list: the Governor of the State of California, the This, the That; Getty, the oilman; some actress—it had three hundred people! And, needless to say, there was no duplication whatsoever!
Then I began to get a little bit nervous. The idea of meeting all these dignitaries frightened me.
The consul saw I was worried. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “Most of them don’t come.”
Well, I had never arranged a party that I invited people to, and knew to expect them not to come! I don’t have to kowtow to anybody and give them the delight of being honored with this invitation that they can refuse; it’s stupid!
By the time I got home I was really upset with the whole thing. I called the consul back and said, “I’ve thought it over, and I realize that I just can’t go through with the reception.”
He was delighted. He said, “You’re perfectly right.” I think he was in the same position—having to set up a party for this jerk was just a pain in the ass, It turned out, in the end, everybody was happy. Nobody wanted to come, including the guest of honor! The host was much better off, too!
I had a certain psychological difficulty all the way through this period. You see, I had been brought up by my father against royalty and pomp (he was in the uniforms business, so he knew the difference between a man with a uniform on, and with the uniform off—it’s the same man). I had actually learned to ridicule this stuff all my life, and it was so strong and deeply cut into me that I couldn’t go up to a king without some strain. It was childish, I know, but I was brought up that way, so it was a problem.
People told me that there was a rule in Sweden that after you accept the Prize, you have to back away from the king without turning around. You come down some steps, accept the Prize, and then go back up the steps. So I said to myself, “All right, I’m gonna fix them!”—and I practiced jumping up stairs, backwards, to show how ridiculous their custom was. I was in a terrible mood! That was stupid and silly, of course.
I found out this wasn’t a rule any more; you could turn around when you left the king, and walk like a normal human being, in the direction you were intending to go, with your nose in front.
I was pleased to find that not all the people in Sweden take the royal ceremonies as seriously as you! might think. When you get there, you discover that they’re on your side.
The students had, for example, a special ceremony in which they granted each Nobel-Prize-winner the special “Order of the Frog.” When you get this little frog, you have to make a frog noise.
When I was younger I was anti-culture, but my father had some good books around. One was a book with the old Greek play TheFrogs in it, and I glanced at it one time and I saw in there that a frog talks. It was written as “brek, kek, kek.” I thought, “No frog ever made a sound like that; that’s a crazy way to describe it!” so I tried it, and after practicing it awhile, I realized that it’s very accurately what a frog says.
So my chance glance into a book by Aristophanes turned out to be useful, later on: I could make a good frog noise at the students’ ceremony for the Nobel-Prize-winners! And jumping backwards fit right in, too. So I liked that part of it; that ceremony went well.
While I had a lot of fun, I did still have this psychological difficulty all the way through. My greatest problem was the Thank-You speech that you give at the King’s Dinner. When they give you the Prize they give you some nicely bound books about the years before, and they have all the Thank-You speeches written out as if they’re some big deal. So you begin to think it’s of some importance what you say in this ThankYou speech, because it’s going to be published. What I didn’t realize was that hardly anyone was going to listen to it carefully, and nobody was going to read it! I had lost my sense of proportion: I couldn’t just say thank you very much, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah; it would have been so easy to do that, but no, I have to make it honest. And the truth was, I didn’t really want this Prize, so how do I say thank you when I don’t want it?
My wife says I was a nervous wreck, worrying about what I was going to say in the speech, but I finally figured out a way to make a perfectly satisfactory-sounding speech that was nevertheless completely honest. I’m sure those who heard the speech had no idea what this guy had gone through in preparing it.
I started out by saying that I had already received my prize in the pleasure I got in discovering what I did, from the fact that others used my work, and so on. I tried to explain that I had already received everything I expected to get, and the rest was nothing compared to it. I had already received my prize.
But then I said I received, all at once, a big pile of letters—I said it much better in the speech—reminding me of all these people that I knew: letters from childhood friends who jumped up when they read the morning newspaper and cried out, “I know him! He’s that kid we used to play with!” and so on; letters like that, which were very supportive and expressed what I interpreted as a kind of love. For that I thanked them.
The speech went fine, but I was always getting into slight difficulties with royalty. During the King’s Dinner I was sitting next to a princess who had gone to college in the United States. I assumed, incorrectly, that she had the same attitudes as I did. I figured she was just a kid like everybody else. I remarked on how the king and all the royalty had to stand for such a long time, shaking hands with all the guests at the reception before the dinner. “In America,” I said, “we could make this more efficient. We would design a machine to shake hands.”
“Yes, but there wouldn’t be very much of a market for it here,” she said, uneasily. “There’s not that much royalty.”
“On the contrary, there’d be a very big market. At first, only the king would have a machine, and we could give it to him free. Then, of course, other people would want a machine, too. The question now becomes, who will be allowed to have a machine? The prime minister is permitted to buy one; then the president of the senate is allowed to buy one, and then the most important senior deputies. So there’s a very big, expanding market, and pretty soon, you wouldn’t have to go through the reception line to shake hands with the machines; you’d send your machine!”
I also sat next to the lady who was in charge of organizing the dinner. A waitress came by to fill my wine glass, and I said, “No, thank you. I don’t drink.”
The lady said, “No, no. Let her pour the drink.”
“But I don’t drink.”
She said, “It’s all right. Just look. You see, she has two bottles. We know that number eighty-eight doesn’t drink.” (Number eighty-eight was on the back of my chair.) “They look exactly the same, but one has no alcohol.”
“But how do you know?” I exclaimed.
She smiled. “Now watch the king,” she said. “He doesn’t drink either.”
She told me some of the problems they had had this particular year. One of them was, where should the Russian ambassador sit? The problem always is, at dinners like this, who sits nearer to the king. The Prize-winners normally sit closer to the king than the diplomatic corps does. And the order in which the diplomats sit is determined according to the length of time they have been in Sweden. Now at that time, the United States ambassador had been in Sweden longer than the Russian ambassador, But that year, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Mr. Sholokhov, a Russian, and the Russian ambassador wanted to be Mr. Sholokhov’s translator—and therefore to sit next to him. So the problem was how to let the Russian ambassador sit closer to the king without offending the United States ambassador and the rest of the diplomatic corps.
She said, “You should have seen what a fuss they went through—letters back and forth, telephone calls, and so on—before I ever got permission to have the ambassador sit next to Mr. Sholokhov. It was finally agreed that the ambassador wouldn’t officially represent the embassy of the Soviet Union that evening; rather, he was to be only the translator for Mr. Sholokhov.”
After the dinner we went off into another room, where there were different conversations going on. There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty chair at their table and sat down.
She turned to me and said, “Oh! You’re one of the Nobel-Prize-winners. In what field did you do your work?”
“In physics,” I said.
“Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can’t talk about it.”
“On the contrary,” I answered. “It’s because somebody knows something about it that we can’t talk about physics. It’s the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance—gold transfers we can’t talk about, because those are understood—so it’s the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!”
I don’t know how they do it. There’s a way of forming ice on the surface of the face, and she did it! She turned to talk to somebody else.
After a while I could tell I was completely cut out of the conversation, so I got up and started away. The Japanese ambassador, who was also sitting at that table, jumped up and walked after me. “Professor Feynman,” he said, “there is something I should like to tell you about diplomacy.”
He went into a long story about how a young man in Japan goes to the university and studies international relations because he thinks he can make a contribution to his country. As a sophomore he begins to have slight twinges of doubt about what he is learning. After college he takes his first post in an embassy and has still more doubts about his understanding of diplomacy, until he finally realizes that nobody knows anything about international relations. At that point, he can become an ambassador! “So Professor Feynman,” he said, “next time you give examples of things that everybody talks about that nobody knows about, please include international relations!”
He was a very interesting man, and we got to talking. I had always been interested in how it is the different countries and different peoples develop differently. I told the ambassador that there was one thing that always seemed to me to be a remarkable phenomenon: how Japan had developed itself so rapidly to become such a modern and important country in the world. “What is the aspect and character of the Japanese people that made it possible for the Japanese to do that?” I asked.
The ambassador answered in a way I like to hear: “I don’t know,” he said. “I might suppose something, but I don’t know if it’s true. The people of Japan believed they had only one way of moving up: to have their children educated more than they were; that it was very important for them to move out of their peasantry to become educated. So there has been a great energy in the family to encourage the children to do well in school, and to be pushed forward. Because of this tendency to learn things all the time, new ideas from the outside would spread through the educational system very easily. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Japan has advanced so rapidly.”
All in all, I must say I enjoyed the visit to Sweden, in the end. Instead of coming home immediately, I went to CERN, the European center for nuclear research in Switzerland, to give a talk. I appeared before my colleagues in the suit that I had worn to the King’s Dinner—I had never given a talk in a suit before—and I began by saying, “Funny thing, you know; in Sweden we were sitting around, talking about whether there are any changes as a result of our having won the Nobel Prize, and as a matter of fact, I think I already see a change: I rather like this suit.”
Everybody says “Booooo!” and Weisskopf jumps up and tears off his coat and says, “We’re not gonna wear suits at lectures!”
I took my coat off, loosened my tie, and said, “By the time I had been through Sweden, I was beginning to like this stuff, but now that I’m back in the world, everything’s all right again. Thanks for straightening me out!” They didn’t want me to change. So it was very quick: at CERN they undid everything that they had done in Sweden.
It’s nice that I got some money—I was able to buy a beach house—but altogether, I think it would have been much nicer not to have had the Prize—because you never, any longer, can be taken straightforwardly in any public situation.
In a way, the Nobel Prize has been something of a pain in the neck, though there was at least one time that I got some fun out of it, Shortly after I won the Prize, Gweneth and I received an invitation from the Brazilian government to be the guests of honor at the Carnaval celebrations in Rio. We gladly accepted and had a great time. We went from one dance to another and reviewed the big street parade that featured the famous samba schools playing their wonderful rhythms and music. Photographers from newspapers and magazines were taking pictures all the time—”Here, the Professor from America is dancing with Miss Brazil.”
It was fun to be a “celebrity,” but we were obviously the wrong celebrities. Nobody was very excited about the guests of honor that year. I found out later how our invitation had come about. Gina Lollobrigida was supposed to be the guest of honor, but just before Carnaval, she said no. The Minister of Tourism, who was in charge of organizing Carnaval, had some friends at the Center for Physical Research who knew I had played in a samba band, and since I had recently won the Nobel Prize, I was briefly in the news, In a moment of panic the Minister and his friends got this crazy idea to replace Gina Lollobrigida with the professor of physics!
Needless to say, the Minister did such a bad job on that Carnaval that he lost his position in the government.
One time, a few years after I had won the Nobel Prize, some kids from the Irvine students’ physics club came around and wanted me to talk. I said, “I’d love to do it. What I want to do is talk just to the physics club. But—I don’t want to be immodest—I’ve learned from experience that there’ll be trouble.”
I told them how I used to go over to a local high school every year to talk to the physics club about relativity, or whatever they asked about. Then, after I got the Prize, I went over there again, as usual, with no preparation, and they stuck me in front of an assembly of three hundred kids. It was a mess!
I got that shock about three or four times, being an idiot and not catching on right away. When I was invited to Berkeley to give a talk on something in physics, I prepared something rather technical, expecting to give it to the usual physics department group. But when I got there, this tremendous lecture hall is full of people! And I know there’s not that many people in Berkeley who know the level at which I prepared my talk. My problem is, I like to please the people who come to hear me, and I can’t do it if everybody and his brother wants to hear: I don’t know my audience then.
After the students understood that I can’t just easily go over somewhere and give a talk to the physics club, I said, “Let’s cook up a dull-sounding title and a dull-sounding professor’s name, and then only the kids who are really interested in physics will bother to come, and those are the ones we want, OK? You don’t have to sell anything.”
A few posters appeared on the Irvine campus: Professor Henry Warren from the University of Washington is going to talk about the structure of the proton on May 17th at 3:00 in Room D102.
Then I came and said, “Professor Warren had some personal difficulties and was unable to come and speak to you today, so he telephoned me and asked me if I would talk to you about the subject, since I’ve been doing some work in the field. So here I am.” It worked great.
But then, somehow or other, the faculty adviser of the club found out about the trick, and he got very angry at them. He said, “You know, if it were known that Professor Feynman was coming down here, a lot of people would like to have listened to him.”
The students explained, “That’s just it!” But the adviser was mad that he hadn’t been allowed in on the joke.
Hearing that the students were in real trouble, I decided to write a letter to the adviser and explained that it was all my fault, that I wouldn’t have given the talk unless this arrangement had been made; that I had told the students not to tell anyone; I’m very sorry; please excuse me, blah, blah, blah …” That’s the kind of stuff I have to go through on account of that damn prize!
Just last year I was invited by the students at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks to talk, and had a wonderful time, except for the interviews on local television. I don’t need interviews; there’s no point to it. I came to talk to the physics students, and that’s it. If everybody in town wants to know that, let the school newspaper tell them. It’s on account of the Nobel Prize that I’ve got to have an interview—I’m a big shot, right?
A friend of mine who’s a rich man—he invented some kind of simple digital switch—tells me about these people who contribute money to make prizes or give lectures: “You always look at them carefully to find out what crookery they’re trying to absolve their conscience of.”
My friend Matt Sands was once going to write a book to be called Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake.
For many years I would look, when the time was coming around to give out the Prize, at who might get it. But after a while I wasn’t even aware of when it was the right “season.” I therefore had no idea why someone would be calling me at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning.
“Professor Feynman?”
“Hey! Why are you bothering me at this time in the morning?”
“I thought you’d like to know that you’ve won the Nobel Prize.”
“Yeah, but I’m sleeping! It would have been better if you had called me in the morning.”—and I hung up.
My wife said, “Who was that?”
“They told me I won the Nobel Prize.”
“Oh, Richard, who was it?” I often kid around and she is so smart that she never gets fooled, but this time I caught her.
The phone rings again: “Professor Feynman, have you heard …”
(In a disappointed voice) “Yeah.”
Then I began to think, “How can I turn this all off? I don’t want any of this!” So the first thing was to take the telephone off the hook, because calls were coming one right after the other. I tried to go back to sleep, but found it was impossible.
I went down to the study to think: What am I going to do? Maybe I won’t accept the Prize. What would happen then? Maybe that’s impossible.
I put the receiver back on the hook and the phone rang right away. It was a guy from Time magazine. I said to him, “Listen, I’ve got a problem, so I want this off the record. I don’t know how to get out of this thing. Is there some way not to accept the Prize?”
He said, “I’m afraid, sir, that there isn’t any way you can do it without making more of a fuss than if you leave it alone.” It was obvious. We had quite a conversation, about fifteen or twenty minutes, and the Time guy never published anything about it.
I said thank you very much to the Time guy and hung up. The phone rang immediately: it was the newspaper.
“Yes, you can come up to the house. Yes, it’s all right. Yes, Yes, Yes …”
One of the phone calls was a guy from the Swedish consulate. He was going to have a reception in Los Angeles.
I figured that since I decided to accept the Prize, I’ve got to go through with all this stuff.
The consul said, “Make a list of the people you would like to invite, and we’ll make a list of the people we are inviting. Then I’ll come to your office and we’ll compare the lists to see if there are any duplicates, and we’ll make up the invitations …”
So I made up my list. It had about eight people-my neighbor from across the street, my artist friend Zorthian, and so on.
The consul came over to my office with his list: the Governor of the State of California, the This, the That; Getty, the oilman; some actress—it had three hundred people! And, needless to say, there was no duplication whatsoever!
Then I began to get a little bit nervous. The idea of meeting all these dignitaries frightened me.
The consul saw I was worried. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “Most of them don’t come.”
Well, I had never arranged a party that I invited people to, and knew to expect them not to come! I don’t have to kowtow to anybody and give them the delight of being honored with this invitation that they can refuse; it’s stupid!
By the time I got home I was really upset with the whole thing. I called the consul back and said, “I’ve thought it over, and I realize that I just can’t go through with the reception.”
He was delighted. He said, “You’re perfectly right.” I think he was in the same position—having to set up a party for this jerk was just a pain in the ass, It turned out, in the end, everybody was happy. Nobody wanted to come, including the guest of honor! The host was much better off, too!
I had a certain psychological difficulty all the way through this period. You see, I had been brought up by my father against royalty and pomp (he was in the uniforms business, so he knew the difference between a man with a uniform on, and with the uniform off—it’s the same man). I had actually learned to ridicule this stuff all my life, and it was so strong and deeply cut into me that I couldn’t go up to a king without some strain. It was childish, I know, but I was brought up that way, so it was a problem.
People told me that there was a rule in Sweden that after you accept the Prize, you have to back away from the king without turning around. You come down some steps, accept the Prize, and then go back up the steps. So I said to myself, “All right, I’m gonna fix them!”—and I practiced jumping up stairs, backwards, to show how ridiculous their custom was. I was in a terrible mood! That was stupid and silly, of course.
I found out this wasn’t a rule any more; you could turn around when you left the king, and walk like a normal human being, in the direction you were intending to go, with your nose in front.
I was pleased to find that not all the people in Sweden take the royal ceremonies as seriously as you! might think. When you get there, you discover that they’re on your side.
The students had, for example, a special ceremony in which they granted each Nobel-Prize-winner the special “Order of the Frog.” When you get this little frog, you have to make a frog noise.
When I was younger I was anti-culture, but my father had some good books around. One was a book with the old Greek play TheFrogs in it, and I glanced at it one time and I saw in there that a frog talks. It was written as “brek, kek, kek.” I thought, “No frog ever made a sound like that; that’s a crazy way to describe it!” so I tried it, and after practicing it awhile, I realized that it’s very accurately what a frog says.
So my chance glance into a book by Aristophanes turned out to be useful, later on: I could make a good frog noise at the students’ ceremony for the Nobel-Prize-winners! And jumping backwards fit right in, too. So I liked that part of it; that ceremony went well.
While I had a lot of fun, I did still have this psychological difficulty all the way through. My greatest problem was the Thank-You speech that you give at the King’s Dinner. When they give you the Prize they give you some nicely bound books about the years before, and they have all the Thank-You speeches written out as if they’re some big deal. So you begin to think it’s of some importance what you say in this ThankYou speech, because it’s going to be published. What I didn’t realize was that hardly anyone was going to listen to it carefully, and nobody was going to read it! I had lost my sense of proportion: I couldn’t just say thank you very much, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah; it would have been so easy to do that, but no, I have to make it honest. And the truth was, I didn’t really want this Prize, so how do I say thank you when I don’t want it?
My wife says I was a nervous wreck, worrying about what I was going to say in the speech, but I finally figured out a way to make a perfectly satisfactory-sounding speech that was nevertheless completely honest. I’m sure those who heard the speech had no idea what this guy had gone through in preparing it.
I started out by saying that I had already received my prize in the pleasure I got in discovering what I did, from the fact that others used my work, and so on. I tried to explain that I had already received everything I expected to get, and the rest was nothing compared to it. I had already received my prize.
But then I said I received, all at once, a big pile of letters—I said it much better in the speech—reminding me of all these people that I knew: letters from childhood friends who jumped up when they read the morning newspaper and cried out, “I know him! He’s that kid we used to play with!” and so on; letters like that, which were very supportive and expressed what I interpreted as a kind of love. For that I thanked them.
The speech went fine, but I was always getting into slight difficulties with royalty. During the King’s Dinner I was sitting next to a princess who had gone to college in the United States. I assumed, incorrectly, that she had the same attitudes as I did. I figured she was just a kid like everybody else. I remarked on how the king and all the royalty had to stand for such a long time, shaking hands with all the guests at the reception before the dinner. “In America,” I said, “we could make this more efficient. We would design a machine to shake hands.”
“Yes, but there wouldn’t be very much of a market for it here,” she said, uneasily. “There’s not that much royalty.”
“On the contrary, there’d be a very big market. At first, only the king would have a machine, and we could give it to him free. Then, of course, other people would want a machine, too. The question now becomes, who will be allowed to have a machine? The prime minister is permitted to buy one; then the president of the senate is allowed to buy one, and then the most important senior deputies. So there’s a very big, expanding market, and pretty soon, you wouldn’t have to go through the reception line to shake hands with the machines; you’d send your machine!”
I also sat next to the lady who was in charge of organizing the dinner. A waitress came by to fill my wine glass, and I said, “No, thank you. I don’t drink.”
The lady said, “No, no. Let her pour the drink.”
“But I don’t drink.”
She said, “It’s all right. Just look. You see, she has two bottles. We know that number eighty-eight doesn’t drink.” (Number eighty-eight was on the back of my chair.) “They look exactly the same, but one has no alcohol.”
“But how do you know?” I exclaimed.
She smiled. “Now watch the king,” she said. “He doesn’t drink either.”
She told me some of the problems they had had this particular year. One of them was, where should the Russian ambassador sit? The problem always is, at dinners like this, who sits nearer to the king. The Prize-winners normally sit closer to the king than the diplomatic corps does. And the order in which the diplomats sit is determined according to the length of time they have been in Sweden. Now at that time, the United States ambassador had been in Sweden longer than the Russian ambassador, But that year, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Mr. Sholokhov, a Russian, and the Russian ambassador wanted to be Mr. Sholokhov’s translator—and therefore to sit next to him. So the problem was how to let the Russian ambassador sit closer to the king without offending the United States ambassador and the rest of the diplomatic corps.
She said, “You should have seen what a fuss they went through—letters back and forth, telephone calls, and so on—before I ever got permission to have the ambassador sit next to Mr. Sholokhov. It was finally agreed that the ambassador wouldn’t officially represent the embassy of the Soviet Union that evening; rather, he was to be only the translator for Mr. Sholokhov.”
After the dinner we went off into another room, where there were different conversations going on. There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty chair at their table and sat down.
She turned to me and said, “Oh! You’re one of the Nobel-Prize-winners. In what field did you do your work?”
“In physics,” I said.
“Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can’t talk about it.”
“On the contrary,” I answered. “It’s because somebody knows something about it that we can’t talk about physics. It’s the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance—gold transfers we can’t talk about, because those are understood—so it’s the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!”
I don’t know how they do it. There’s a way of forming ice on the surface of the face, and she did it! She turned to talk to somebody else.
After a while I could tell I was completely cut out of the conversation, so I got up and started away. The Japanese ambassador, who was also sitting at that table, jumped up and walked after me. “Professor Feynman,” he said, “there is something I should like to tell you about diplomacy.”
He went into a long story about how a young man in Japan goes to the university and studies international relations because he thinks he can make a contribution to his country. As a sophomore he begins to have slight twinges of doubt about what he is learning. After college he takes his first post in an embassy and has still more doubts about his understanding of diplomacy, until he finally realizes that nobody knows anything about international relations. At that point, he can become an ambassador! “So Professor Feynman,” he said, “next time you give examples of things that everybody talks about that nobody knows about, please include international relations!”
He was a very interesting man, and we got to talking. I had always been interested in how it is the different countries and different peoples develop differently. I told the ambassador that there was one thing that always seemed to me to be a remarkable phenomenon: how Japan had developed itself so rapidly to become such a modern and important country in the world. “What is the aspect and character of the Japanese people that made it possible for the Japanese to do that?” I asked.
The ambassador answered in a way I like to hear: “I don’t know,” he said. “I might suppose something, but I don’t know if it’s true. The people of Japan believed they had only one way of moving up: to have their children educated more than they were; that it was very important for them to move out of their peasantry to become educated. So there has been a great energy in the family to encourage the children to do well in school, and to be pushed forward. Because of this tendency to learn things all the time, new ideas from the outside would spread through the educational system very easily. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Japan has advanced so rapidly.”
All in all, I must say I enjoyed the visit to Sweden, in the end. Instead of coming home immediately, I went to CERN, the European center for nuclear research in Switzerland, to give a talk. I appeared before my colleagues in the suit that I had worn to the King’s Dinner—I had never given a talk in a suit before—and I began by saying, “Funny thing, you know; in Sweden we were sitting around, talking about whether there are any changes as a result of our having won the Nobel Prize, and as a matter of fact, I think I already see a change: I rather like this suit.”
Everybody says “Booooo!” and Weisskopf jumps up and tears off his coat and says, “We’re not gonna wear suits at lectures!”
I took my coat off, loosened my tie, and said, “By the time I had been through Sweden, I was beginning to like this stuff, but now that I’m back in the world, everything’s all right again. Thanks for straightening me out!” They didn’t want me to change. So it was very quick: at CERN they undid everything that they had done in Sweden.
It’s nice that I got some money—I was able to buy a beach house—but altogether, I think it would have been much nicer not to have had the Prize—because you never, any longer, can be taken straightforwardly in any public situation.
In a way, the Nobel Prize has been something of a pain in the neck, though there was at least one time that I got some fun out of it, Shortly after I won the Prize, Gweneth and I received an invitation from the Brazilian government to be the guests of honor at the Carnaval celebrations in Rio. We gladly accepted and had a great time. We went from one dance to another and reviewed the big street parade that featured the famous samba schools playing their wonderful rhythms and music. Photographers from newspapers and magazines were taking pictures all the time—”Here, the Professor from America is dancing with Miss Brazil.”
It was fun to be a “celebrity,” but we were obviously the wrong celebrities. Nobody was very excited about the guests of honor that year. I found out later how our invitation had come about. Gina Lollobrigida was supposed to be the guest of honor, but just before Carnaval, she said no. The Minister of Tourism, who was in charge of organizing Carnaval, had some friends at the Center for Physical Research who knew I had played in a samba band, and since I had recently won the Nobel Prize, I was briefly in the news, In a moment of panic the Minister and his friends got this crazy idea to replace Gina Lollobrigida with the professor of physics!
Needless to say, the Minister did such a bad job on that Carnaval that he lost his position in the government.
Bringing Culture to the Physicists
Nina Byers, a professor at UCLA, became in charge of the physics colloquium sometime in the early seventies. The colloquia are normally a place where physicists from other universities come and talk pure technical stuff. But partly as a result of the atmosphere of that particular period of time, she got the idea that the physicists needed more culture, so she thought she would arrange something along those lines: Since Los Angeles is near Mexico, she would have a colloquium on the mathematics and astronomy of the Mayans—the old civilization of Mexico.