So I went out and got on the bus for Schenectady, and while I was riding on the bus I thought about the crazy thing that had happened, and I started to laugh—out loud—and I said to myself, “My God! If they saw me now, they would be sure!”
When I finally got back to Schenectady I went in to see Hans Bethe. He was sitting behind his desk, and he said to me in a joking voice, “Well, Dick, did you pass?”
I made a long face and shook my head slowly. “No.”
Then he suddenly felt terrible, thinking that they had discovered some serious medical problem with me, so he said in a concerned voice, “What’s the matter, Dick?”
I touched my finger to my forehead.
He said, “No!”
“Yes!”
He cried, “No-o-o-o-o-o-o!!!” and he laughed so hard that the roof of the General Electric Company nearly came off.
I told the story to many other people, and everybody laughed, with a few exceptions.
When I got back to New York, my father, mother, and sister called for me at the airport, and on the way home in the car I told them all the story. At the end of it my mother said, “Well, what should we do, Mel?”
My father said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Lucille. It’s absurd!”
So that was that, but my sister told me later that when we got home and they were alone, my father said, “Now, Lucille, you shouldn’t have said anything in front of him. Now what should we do?”
By that time my mother had sobered up, and she said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Mel!”
One other person was bothered by the story. It was at a Physical Society meeting dinner, and Professor Slater, my old professor at MIT, said, “Hey, Feynman! Tell us that story about the draft I heard.”
I told the whole story to all these physicists—I didn’t know any of them except Slater—and they were all laughing throughout, but at the end one guy said, “Well, maybe the psychiatrist had something in mind.”
I said resolutely, “And what profession are you, sir?” Of course, that was a dumb question, because we were all physicists at a professional meeting. But I was surprised that a physicist would say something like that.
He said, “Well, uh, I’m really not supposed to be here, but I came as the guest of my brother, who’s a physicist. I’m a psychiatrist.” I smoked him right out!
After a while I began to worry. Here’s a guy who’s been deferred all during the war because he’s working on the bomb, and the draft board gets letters saying he’s important, and now he gets a “D” in “Psychiatric”—it turns out he’s a nut! Obviously he isn’t a nut; he’s just trying to make us believe he’s a nut—we’ll get him!
The situation didn’t look good to me, so I had to find a way out. After a few days, I figured out a solution. I wrote a letter to the draft board that went something like this:
Result: “Deferred. 4F Medical Reasons.”
Part 4. From Cornell to Caltech, With a Touch of Brazil
The Dignified Professor
Any Questions?
I Want My Dollar!
You Just Ask Them?
When I finally got back to Schenectady I went in to see Hans Bethe. He was sitting behind his desk, and he said to me in a joking voice, “Well, Dick, did you pass?”
I made a long face and shook my head slowly. “No.”
Then he suddenly felt terrible, thinking that they had discovered some serious medical problem with me, so he said in a concerned voice, “What’s the matter, Dick?”
I touched my finger to my forehead.
He said, “No!”
“Yes!”
He cried, “No-o-o-o-o-o-o!!!” and he laughed so hard that the roof of the General Electric Company nearly came off.
I told the story to many other people, and everybody laughed, with a few exceptions.
When I got back to New York, my father, mother, and sister called for me at the airport, and on the way home in the car I told them all the story. At the end of it my mother said, “Well, what should we do, Mel?”
My father said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Lucille. It’s absurd!”
So that was that, but my sister told me later that when we got home and they were alone, my father said, “Now, Lucille, you shouldn’t have said anything in front of him. Now what should we do?”
By that time my mother had sobered up, and she said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Mel!”
One other person was bothered by the story. It was at a Physical Society meeting dinner, and Professor Slater, my old professor at MIT, said, “Hey, Feynman! Tell us that story about the draft I heard.”
I told the whole story to all these physicists—I didn’t know any of them except Slater—and they were all laughing throughout, but at the end one guy said, “Well, maybe the psychiatrist had something in mind.”
I said resolutely, “And what profession are you, sir?” Of course, that was a dumb question, because we were all physicists at a professional meeting. But I was surprised that a physicist would say something like that.
He said, “Well, uh, I’m really not supposed to be here, but I came as the guest of my brother, who’s a physicist. I’m a psychiatrist.” I smoked him right out!
After a while I began to worry. Here’s a guy who’s been deferred all during the war because he’s working on the bomb, and the draft board gets letters saying he’s important, and now he gets a “D” in “Psychiatric”—it turns out he’s a nut! Obviously he isn’t a nut; he’s just trying to make us believe he’s a nut—we’ll get him!
The situation didn’t look good to me, so I had to find a way out. After a few days, I figured out a solution. I wrote a letter to the draft board that went something like this:
Dear Sirs:
I do not think I should be drafted because I am teaching science students, and it is partly in the strength of our future scientists that the national welfare lies. Nevertheless, you may decide that I should be deferred because of the result of my medical report, namely, that I am psychiatrically unfit. I feel that no weight whatsoever should be attached to this report because I consider it to be a gross error.
I am calling this error to your attention because I am insane enough not to wish to take advantage of it.
Sincerely,R. P Feynman
Result: “Deferred. 4F Medical Reasons.”
Part 4. From Cornell to Caltech, With a Touch of Brazil
The Dignified Professor
I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere I can say to myself, “At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something; I’m making some contribution”—it’s just psychological.
When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.
Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!
In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you’ve got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it’s the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer periods of time when not much is coming to you. You’re not getting any ideas, and if you’re doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can’t even say “I’m teaching my class.”
If you’re teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn’t do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can’t think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you’re rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.
The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.
So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.
But once I was offered such a position.
During the war, when I was still in Los Alamos, Hans Bethe got me this job at Cornell, for $3700 a year. I got an offer from some other place for more, but I like Bethe, and I had decided to go to Cornell and wasn’t worried about the money. But Bethe was always watching out for me, and when he found out that others were offering more, he got Cornell to give me a raise to $4000 even before I started.
Cornell told me that I would be teaching a course in mathematical methods of physics, and they told me what day I should come—November 6, I think, but it sounds funny that it could be so late in the year. I took the train from Los Alamos to Ithaca, and spent most of my time writing final reports for the Manhattan Project. I still remember that it was on the night train from Buffalo to Ithaca that I began to work on my course.
You have to understand the pressures at Los Alamos. You did everything as fast as you could; everybody worked very, very hard; and everything was finished at the last minute. So, working out my course on the train a day or two before the first lecture seemed natural to me.
Mathematical methods of physics was an ideal course for me to teach. It was what I had done during the war—apply mathematics to physics. I knew which methods were really useful, and which were not. I had lots of experience by that time, working so hard for four years using mathematical tricks. So I laid out the different subjects in mathematics and how to deal with them, and I still have the papers—the notes I made on the train.
I got off the train in Ithaca, carrying my heavy suitcase on my shoulder, as usual. A guy called out, “Want a taxi, sir?”
I had never wanted to take a taxi: I was always a young fella, short on money, wanting to be my own man. But I thought to myself, “I’m a professor—I must be dignified.” So I took my suitcase down from my shoulder and carried it in my hand, and said, “Yes.”
“Where to?”
“The hotel.”
“Which hotel?”
“One of the hotels you’ve got in Ithaca.”
“Have you got a reservation?”
“No.”
“It’s not so easy to get a room.”
“We’ll just go from one hotel to another. Stay and wait for me.”
I try the Hotel Ithaca: no room. We go over to the Traveller’s Hotel: they don’t have any room either. I say to the taxi guy, “No use driving around town with me; it’s gonna cost a lot of money, I’ll walk from hotel to hotel.” I leave my suitcase in the Traveller’s Hotel and I start to wander around, looking for a room. That shows you how much preparation I had, a new professor.
I found some other guy wandering around looking for a room too. It turned out that the hotel room situation was utterly impossible. After a while we wandered up some sort of a hill, and gradually realized we were coming near the campus of the university.
We saw something that looked like a rooming house, with an open window, and you could see bunk beds in there. By this time it was night, so we decided to ask if we could sleep there. The door was open, but there was nobody in the whole place. We walked up into one of the rooms, and the other guy said, “Come on, let’s just sleep here!”
I didn’t think that was so good. It seemed like stealing to me. Somebody had made the beds; they might come home and find us sleeping in their beds, and we’d get into trouble.
So we go out. We walk a little further, and we see, under a streetlight, an enormous mass of leaves that had been collected—it was autumn—from the lawns. I say, “Hey! We could crawl in these leaves and sleep here!” I tried it; they were rather soft, I was tired of walking around, it would have been perfectly all right. But I didn’t want to get into trouble right away. Back at Los Alamos people had teased me (when I played drums and so on) about what kind of “professor” Cornell was going to get. They said I’d get a reputation right off by doing something silly, so I was trying to be a little dignified. I reluctantly gave up the idea of sleeping in the pile of leaves.
We wandered around a little more, and came to a big building, some important building of the campus. We went in, and there were two couches in the hallway. The other guy said, “I’m sleeping here!” and collapsed onto the couch.
I didn’t want to get into trouble, so I found a janitor down in the basement and asked him whether I could sleep on the couch, and he said “Sure.”
The next morning I woke up, found a place to eat breakfast, and started rushing around as fast as I could to find out when my first class was going to be. I ran into the physics department: “What time is my first class? Did I miss it?”
The guy said, “You have nothing to worry about. Classes don’t start for eight days.”
That was a shock to me! The first thing I said was, “Well, why did you tell me to be here a week ahead?”
“I thought you’d like to come and get acquainted, find a place to stay and settle down before you begin your classes.”
I was back to civilization, and I didn’t know what it was!
Professor Gibbs sent me to the Student Union to find a place to stay. It’s a big place, with lots of students milling around. I go up to a big desk that says HOUSING and I say, “I’m new, and I’m looking for a room.”
The guy says, “Buddy, the housing situation in Ithaca is tough. In fact, it’s so tough that, believe it or not, a professor had to sleep on a couch in this lobby last night!”
I look around, and it’s the same lobby! I turn to him and I say, “Well, I’m that professor, and the professor doesn’t want to do it again!”
My early days at Cornell as a new professor were interesting and sometimes amusing. A few days after I got there, professor Gibbs came into my office and explained to me that ordinarily we don’t accept students this late in the term, but in a few cases, when the applicant is very, very good, we can accept him. He handed me an application and asked me to look it over.
He comes back: “Well, what do you think?”
“I think he’s first rate, and I think we ought to accept him. I think we’re lucky to get him here.”
“Yes, but did you look at his picture?”
“What possible difference could that make? ” I exclaimed.
“Absolutely none, sir! Glad to hear you say that. I wanted to see what kind of a man we had for our new professor.” Gibbs liked the way I came right back at him without thinking to myself, “He’s the head of the department, and I’m new here, so I’d better be careful what I say.” I haven’t got the speed to think like that; my first reaction is immediate, and I say the first thing that comes into my mind.
Then another guy came into my office. He wanted to talk to me about philosophy, and I can’t really quite remember what he said, but he wanted me to join some kind of a club of professors. The club was some sort of anti-Semitic club that thought the Nazis weren’t so bad. He tried to explain to me how there were too many Jews doing this and that—some crazy thing. So I waited until he got all finished, and said to him, “You know, you made a big mistake: I was brought up in a Jewish family.” He went out, and that was the beginning of my loss of respect for some of the professors in the humanities, and other areas, at Cornell University.
I was starting over, after my wife’s death, and I wanted to meet some girls. In those days there was a lot of social dancing. So there were a lot of dances at Cornell, mixers to get people together, especially for the freshmen and others returning to school.
I remember the first dance that I went to. I hadn’t been dancing for three or four years while I was at Los Alamos; I hadn’t even been in society. So I went to this dance and danced as best I could, which I thought was reasonably all right. You can usually tell somebody’s dancing with you and they feel pretty good about it.
As we danced I would talk with the girl a little bit; she would ask me some questions about myself, and I would ask some about her. But when I wanted to dance with a girl I had danced with before, I had to look for her.
“Would you like to dance again?”
“No, I’m sorry; I need some air.” Or, “Well, I have to go to the ladies’ room”—this and that excuse, from two or three girls in a row! What was the matter with me? Was my dancing lousy? Was my personality lousy?
I danced with another girl, and again came the usual questions: “Are you a student, or a graduate student?” (There were a lot of students who looked old then because they had been in the army.)
“No, I’m a professor.”
“Oh? A professor of what?”
“Theoretical physics.”
“I suppose you worked on the atomic bomb.”
“Yes, I was at Los Alamos during the war.”
She said, “You’re a damn liar!”—and walked off.
That relieved me a great deal. It explained everything. I had been telling all the girls the simple-minded, stupid truth, and I never knew what the trouble was. It was perfectly obvious that I was being shunned by one girl after another when I did everything perfectly nice and natural and was polite, and answered the questions. Everything would look very pleasant, and then thwoop—it wouldn’t work. I didn’t understand it until this woman fortunately called me a damn liar.
So then I tried to avoid all the questions, and it had the opposite effect: “Are you a freshman?”
“Well, no.”
“Are you a graduate student?”
“No.”
“What are you?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“Why won’t you tell us what you are?”
“I don’t want to …—and they’d keep talking to me!
I ended up with two girls over at my house and one of them told me that I really shouldn’t feel uncomfortable about being a freshman; there were plenty of guys my age who were starting out in college, and it was really all right. They were sophomores, and were being quite motherly, the two of them. They worked very hard on my psychology, but I didn’t want the situation to get so distorted and so misunderstood, so I let them know I was a professor. They were very upset that I had fooled them. I had a lot of trouble being a young professor at Cornell.
Anyway, I began to teach the course in mathematical methods in physics, and I think I also taught another course—electricity and magnetism, perhaps. I also intended to do research. Before the war, while I was getting my degree, I had many ideas: I had invented new methods of doing quantum mechanics with path integrals, and I had a lot of stuff I wanted to do.
At Cornell, I’d work on preparing my courses, and I’d go over to the library a lot and read through the Arabian Nights and ogle the girls that would go by. But when it came time to do some research, I couldn’t get to work. I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn’t do research! This went on for what I felt was a few years, but when I go back and calculate the timing, it couldn’t have been that long. Perhaps nowadays I wouldn’t think it was such a long time, but then, it seemed to go on for a very long time. I simply couldn’t get started on any problem: I remember writing one or two sentences about some problem in gamma rays and then I couldn’t go any further. I was convinced that from the war and everything else (the death of my wife) I had simply burned myself out.
I now understand it much better. First of all, a young man doesn’t realize how much time it takes to prepare good lectures, for the first time, especially—and to give the lectures, and to make up exam problems, and to check that they’re sensible ones. I was giving good courses, the kind of courses where I put a lot of thought into each lecture. But I didn’t realize that that’s a lot of work! So here I was, “burned out,” reading the ArabianNights and feeling depressed about myself.
During this period I would get offers from different places—universities and industry—with salaries higher than my own. And each time I got something like that I would get a little more depressed. I would say to myself, “Look, they’re giving me these wonderful offers, but they don’t realize that I’m burned out! Of course I can’t accept them. They expect me to accomplish something, and I can’t accomplish anything! I have no ideas …”
Finally there came in the mail an invitation from the Institute for Advanced Study: Einstein.. von Neumann … Wyl … all these great minds! They write to me, and invite me to be a professor there! And not just a regular professor. Somehow they knew my feelings about the Institute: how it’s too theoretical; how there’s not enough real activity and challenge. So they write, “We appreciate that you have a considerable interest in experiments and in teaching, so we have made arrangements to create a special type of professorship, if you wish: half professor at Princeton University, and half at the Institute.”
Institute for Advanced Study! Special exception! A position better than Einstein, even! It was ideal; it was perfect; it was absurd!
It was absurd. The other offers had made me feel worse, up to a point. They were expecting me to accomplish something. But this offer was so ridiculous, so impossible for me ever to live up to, so ridiculously out of proportion. The other ones were just mistakes; this was an absurdity! I laughed at it while I was shaving, thinking about it.
And then I thought to myself, “You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it’s impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!”
It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.
It wasn’t a failure on my part that the Institute for Advanced Study expected me to be that good; it was impossible. It was clearly a mistake-and the moment I appreciated the possibility that they might be wrong, I realized that it was also true of all the other places, including my own university. I am what I am, and if they expected me to be good and they’re offering me some money for it, it’s their hard luck.
Then, within the day, by some strange miracle-perhaps he overheard me talking about it, or maybe he just understood me—Bob Wilson, who was head of the laboratory there at Cornell, called me in to see him. He said, in a serious tone, “Feynman, you’re teaching your classes well; you’re doing a good job, and we’re very satisfied. Any other expectations we might have are a matter of luck. When we hire a professor, we’re taking all the risks. If it comes out good, all right. If it doesn’t, too bad. But you shouldn’t worry about what you’re doing or not doing.” He said it much better than that, and it released me from the feeling of guilt.
Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing—it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference: I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the ArabianNights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.
I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?”
I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.
I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, “Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is …” and I showed him the accelerations.
He says, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?”
“Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.
I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was “playing”—working, really—with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.
It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.
Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!
In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you’ve got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it’s the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer periods of time when not much is coming to you. You’re not getting any ideas, and if you’re doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can’t even say “I’m teaching my class.”
If you’re teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn’t do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can’t think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you’re rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.
The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.
So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.
But once I was offered such a position.
During the war, when I was still in Los Alamos, Hans Bethe got me this job at Cornell, for $3700 a year. I got an offer from some other place for more, but I like Bethe, and I had decided to go to Cornell and wasn’t worried about the money. But Bethe was always watching out for me, and when he found out that others were offering more, he got Cornell to give me a raise to $4000 even before I started.
Cornell told me that I would be teaching a course in mathematical methods of physics, and they told me what day I should come—November 6, I think, but it sounds funny that it could be so late in the year. I took the train from Los Alamos to Ithaca, and spent most of my time writing final reports for the Manhattan Project. I still remember that it was on the night train from Buffalo to Ithaca that I began to work on my course.
You have to understand the pressures at Los Alamos. You did everything as fast as you could; everybody worked very, very hard; and everything was finished at the last minute. So, working out my course on the train a day or two before the first lecture seemed natural to me.
Mathematical methods of physics was an ideal course for me to teach. It was what I had done during the war—apply mathematics to physics. I knew which methods were really useful, and which were not. I had lots of experience by that time, working so hard for four years using mathematical tricks. So I laid out the different subjects in mathematics and how to deal with them, and I still have the papers—the notes I made on the train.
I got off the train in Ithaca, carrying my heavy suitcase on my shoulder, as usual. A guy called out, “Want a taxi, sir?”
I had never wanted to take a taxi: I was always a young fella, short on money, wanting to be my own man. But I thought to myself, “I’m a professor—I must be dignified.” So I took my suitcase down from my shoulder and carried it in my hand, and said, “Yes.”
“Where to?”
“The hotel.”
“Which hotel?”
“One of the hotels you’ve got in Ithaca.”
“Have you got a reservation?”
“No.”
“It’s not so easy to get a room.”
“We’ll just go from one hotel to another. Stay and wait for me.”
I try the Hotel Ithaca: no room. We go over to the Traveller’s Hotel: they don’t have any room either. I say to the taxi guy, “No use driving around town with me; it’s gonna cost a lot of money, I’ll walk from hotel to hotel.” I leave my suitcase in the Traveller’s Hotel and I start to wander around, looking for a room. That shows you how much preparation I had, a new professor.
I found some other guy wandering around looking for a room too. It turned out that the hotel room situation was utterly impossible. After a while we wandered up some sort of a hill, and gradually realized we were coming near the campus of the university.
We saw something that looked like a rooming house, with an open window, and you could see bunk beds in there. By this time it was night, so we decided to ask if we could sleep there. The door was open, but there was nobody in the whole place. We walked up into one of the rooms, and the other guy said, “Come on, let’s just sleep here!”
I didn’t think that was so good. It seemed like stealing to me. Somebody had made the beds; they might come home and find us sleeping in their beds, and we’d get into trouble.
So we go out. We walk a little further, and we see, under a streetlight, an enormous mass of leaves that had been collected—it was autumn—from the lawns. I say, “Hey! We could crawl in these leaves and sleep here!” I tried it; they were rather soft, I was tired of walking around, it would have been perfectly all right. But I didn’t want to get into trouble right away. Back at Los Alamos people had teased me (when I played drums and so on) about what kind of “professor” Cornell was going to get. They said I’d get a reputation right off by doing something silly, so I was trying to be a little dignified. I reluctantly gave up the idea of sleeping in the pile of leaves.
We wandered around a little more, and came to a big building, some important building of the campus. We went in, and there were two couches in the hallway. The other guy said, “I’m sleeping here!” and collapsed onto the couch.
I didn’t want to get into trouble, so I found a janitor down in the basement and asked him whether I could sleep on the couch, and he said “Sure.”
The next morning I woke up, found a place to eat breakfast, and started rushing around as fast as I could to find out when my first class was going to be. I ran into the physics department: “What time is my first class? Did I miss it?”
The guy said, “You have nothing to worry about. Classes don’t start for eight days.”
That was a shock to me! The first thing I said was, “Well, why did you tell me to be here a week ahead?”
“I thought you’d like to come and get acquainted, find a place to stay and settle down before you begin your classes.”
I was back to civilization, and I didn’t know what it was!
Professor Gibbs sent me to the Student Union to find a place to stay. It’s a big place, with lots of students milling around. I go up to a big desk that says HOUSING and I say, “I’m new, and I’m looking for a room.”
The guy says, “Buddy, the housing situation in Ithaca is tough. In fact, it’s so tough that, believe it or not, a professor had to sleep on a couch in this lobby last night!”
I look around, and it’s the same lobby! I turn to him and I say, “Well, I’m that professor, and the professor doesn’t want to do it again!”
My early days at Cornell as a new professor were interesting and sometimes amusing. A few days after I got there, professor Gibbs came into my office and explained to me that ordinarily we don’t accept students this late in the term, but in a few cases, when the applicant is very, very good, we can accept him. He handed me an application and asked me to look it over.
He comes back: “Well, what do you think?”
“I think he’s first rate, and I think we ought to accept him. I think we’re lucky to get him here.”
“Yes, but did you look at his picture?”
“What possible difference could that make? ” I exclaimed.
“Absolutely none, sir! Glad to hear you say that. I wanted to see what kind of a man we had for our new professor.” Gibbs liked the way I came right back at him without thinking to myself, “He’s the head of the department, and I’m new here, so I’d better be careful what I say.” I haven’t got the speed to think like that; my first reaction is immediate, and I say the first thing that comes into my mind.
Then another guy came into my office. He wanted to talk to me about philosophy, and I can’t really quite remember what he said, but he wanted me to join some kind of a club of professors. The club was some sort of anti-Semitic club that thought the Nazis weren’t so bad. He tried to explain to me how there were too many Jews doing this and that—some crazy thing. So I waited until he got all finished, and said to him, “You know, you made a big mistake: I was brought up in a Jewish family.” He went out, and that was the beginning of my loss of respect for some of the professors in the humanities, and other areas, at Cornell University.
I was starting over, after my wife’s death, and I wanted to meet some girls. In those days there was a lot of social dancing. So there were a lot of dances at Cornell, mixers to get people together, especially for the freshmen and others returning to school.
I remember the first dance that I went to. I hadn’t been dancing for three or four years while I was at Los Alamos; I hadn’t even been in society. So I went to this dance and danced as best I could, which I thought was reasonably all right. You can usually tell somebody’s dancing with you and they feel pretty good about it.
As we danced I would talk with the girl a little bit; she would ask me some questions about myself, and I would ask some about her. But when I wanted to dance with a girl I had danced with before, I had to look for her.
“Would you like to dance again?”
“No, I’m sorry; I need some air.” Or, “Well, I have to go to the ladies’ room”—this and that excuse, from two or three girls in a row! What was the matter with me? Was my dancing lousy? Was my personality lousy?
I danced with another girl, and again came the usual questions: “Are you a student, or a graduate student?” (There were a lot of students who looked old then because they had been in the army.)
“No, I’m a professor.”
“Oh? A professor of what?”
“Theoretical physics.”
“I suppose you worked on the atomic bomb.”
“Yes, I was at Los Alamos during the war.”
She said, “You’re a damn liar!”—and walked off.
That relieved me a great deal. It explained everything. I had been telling all the girls the simple-minded, stupid truth, and I never knew what the trouble was. It was perfectly obvious that I was being shunned by one girl after another when I did everything perfectly nice and natural and was polite, and answered the questions. Everything would look very pleasant, and then thwoop—it wouldn’t work. I didn’t understand it until this woman fortunately called me a damn liar.
So then I tried to avoid all the questions, and it had the opposite effect: “Are you a freshman?”
“Well, no.”
“Are you a graduate student?”
“No.”
“What are you?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“Why won’t you tell us what you are?”
“I don’t want to …—and they’d keep talking to me!
I ended up with two girls over at my house and one of them told me that I really shouldn’t feel uncomfortable about being a freshman; there were plenty of guys my age who were starting out in college, and it was really all right. They were sophomores, and were being quite motherly, the two of them. They worked very hard on my psychology, but I didn’t want the situation to get so distorted and so misunderstood, so I let them know I was a professor. They were very upset that I had fooled them. I had a lot of trouble being a young professor at Cornell.
Anyway, I began to teach the course in mathematical methods in physics, and I think I also taught another course—electricity and magnetism, perhaps. I also intended to do research. Before the war, while I was getting my degree, I had many ideas: I had invented new methods of doing quantum mechanics with path integrals, and I had a lot of stuff I wanted to do.
At Cornell, I’d work on preparing my courses, and I’d go over to the library a lot and read through the Arabian Nights and ogle the girls that would go by. But when it came time to do some research, I couldn’t get to work. I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn’t do research! This went on for what I felt was a few years, but when I go back and calculate the timing, it couldn’t have been that long. Perhaps nowadays I wouldn’t think it was such a long time, but then, it seemed to go on for a very long time. I simply couldn’t get started on any problem: I remember writing one or two sentences about some problem in gamma rays and then I couldn’t go any further. I was convinced that from the war and everything else (the death of my wife) I had simply burned myself out.
I now understand it much better. First of all, a young man doesn’t realize how much time it takes to prepare good lectures, for the first time, especially—and to give the lectures, and to make up exam problems, and to check that they’re sensible ones. I was giving good courses, the kind of courses where I put a lot of thought into each lecture. But I didn’t realize that that’s a lot of work! So here I was, “burned out,” reading the ArabianNights and feeling depressed about myself.
During this period I would get offers from different places—universities and industry—with salaries higher than my own. And each time I got something like that I would get a little more depressed. I would say to myself, “Look, they’re giving me these wonderful offers, but they don’t realize that I’m burned out! Of course I can’t accept them. They expect me to accomplish something, and I can’t accomplish anything! I have no ideas …”
Finally there came in the mail an invitation from the Institute for Advanced Study: Einstein.. von Neumann … Wyl … all these great minds! They write to me, and invite me to be a professor there! And not just a regular professor. Somehow they knew my feelings about the Institute: how it’s too theoretical; how there’s not enough real activity and challenge. So they write, “We appreciate that you have a considerable interest in experiments and in teaching, so we have made arrangements to create a special type of professorship, if you wish: half professor at Princeton University, and half at the Institute.”
Institute for Advanced Study! Special exception! A position better than Einstein, even! It was ideal; it was perfect; it was absurd!
It was absurd. The other offers had made me feel worse, up to a point. They were expecting me to accomplish something. But this offer was so ridiculous, so impossible for me ever to live up to, so ridiculously out of proportion. The other ones were just mistakes; this was an absurdity! I laughed at it while I was shaving, thinking about it.
And then I thought to myself, “You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it’s impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!”
It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.
It wasn’t a failure on my part that the Institute for Advanced Study expected me to be that good; it was impossible. It was clearly a mistake-and the moment I appreciated the possibility that they might be wrong, I realized that it was also true of all the other places, including my own university. I am what I am, and if they expected me to be good and they’re offering me some money for it, it’s their hard luck.
Then, within the day, by some strange miracle-perhaps he overheard me talking about it, or maybe he just understood me—Bob Wilson, who was head of the laboratory there at Cornell, called me in to see him. He said, in a serious tone, “Feynman, you’re teaching your classes well; you’re doing a good job, and we’re very satisfied. Any other expectations we might have are a matter of luck. When we hire a professor, we’re taking all the risks. If it comes out good, all right. If it doesn’t, too bad. But you shouldn’t worry about what you’re doing or not doing.” He said it much better than that, and it released me from the feeling of guilt.
Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing—it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference: I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the ArabianNights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.
I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?”
I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.
I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, “Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is …” and I showed him the accelerations.
He says, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?”
“Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.
I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was “playing”—working, really—with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.
It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
Any Questions?
When I was at Cornell I was asked to give a series of lectures once a week at an aeronautics laboratory in Buffalo. Cornell had made an arrangement with the laboratory which included evening lectures in physics to be given by somebody from the university. There was some guy already doing it, but there were complaints, so the physics department came to me. I was a young professor at the time and I couldn’t say no very easily, so I agreed to do it.
To get to Buffalo they had me go on a little airline which consisted of one airplane. It was called Robinson Airlines (it later became Mohawk Airlines) and I remember the first time I flew to Buffalo, Mr. Robinson was the pilot. He knocked the ice off the wings and we flew away.
All in all, I didn’t enjoy the idea of going to Buffalo every Thursday night. The university was paying me $35 in addition to my expenses. I was a Depression kid, and I figured I’d save the $35, which was a sizable amount of money in those days.
Suddenly I got an idea: I realized that the purpose of the $35 was to make the trip to Buffalo more attractive, and the way to do that is to spend the money. So I decided to spend the $35 to entertain myself each time I went to Buffalo, and see if I could make the trip worthwhile.
I didn’t have much experience with the rest of the world. Not knowing how to get started, I asked the taxi driver who picked me up at the airport to guide me through the ins and outs of entertaining myself in Buffalo. He was very helpful, and I still remember his name—Marcuso, who drove car number 169. I would always ask for him when I came into the airport on Thursday nights.
As I was going to give my first lecture I asked Marcuso, “Where’s an interesting bar where lots of things are going on?” I thought that things went on in bars.
“The Alibi Room,” he said. “It’s a lively place where you can meet lots of people. I’ll take you there after your lecture.”
After the lecture Marcuso picked me up and drove me to the Alibi Room. On the way, I say, “Listen, I’m gonna have to ask for some kind of drink. What’s the name of a good whiskey?”
“Ask for Black and White, water on the side,” he counseled.
The Alibi Room was an elegant place with lots of people and lots of activity. The women were dressed in furs, everybody was friendly, and the phones were ringing all the time.
I walked up to the bar and ordered my Black and White, water on the side. The bartender was very friendly quickly found a beautiful woman to sit next to me, and introduced her. I bought her drinks. I liked the place and decided to come back the following week.
Every Thursday night I’d come to Buffalo and be driven in car number 169 to my lecture and then to the Alibi Room. I’d walk into the bar and order my Black and White, water on the side. After a few weeks of this it got to the point where as soon as I would come in, before I reached the bar, there would be a Black and White, water on the side, waiting for me. “Your regular, sir;’ was the bartender’s greeting.
I’d take the whole shot glass down at once, to show I was a tough guy, like I had seen in the movies, and then I’d sit around for about twenty seconds before I drank the water. After a while I didn’t even need the water.
The bartender always saw to it that the empty chair next to mine was quickly filled by a beautiful woman, and everything would start off all right, but just before the bar closed, they all had to go off somewhere. I thought it was possibly because I was getting pretty drunk by that time.
One time, as the Alibi Room was closing, the girl I was buying drinks for that night suggested we go to another place where she knew a lot of people. It was on the second floor of some other building which gave no hint that there was a bar upstairs. All the bars in Buffalo had to close at two o’clock, and all the people in the bars would get sucked into this big hall on the second floor, and keep right on going—illegally, of course.
I tried to figure out a way that I could stay in bars and watch what was going on without getting drunk. One night I noticed a guy who had been there a lot go up to the bar and order a glass of milk. Everybody knew what his problem was: he had an ulcer, the poor fella. That gave me an idea.
The next time I come into the Alibi Room the bartender says, “The usual, sir?”
“No. Coke. Just plain Coke,” I say, with a disappointed look on my face.
The other guys gather around and sympathize: “Yeah, I was on the wagon three weeks ago,” one says. “It’s really tough, Dick, it’s really tough,” says another.
They all honored me. I was “on the wagon” now, and had the guts to enter that bar, with all its “temptations,” and just order Coke—because, of course, I had to see my friends. And I maintained that for a month! I was a real tough bastard.
One time I was in the men’s room of the bar and there was a guy at the urinal. He was kind of drunk, and said to me in a mean-sounding voice, “I don’t like your face. I think I’ll push it in.”
I was scared green. I replied in an equally mean voice, “Get out of my way, or I’ll pee right through ya!”
He said something else, and I figured it was getting pretty close to a fight now. I had never been in a fight. I didn’t know what to do, exactly, and I was afraid of getting hurt. I did think of one thing: I moved away from the wall, because I figured if I got hit, I’d get hit from the back, too.
Then I felt a sort of funny crunching in my eye—it didn’t hurt much—and the next thing I know, I’m slamming the son of a gun right back, automatically. It was remarkable for me to discover that I didn’t have to think; the “machinery” knew what to do.
“OK. That’s one for one,” I said. “Ya wanna keep on goin’?”
The other guy backed off and left. We would have killed each other if the other guy was as dumb as I was.
I went to wash up, my hands are shaking, blood is leaking out of my gums—I’ve got a weak place in my gums—and my eye hurt. After I calmed down I went back into the bar and swaggered up to the bartender: “Black and White, water on the side,” I said. I figured it would calm my nerves.
I didn’t realize it, but the guy I socked in the men’s room was over in another part of the bar, talking with three other guys. Soon these three guys—big, tough guys—came over to where I was sitting and leaned over me. They looked down threateningly, and said, “What’s the idea of pickin’ a fight with our friend?”
Well I’m so dumb I don’t realize I’m being intimidated; all I know is right and wrong. I simply whip around and snap at them, “Why don’t ya find out who started what first, before ya start makin’ trouble?”
The big guys were so taken aback by the fact that their intimidation didn’t work that they backed away and left.
After a while one of the guys came back and said to me, “You’re right, Curly’s always doin’ that. He’s always gettin’ into fights and askin’ us to straighten it out.”
“You’re damn tootin’ I’m right!” I said, and the guy sat down next to me.
Curly and the other two fellas came over and sat down on the other side of me, two seats away. Curly said something about my eye not looking too good, and I said his didn’t look to be in the best of shape either.
I continue talking tough, because I figure that’s the way a real man is supposed to act in a bar.
The situation’s getting tighter and tighter, and people in the bar are worrying about what’s going to happen. The bartender says, “No fighting in here, boys! Calm down!”
Curly hisses, “That’s OK; we’ll get ‘im when he goes out.”
Then a genius comes by. Every field has its first-rate experts. This fella comes over to me and says, “Hey, Dan! I didn’t know you were in town! It’s good to see you!”
Then he says to Curly, “Say, Paul! I’d like you to meet a good friend of mine, Dan, here. I think you two guys would like each other. Why don’t you shake?”
We shake hands. Curly says, “Uh, pleased to meet you.”
Then the genius leans over to me and very quietly whispers, “Now get out of here fast!”
“But they said they would …”
“Just go!” he says.
I got my coat and went out quickly. I walked along near the walls of the buildings, in case they went looking for me. Nobody came out, and I went to my hotel. It happened to be the night of the last lecture, so I never went back to the Alibi Room, at least for a few years.
(I did go back to the Alibi Room about ten years later, and it was all different. It wasn’t nice and polished like it was before; it was sleazy and had seedy-looking people in it. I talked to the bartender, who was a different man, and told him about the old days. “Oh, yes!” he said. “This was the bar where all the bookmakers and their girls used to hang out.” I understood then why there were so many friendly and elegant-looking people there, and why the phones were ringing all the time.)
The next morning, when I got up and looked in the mirror, I discovered that a black eye takes a few hours to develop fully. When I got back to Ithaca that day, I went to deliver some stuff over to the dean’s office. A professor of philosophy saw my black eye and exclaimed, “Oh, Mr. Feynman! Don’t tell me you got that walking into a door?”
“Not at all,” I said. “I got it in a fight in the men’s room of a bar in Buffalo.”
“Ha, ha, ha!” he laughed.
Then there was the problem of giving the lecture to my regular class. I walked into the lecture hall with my head down, studying my notes. When I was ready to start, I lifted my head and looked straight at them, and said what I always said before I began my lecture-but this time, in a tougher tone of voice: “Any questions?”
To get to Buffalo they had me go on a little airline which consisted of one airplane. It was called Robinson Airlines (it later became Mohawk Airlines) and I remember the first time I flew to Buffalo, Mr. Robinson was the pilot. He knocked the ice off the wings and we flew away.
All in all, I didn’t enjoy the idea of going to Buffalo every Thursday night. The university was paying me $35 in addition to my expenses. I was a Depression kid, and I figured I’d save the $35, which was a sizable amount of money in those days.
Suddenly I got an idea: I realized that the purpose of the $35 was to make the trip to Buffalo more attractive, and the way to do that is to spend the money. So I decided to spend the $35 to entertain myself each time I went to Buffalo, and see if I could make the trip worthwhile.
I didn’t have much experience with the rest of the world. Not knowing how to get started, I asked the taxi driver who picked me up at the airport to guide me through the ins and outs of entertaining myself in Buffalo. He was very helpful, and I still remember his name—Marcuso, who drove car number 169. I would always ask for him when I came into the airport on Thursday nights.
As I was going to give my first lecture I asked Marcuso, “Where’s an interesting bar where lots of things are going on?” I thought that things went on in bars.
“The Alibi Room,” he said. “It’s a lively place where you can meet lots of people. I’ll take you there after your lecture.”
After the lecture Marcuso picked me up and drove me to the Alibi Room. On the way, I say, “Listen, I’m gonna have to ask for some kind of drink. What’s the name of a good whiskey?”
“Ask for Black and White, water on the side,” he counseled.
The Alibi Room was an elegant place with lots of people and lots of activity. The women were dressed in furs, everybody was friendly, and the phones were ringing all the time.
I walked up to the bar and ordered my Black and White, water on the side. The bartender was very friendly quickly found a beautiful woman to sit next to me, and introduced her. I bought her drinks. I liked the place and decided to come back the following week.
Every Thursday night I’d come to Buffalo and be driven in car number 169 to my lecture and then to the Alibi Room. I’d walk into the bar and order my Black and White, water on the side. After a few weeks of this it got to the point where as soon as I would come in, before I reached the bar, there would be a Black and White, water on the side, waiting for me. “Your regular, sir;’ was the bartender’s greeting.
I’d take the whole shot glass down at once, to show I was a tough guy, like I had seen in the movies, and then I’d sit around for about twenty seconds before I drank the water. After a while I didn’t even need the water.
The bartender always saw to it that the empty chair next to mine was quickly filled by a beautiful woman, and everything would start off all right, but just before the bar closed, they all had to go off somewhere. I thought it was possibly because I was getting pretty drunk by that time.
One time, as the Alibi Room was closing, the girl I was buying drinks for that night suggested we go to another place where she knew a lot of people. It was on the second floor of some other building which gave no hint that there was a bar upstairs. All the bars in Buffalo had to close at two o’clock, and all the people in the bars would get sucked into this big hall on the second floor, and keep right on going—illegally, of course.
I tried to figure out a way that I could stay in bars and watch what was going on without getting drunk. One night I noticed a guy who had been there a lot go up to the bar and order a glass of milk. Everybody knew what his problem was: he had an ulcer, the poor fella. That gave me an idea.
The next time I come into the Alibi Room the bartender says, “The usual, sir?”
“No. Coke. Just plain Coke,” I say, with a disappointed look on my face.
The other guys gather around and sympathize: “Yeah, I was on the wagon three weeks ago,” one says. “It’s really tough, Dick, it’s really tough,” says another.
They all honored me. I was “on the wagon” now, and had the guts to enter that bar, with all its “temptations,” and just order Coke—because, of course, I had to see my friends. And I maintained that for a month! I was a real tough bastard.
One time I was in the men’s room of the bar and there was a guy at the urinal. He was kind of drunk, and said to me in a mean-sounding voice, “I don’t like your face. I think I’ll push it in.”
I was scared green. I replied in an equally mean voice, “Get out of my way, or I’ll pee right through ya!”
He said something else, and I figured it was getting pretty close to a fight now. I had never been in a fight. I didn’t know what to do, exactly, and I was afraid of getting hurt. I did think of one thing: I moved away from the wall, because I figured if I got hit, I’d get hit from the back, too.
Then I felt a sort of funny crunching in my eye—it didn’t hurt much—and the next thing I know, I’m slamming the son of a gun right back, automatically. It was remarkable for me to discover that I didn’t have to think; the “machinery” knew what to do.
“OK. That’s one for one,” I said. “Ya wanna keep on goin’?”
The other guy backed off and left. We would have killed each other if the other guy was as dumb as I was.
I went to wash up, my hands are shaking, blood is leaking out of my gums—I’ve got a weak place in my gums—and my eye hurt. After I calmed down I went back into the bar and swaggered up to the bartender: “Black and White, water on the side,” I said. I figured it would calm my nerves.
I didn’t realize it, but the guy I socked in the men’s room was over in another part of the bar, talking with three other guys. Soon these three guys—big, tough guys—came over to where I was sitting and leaned over me. They looked down threateningly, and said, “What’s the idea of pickin’ a fight with our friend?”
Well I’m so dumb I don’t realize I’m being intimidated; all I know is right and wrong. I simply whip around and snap at them, “Why don’t ya find out who started what first, before ya start makin’ trouble?”
The big guys were so taken aback by the fact that their intimidation didn’t work that they backed away and left.
After a while one of the guys came back and said to me, “You’re right, Curly’s always doin’ that. He’s always gettin’ into fights and askin’ us to straighten it out.”
“You’re damn tootin’ I’m right!” I said, and the guy sat down next to me.
Curly and the other two fellas came over and sat down on the other side of me, two seats away. Curly said something about my eye not looking too good, and I said his didn’t look to be in the best of shape either.
I continue talking tough, because I figure that’s the way a real man is supposed to act in a bar.
The situation’s getting tighter and tighter, and people in the bar are worrying about what’s going to happen. The bartender says, “No fighting in here, boys! Calm down!”
Curly hisses, “That’s OK; we’ll get ‘im when he goes out.”
Then a genius comes by. Every field has its first-rate experts. This fella comes over to me and says, “Hey, Dan! I didn’t know you were in town! It’s good to see you!”
Then he says to Curly, “Say, Paul! I’d like you to meet a good friend of mine, Dan, here. I think you two guys would like each other. Why don’t you shake?”
We shake hands. Curly says, “Uh, pleased to meet you.”
Then the genius leans over to me and very quietly whispers, “Now get out of here fast!”
“But they said they would …”
“Just go!” he says.
I got my coat and went out quickly. I walked along near the walls of the buildings, in case they went looking for me. Nobody came out, and I went to my hotel. It happened to be the night of the last lecture, so I never went back to the Alibi Room, at least for a few years.
(I did go back to the Alibi Room about ten years later, and it was all different. It wasn’t nice and polished like it was before; it was sleazy and had seedy-looking people in it. I talked to the bartender, who was a different man, and told him about the old days. “Oh, yes!” he said. “This was the bar where all the bookmakers and their girls used to hang out.” I understood then why there were so many friendly and elegant-looking people there, and why the phones were ringing all the time.)
The next morning, when I got up and looked in the mirror, I discovered that a black eye takes a few hours to develop fully. When I got back to Ithaca that day, I went to deliver some stuff over to the dean’s office. A professor of philosophy saw my black eye and exclaimed, “Oh, Mr. Feynman! Don’t tell me you got that walking into a door?”
“Not at all,” I said. “I got it in a fight in the men’s room of a bar in Buffalo.”
“Ha, ha, ha!” he laughed.
Then there was the problem of giving the lecture to my regular class. I walked into the lecture hall with my head down, studying my notes. When I was ready to start, I lifted my head and looked straight at them, and said what I always said before I began my lecture-but this time, in a tougher tone of voice: “Any questions?”
I Want My Dollar!
When I was at Cornell I would often come back home to Far Rockaway to visit. One time when I happened to be home, the telephone rings: it’s LONG DISTANCE, from California. In those days, a long distance call meant it was something very important, especially a long distance call from this marvelous place, California, a million miles away.
The guy on the other end says, “Is this Professor Feynman, of Cornell University?”
“That’s right.”
“This is Mr. So-and-so from the Such-and-such Aircraft Company.” It was one of the big airplane companies in California, but unfortunately I can’t remember which one. The guy continues: “We’re planning to start a laboratory on nuclear-propelled rocket airplanes. It will have an annual budget of so-and-so-many million dollars …” Big numbers.
I said, “Just a moment, sir; I don’t know why you’re telling me all this.”
“Just let me speak to you,” he says; “just let me explain everything. Please let me do it my way.” So he goes on a little more, and says how many people are going to be in the laboratory, so-and-so-many people at this level, and so-and-so-many Ph.D’s at that level …
“Excuse me, sir,” I say, “but I think you have the wrong fella.”
“Am I talking to Richard Feynman, Richard P. Feynman?”
“Yes, but you’re..
“Would you please let me present what I have to say, sir, and then we’ll discuss it.”
“All right!” I sit down and sort of close my eyes to listen to all this stuff, all these details about this big project, and I still haven’t the slightest idea why he’s giving me all this information,
Finally, when he’s all finished, he says, “I’m telling you about our plans because we want to know if you would like to be the director of the laboratory.”
“Have you really got the right fella?” I say. “I’m a professor of theoretical physics. I’m not a rocket engineer, or an airplane engineer, or anything like that.”
“We’re sure we have the right fellow.’
“Where did you get my name then? Why did you decide to call me?”
“Sir, your name is on the patent for nuclear-powered, rocket-propelled airplanes.”
“Oh,” I said, and I realized why my name was on the patent, and I’ll have to tell you the story. I told the man, “I’m sorry, but I would like to continue as a professor at Cornell University.”
What had happened was, during the war, at Los Alamos, there was a very nice fella in charge of the patent office for the government, named Captain Smith. Smith sent around a notice to everybody that said something like, “We in the patent office would like to patent every idea you have for the United States government, for which you are working now. Any idea you have on nuclear energy or its application that you may think everybody knows about, everybody doesn’t know about: Just come to my office and tell me the idea.”
I see Smith at lunch, and as we’re walking back to the technical area, I say to him, “That note you sent around: That’s kind of crazy to have us come in and tell you every idea.”
We discussed it back and forth—by this time we’re in his office-and I say, “There are so many ideas about nuclear energy that are so perfectly obvious, that I’d be here all day telling you stuff.”
“LIKE WHAT?”
“Nothin’ to it!” I say. “Example: nuclear reactor … under water.. water goes in … steam goes out the other side … Pshshshsht—it’s a submarine. Or: nuclear reactor … air comes rushing in the front… heated up by nuclear reaction … out the back it goes … Boom! Through the air—it’s an airplane. Or: nuclear reactor.. you have hydrogen go through the thing … Zoom!—it’s a rocket. Or: nuclear reactor … only instead of using ordinary uranium, you use enriched uranium with beryllium oxide at high temperature to make it more efficient … It’s an electrical power plant. There’s a million ideas!” I said, as I went out the door.
Nothing happened.
About three months later, Smith calls me in the office and says, “Feynman, the submarine has already been taken. But the other three are yours.” So when the guys at the airplane company in California are planning their laboratory, and try to find out who’s an expert in rocket-propelled whatnots, there’s nothing to it: They look at who’s got the patent on it!
Anyway, Smith told me to sign some papers for the three ideas I was giving to the government to patent. Now, it S some dopey legal thing, but when you give the patent to the government, the document you sign is not a legal document unless there’s some exchange, so the paper I signed said, “For the sum of one dollar, I, Richard P. Feynman, give this idea to the government …”
I sign the paper.
“Where’s my dollar?”
“That’s just a formality,” he says. “We haven’t got any funds set up to give a dollar.”
“You’ve got it all set up that I’m signing for the dollar,” I say. “I want my dollar!”
“This is silly,” Smith protests.
“No, it’s not,” I say. “It’s a legal document, You made me sign it, and I’m an honest man. There’s no fooling around about it.”
“All right, all right!” he says, exasperated. “I’ll give you a dollar, from my pocket!”
“OK.”
I take the dollar, and I realize what I’m going to do. I go down to the grocery store, and I buy a dollar’s worth—which was pretty good, then—of cookies and goodies, those chocolate goodies with marshmallow inside, a whole lot of stuff.
I come back to the theoretical laboratory, and I give them out: “I got a prize, everybody! Have a cookie! I got a prize! A dollar for my patent! I got a dollar for my patent!”
Everybody who had one of those patents—a lot of people had been sending them in—everybody comes down to Captain Smith: they want their dollar!
He starts shelling them out of his pocket, but soon realizes that it’s going to be a hemorrhage! He went crazy trying to set up a fund where he could get the dollars these guys were insisting on. I don’t know how he settled up.
The guy on the other end says, “Is this Professor Feynman, of Cornell University?”
“That’s right.”
“This is Mr. So-and-so from the Such-and-such Aircraft Company.” It was one of the big airplane companies in California, but unfortunately I can’t remember which one. The guy continues: “We’re planning to start a laboratory on nuclear-propelled rocket airplanes. It will have an annual budget of so-and-so-many million dollars …” Big numbers.
I said, “Just a moment, sir; I don’t know why you’re telling me all this.”
“Just let me speak to you,” he says; “just let me explain everything. Please let me do it my way.” So he goes on a little more, and says how many people are going to be in the laboratory, so-and-so-many people at this level, and so-and-so-many Ph.D’s at that level …
“Excuse me, sir,” I say, “but I think you have the wrong fella.”
“Am I talking to Richard Feynman, Richard P. Feynman?”
“Yes, but you’re..
“Would you please let me present what I have to say, sir, and then we’ll discuss it.”
“All right!” I sit down and sort of close my eyes to listen to all this stuff, all these details about this big project, and I still haven’t the slightest idea why he’s giving me all this information,
Finally, when he’s all finished, he says, “I’m telling you about our plans because we want to know if you would like to be the director of the laboratory.”
“Have you really got the right fella?” I say. “I’m a professor of theoretical physics. I’m not a rocket engineer, or an airplane engineer, or anything like that.”
“We’re sure we have the right fellow.’
“Where did you get my name then? Why did you decide to call me?”
“Sir, your name is on the patent for nuclear-powered, rocket-propelled airplanes.”
“Oh,” I said, and I realized why my name was on the patent, and I’ll have to tell you the story. I told the man, “I’m sorry, but I would like to continue as a professor at Cornell University.”
What had happened was, during the war, at Los Alamos, there was a very nice fella in charge of the patent office for the government, named Captain Smith. Smith sent around a notice to everybody that said something like, “We in the patent office would like to patent every idea you have for the United States government, for which you are working now. Any idea you have on nuclear energy or its application that you may think everybody knows about, everybody doesn’t know about: Just come to my office and tell me the idea.”
I see Smith at lunch, and as we’re walking back to the technical area, I say to him, “That note you sent around: That’s kind of crazy to have us come in and tell you every idea.”
We discussed it back and forth—by this time we’re in his office-and I say, “There are so many ideas about nuclear energy that are so perfectly obvious, that I’d be here all day telling you stuff.”
“LIKE WHAT?”
“Nothin’ to it!” I say. “Example: nuclear reactor … under water.. water goes in … steam goes out the other side … Pshshshsht—it’s a submarine. Or: nuclear reactor … air comes rushing in the front… heated up by nuclear reaction … out the back it goes … Boom! Through the air—it’s an airplane. Or: nuclear reactor.. you have hydrogen go through the thing … Zoom!—it’s a rocket. Or: nuclear reactor … only instead of using ordinary uranium, you use enriched uranium with beryllium oxide at high temperature to make it more efficient … It’s an electrical power plant. There’s a million ideas!” I said, as I went out the door.
Nothing happened.
About three months later, Smith calls me in the office and says, “Feynman, the submarine has already been taken. But the other three are yours.” So when the guys at the airplane company in California are planning their laboratory, and try to find out who’s an expert in rocket-propelled whatnots, there’s nothing to it: They look at who’s got the patent on it!
Anyway, Smith told me to sign some papers for the three ideas I was giving to the government to patent. Now, it S some dopey legal thing, but when you give the patent to the government, the document you sign is not a legal document unless there’s some exchange, so the paper I signed said, “For the sum of one dollar, I, Richard P. Feynman, give this idea to the government …”
I sign the paper.
“Where’s my dollar?”
“That’s just a formality,” he says. “We haven’t got any funds set up to give a dollar.”
“You’ve got it all set up that I’m signing for the dollar,” I say. “I want my dollar!”
“This is silly,” Smith protests.
“No, it’s not,” I say. “It’s a legal document, You made me sign it, and I’m an honest man. There’s no fooling around about it.”
“All right, all right!” he says, exasperated. “I’ll give you a dollar, from my pocket!”
“OK.”
I take the dollar, and I realize what I’m going to do. I go down to the grocery store, and I buy a dollar’s worth—which was pretty good, then—of cookies and goodies, those chocolate goodies with marshmallow inside, a whole lot of stuff.
I come back to the theoretical laboratory, and I give them out: “I got a prize, everybody! Have a cookie! I got a prize! A dollar for my patent! I got a dollar for my patent!”
Everybody who had one of those patents—a lot of people had been sending them in—everybody comes down to Captain Smith: they want their dollar!
He starts shelling them out of his pocket, but soon realizes that it’s going to be a hemorrhage! He went crazy trying to set up a fund where he could get the dollars these guys were insisting on. I don’t know how he settled up.
You Just Ask Them?
When I was first at Cornell I corresponded with a girl I had met in New Mexico while I was working on the bomb. I got to thinking, when she mentioned some other fella she knew, that I had better go out there quickly at the end of the school year and try to save the situation. But when I got out there, I found it was too late, so I ended up in a motel in Albuquerque with a free summer and nothing to do.
The Casa Grande Motel was on Route 66, the main highway through town. About three places further down the road there was a little nightclub that had entertainment. Since I had nothing to do, and since I enjoyed watching and meeting people in bars, I very often went to this nightclub.
When I first went there I was talking with some guy at the bar, and we noticed a wholetable full of nice young ladies—TWA hostesses, I think they were-who were having some sort of birthday party. The other guy said, “Come on, let’s get up our nerve and ask them to dance.”
So we asked two of them to dance, and afterwards they invited us to sit with the other girls at the table. After a few drinks, the waiter came around: “Anybody want anything?”
I liked to imitate being drunk, so although I was completely sober, I turned to the girl I’d been dancing with and asked her in a drunken voice, “YaWANanything?”
“What can we have?” she asks.
“Annnnnnnnnnnnything you want—ANYTHING!”
“All right! We’ll have champagne!” she says happily.
So I say in a loud voice that everybody in the bar can hear, “OK! Ch-ch-champagne for evvverybody!”
Then I hear my friend talking to my girl, saying what a dirty trick it is to “take all that dough from him because he’s drunk,” and I’m beginning to think maybe I made a mistake.
Well, nicely enough, the waiter comes over to me, leans down, and says in a low voice, “Sir, that’s sixteen dollars a bottle.”
I decide to drop the idea of champagne for everybody, so I say in an even louder voice than before, “NEVER MIND!”
I was therefore quite surprised when, a few moments later, the waiter came back to the table with all his fancy stuff—a white towel over his arm, a tray full of glasses, an ice bucket full of ice, and a bottle of champagne. He thought I meant, “Never mind the price,” when I meant, “Never mind the champagne!”
The Casa Grande Motel was on Route 66, the main highway through town. About three places further down the road there was a little nightclub that had entertainment. Since I had nothing to do, and since I enjoyed watching and meeting people in bars, I very often went to this nightclub.
When I first went there I was talking with some guy at the bar, and we noticed a wholetable full of nice young ladies—TWA hostesses, I think they were-who were having some sort of birthday party. The other guy said, “Come on, let’s get up our nerve and ask them to dance.”
So we asked two of them to dance, and afterwards they invited us to sit with the other girls at the table. After a few drinks, the waiter came around: “Anybody want anything?”
I liked to imitate being drunk, so although I was completely sober, I turned to the girl I’d been dancing with and asked her in a drunken voice, “YaWANanything?”
“What can we have?” she asks.
“Annnnnnnnnnnnything you want—ANYTHING!”
“All right! We’ll have champagne!” she says happily.
So I say in a loud voice that everybody in the bar can hear, “OK! Ch-ch-champagne for evvverybody!”
Then I hear my friend talking to my girl, saying what a dirty trick it is to “take all that dough from him because he’s drunk,” and I’m beginning to think maybe I made a mistake.
Well, nicely enough, the waiter comes over to me, leans down, and says in a low voice, “Sir, that’s sixteen dollars a bottle.”
I decide to drop the idea of champagne for everybody, so I say in an even louder voice than before, “NEVER MIND!”
I was therefore quite surprised when, a few moments later, the waiter came back to the table with all his fancy stuff—a white towel over his arm, a tray full of glasses, an ice bucket full of ice, and a bottle of champagne. He thought I meant, “Never mind the price,” when I meant, “Never mind the champagne!”