Feynman Richard P. - Surely Youre Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Part 1

From Far Rockaway to MIT- He Fixes Radios by Thinking! -When I was about eleven or twelve I set up a lab in my house. It consisted of an old wooden packing box that I put shelves in. I had a heater, and Id put in fat and cook french-fried potatoes all the time. I also had a storage battery, and a lamp bank.To build the lamp bank I went down to the five-and-ten and got some sockets you can screw down to a wooden base, and connected them with pieces of bell wire. By making different combinations of switchesin series or parallelI knew I could get different voltages. But what I hadnt realized was that a bulbs resistance depends on its temperature, so the results of my calculations werent the same as the stuff that came out of the circuit. But it was all right, and when the bulbs were in series, all half-lit, they would _gloooooooooow_, very prettyit was great!I had a fuse in the system so if I shorted anything, the fuse would blow. Now I had to have a fuse that was weaker than the fuse in the house, so I made my own fuses by taking tin foil and wrapping it around an old burnt-out fuse. Across my fuse I had a five-watt bulb, so when my fuse blew, the load from the trickle charger that was always charging the storage battery would light up the bulb. The bulb was on the switchboard behind a piece of brown candy paper (it looks red when a lights behind it)so if something went off, Id look up to the switchboard and there would be a big red spot where the fuse went. It was _fun_!I enjoyed radios. I started with a crystal set that I bought at the store, and I used to listen to it at night in bed while I was going to sleep, through a pair of earphones. When my mother and father went out until late at night, they would come into my room and take the earphones offand worry about what was going into my head while I was asleep.About that time I invented a burglar alarm, which was a very simple-minded thing: it was just a big battery and a bell connected with some wire. When the door to my room opened, it pushed the wire against the battery and closed the circuit, and the bell would go off.One night my mother and father came home from a night out and very, very quietly, so as not to disturb the child, opened the door to come into my room to take my earphones off. All of a sudden this tremendous bell went off with a helluva racketBONG BONG BONG BONG BONG!!! I jumped out of bed yelling, It worked! It worked!I had a Ford coila spark coil from an automobileand I had the spark terminals at the top of my switchboard. I would put a Raytheon RH tube, which had argon gas in it, across the terminals, and the spark would make a purple glow inside the vacuumit was just great!One day I was playing with the Ford coil, punching holes in paper with the sparks, and the paper caught on fire. Soon I couldnt hold it any more because it was burning near my fingers, so I dropped it in a metal wastebasket which had a lot of newspapers in it. Newspapers burn fast, you know, and the flame looked pretty big inside the room. I shut the door so my motherwho was playing bridge with some friends in the living roomwouldnt find out there was a fire in my room, took a magazine that was lying nearby, and put it over the wastebasket to smother the fire.After the fire was out I took the magazine off, but now the room began to fill up with smoke. The wastebasket was still too hot to handle, so I got a pair of pliers, carried it across the room, and held it out the window for the smoke to blow out.But because it was breezy outside, the wind lit the fire again, and now the magazine was out of reach. So I pulled the flaming wastebasket back in through the window to get the magazine, and I noticed there were curtains in the windowit was very dangerous!Well, I got the magazine, put the fire out again, and this time kept the magazine with me while I shook the glowing coals out of the wastepaper basket onto the street, two or three floors below. Then I went out of my room, closed the door behind me, and said to my mother, Im going out to play, and the smoke went out slowly through the windows.I also did some things with electric motors and built an amplifier for a photo cell that I bought that could make a bell ring when I put my hand in front of the cell. I didnt get to do as much as I wanted to, because my mother kept putting me out all the time, to play. But I was often in the house, fiddling with my lab.I bought radios at rummage sales. I didnt have any money, but it wasnt very expensive-they were old, broken radios, and Id buy them and try to fix them. Usually they were broken in some simple-minded waysome obvious wire was hanging loose, or a coil was broken or partly unwoundso I could get some of them going. On one of these radios one night I got WACO in Waco, Texasit was tremendously exciting!On this same tube radio up in my lab I was able to hear a station up in Schenectady called WGN. Now, all of us kids my two cousins, my sister, and the neighborhood kidslistened on the radio downstairs to a program called the Eno Crime ClubEno effervescent saltsit was _the_ thing! Well, I discovered that I could hear this program up in my lab on WGN one hour before it was broadcast in New York! So Id discover what was going to happen, and then, when we were all sitting around the radio downstairs listening to the Eno Crime Club, Id say, You know, we havent heard from so-and-so in a long time. I betcha he comes and saves the situation.Two seconds later, _bup-bup_, he comes! So they all got excited about this, and I predicted a couple of other things. Then they realized that there must be some trick to itthat I must know, somehow. So I owned up to what it was, that I could hear it upstairs the hour before.You know what the result was, naturally. Now they couldnt wait for the regular hour, They all had to sit upstairs in my lab with this little creaky radio for half an hour, listening to the Eno Crime Club from Schenectady.We lived at that time in a big house; it was left by my grandfather to his children, and they didnt have much money aside from the house. It was a very large, wooden house, and I would run wires all around the outside, and had plugs in all the rooms, so I could always listen to my radios, which were upstairs in my lab. I also had a loudspeakernot the whole speaker, but the part without the big horn on it.One day, when I had my earphones on, I connected them to the loudspeaker, and I discovered something: I put my finger in the speaker and I could hear it in the earphones; I scratched the speaker and Id hear it in the earphones. So I discovered that the speaker could act like a microphone, and you didnt even need any batteries. At school we were talking about Alexander Graham Bell, so I gave a demonstration of the speaker and the earphones. I didnt know it at the time, but I think it was the type of telephone he originally used.So now I had a microphone, and I could broadcast from upstairs to downstairs, and from downstairs to upstairs, using the amplifiers of my rummage-sale radios. At that time my sister Joan, who was nine years younger than I was, must have been about two or three, and there was a guy on the radio called Uncle Don that she liked to listen to. Hed sing little songs about good children, and so on, and hed read cards sent in by parents telling that Mary So-and-so is having a birthday this Saturday at 25 Flatbush Avenue.One day my cousin Francis and I sat Joan down and said that there was a special program she should listen to. Then we ran upstairs and we started to broadcast: This is Uncle Don. We know a very nice little girl named Joan who lives on New Broadway; shes got a birthday comingnot today, but such-and-such. Shes a cute girl. We sang a little song, and then we made music: _Deedle leet deet, doodle doodle loot doot; deedle deedle leet, doodle loot doot doo_ We went through the whole deal, and then we came downstairs: How was it? Did you like the program?It was good, she said, but why did you make the music with your mouth?One day I got a telephone call: Mister, are you Richard Feynman ?Yes.This is a hotel. We have a radio that doesnt work, and would like it repaired. We understand you might be able to do something about it.But Im only a little boy, I said. I dont know howYes, we know that, but wed like you to come over anyway.It was a hotel that my aunt was running, but I didnt know that. I went over there withthey still tell the storya big screwdriver in my back pocket. Well, I was small, so _any_ screwdriver looked big in my back pocket.I went up to the radio and tried to fix it. I didnt know anything about it, but there was also a handyman at the hotel, and either he noticed, or I noticed, a loose knob on the rheostatto turn up the volumeso that it wasnt turning the shaft. He went off and filed something, and fixed it up so it worked.The next radio I tried to fix didnt work at all. That was easy: it wasnt plugged in right. As the repair jobs got more and more complicated, I got better and better, and more elaborate. I bought myself a milliammeter in New York and converted it into a voltmeter that had different scales on it by using the right lengths (which I calculated) of very fine copper wire. It wasnt very accurate, hut it was good enough to tell whether things were in the right ballpark at different connections in those radio sets.The main reason people hired me was the Depression. They didnt have any money to fix their radios, and theyd hear about this kid who would do it for less. So Id climb on roofs to fix antennas, and all kinds of stuff. I got a series of lessons of ever-increasing difficulty. Ultimately I got some job like converting a DC set into an AC set, and it was very hard to keep the hum from going through the system, and I didnt build it quite right. I shouldnt have bitten that one off, but I didnt know.One job was really sensational. I was working at the time for a printer, and a man who knew that printer knew I was trying to get jobs fixing radios, so he sent a fellow around to the print shop to pick me up. The guy is obviously poorhis car is a complete wreckand we go to his house which is in a cheap part of town. On the way, I say, Whats the trouble with the radio?He says, When I turn it on it makes a noise, and after a while the noise stops and everythings all right, but I dont like the noise at the beginning.I think to myself: What the hell! If he hasnt got any money, youd think he could stand a little noise for a while.And all the time, on the way to his house, hes saying things like, Do you know anything about radios? How do you know about radiosyoure just a little boy!Hes putting me down the whole way, and Im thinking, So whats the matter with him? So it makes a little noise.But when we got there I went over to the radio and turned it on. Little noise? _My God!_ No wonder the poor guy couldnt stand it. The thing began to roar and wobbleWUH BUH BUH BUH BUHA _tremendous_ amount of noise. Then it quieted down and played correctly. So I started to think: How can that happen?I start walking back and forth, thinking, and I realize that one way it can happen is that the tubes are heating up in the wrong orderthat is, the amplifiers all hot, the tubes are ready to go, and theres nothing feeding in, or theres some back circuit feeding in, or something wrong in the beginning partthe HF partand therefore its making a lot of noise, picking up something. And when the RF circuits finally going, and the grid voltages are adjusted, everythings all right.So the guy says, What are you doing? You come to fix the radio, but youre only walking back and forth!I say, Im thinking! Then I said to myself, All right, take the tubes out, and reverse the order completely in the set. (Many radio sets in those days used the same tubes in different places212s, I think they were, or 212-As.) So I changed the tubes around, stepped to the front of the radio, turned the thing on, and its as quiet as a lamb: it waits until it heats up, and then plays perfectlyno noise.When a person has been negative to you, and then you do something like that, theyre usually a hundred percent the other way, kind of to compensate. He got me other jobs, and kept telling everybody what a tremendous genius I was, saying, He fixes radios by _thinking_! The whole idea of thinking, to fix a radioa little boy stops and thinks, and figures out how to do ithe never thought that was possible.Radio circuits were much easier to understand in those days because everything was out in the open. After you took the set apart (it was a big problem to find the right screws), you could see this was a resistor, thats a condenser, heres a this, theres a that; they were all labeled. And if wax had been dripping from the condenser, it was too hot and you could tell that the condenser was burned out. If there was charcoal on one of the resistors you knew where the trouble was. Or, if you couldnt tell what was the matter by looking at it, youd test it with your voltmeter and see whether voltage was coming through. The sets were simple, the circuits were not complicated. The voltage on the grids was always about one and a half or two volts and the voltages on the plates were one hundred or two hundred, DC. So it wasnt hard for me to fix a radio by understanding what was going on inside, noticing that something wasnt working right, and fixing it.Sometimes it took quite a while. I remember one particular time when it took the whole afternoon to find a burnedout resistor that was not apparent. That particular time it happened to be a friend of my mother, so I _had_ time-there was nobody on my back saying, What are you doing? Instead, they were saying, Would you like a little milk, or some cake? I finally fixed it because I had, and still have, persistence. Once I get on a puzzle, I cant get off. If my mothers friend had said, Never mind, its too much work, Id have blown my top, because I want to beat this damn thing, as long as Ive gone this far. I cant just leave it after Ive found out so much about it. I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.Thats a puzzle drive. Its what accounts for my wanting to decipher Mayan hieroglyphics, for trying to open safes. I remember in high school, during first period a guy would come to me with a puzzle in geometry, or something which had been assigned in his advanced math class. I wouldnt stop until I figured the damn thing outit would take me fifteen or twenty minutes. But during the day, other guys would come to me with the same problem, and Id do it for them in a flash. So for one guy, to do it took me twenty minutes, while there were five guys who thought I was a super-genius.So I got a fancy reputation. During high school every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew. So when I got to MIT there was a dance, and one of the seniors had his girlfriend there, and she knew a lot of puzzles, and he was telling her that I was pretty good at them. So during the dance she came over to me and said, They say youre a smart guy, so heres one for you: A man has eight cords of wood to chop...And I said, He starts by chopping every other one in three parts, because I had heard that one.Then shed go away and come back with another one, and Id always know it.This went on for quite a while, and finally, near the end of the dance, she came over, looking as if she was going to get me for sure this time, and she said, A mother and daughter are traveling to Europe...The daughter got the bubonic plague.She collapsed! That was hardly enough clues to get the answer to that one: It was the long story about how a mother and daughter stop at a hotel and stay in separate rooms, and the next day the mother goes to the daughters room and theres nobody there, or somebody else is there, and she says, Wheres my daughter? and the hotel keeper says, What daughter? and the registers got only the mothers name, and so on, and so on, and theres a big mystery as to what happened. The answer is, the daughter got bubonic plague, and the hotel, not wanting to have to close up, spirits the daughter away, cleans up the room, and erases all evidence of her having been there. It was a long tale, but I had heard it, so when the girl started out with, A mother and daughter are traveling to Europe, I knew one thing that started that way, so I took a flying guess, and got it.We had a thing at high school called the algebra team, which consisted of five kids, and we would travel to different schools as a team and have competitions. We would sit in one row of seats and the other team would sit in another row. A teacher, who was running the contest, would take out an envelope, and on the envelope it says forty-five seconds. She opens it up, writes the problem on the blackboard, and says, Go!so you really have more than forty-five seconds because while shes writing you can think. Now the game was this: You have a piece of paper, and on it you can write anything, you can do anything. The only thing that counted was the answer. If the answer was six books, youd have to write 6, and put a big circle around it. If what was in the circle was right, you won; if it wasnt, you lost.One thing was for sure: It was practically impossible to do the problem in any conventional, straightforward way, like putting A is the number of red books, B is the number of blue books, grind, grind, grind, until you get six books. That would take you fifty seconds, because the people who set up the timings on these problems had made them all a trifle short. So you had to think, Is there a way to see it? Sometimes you could see it in a flash, and sometimes youd have to invent another way to do it and then do the algebra as fast as you could. It was wonderful practice, and I got better and better, and I eventually got to be the head of the team. So I learned to do algebra very quickly, and it came in handy in college. When we had a problem in calculus, I was very quick to see where it was going and to do the algebrafast.Another thing I did in high school was to invent problems and theorems. I mean, if I were doing any mathematical thing at all, I would find some practical example for which it would be useful. I invented a set of right-triangle problems. But instead of giving the lengths of two of the sides to find the third, I gave the difference of the two sides. A typical example was: Theres a flagpole, and theres a rope that comes down from the top. When you hold the rope straight down, its three feet longer than the pole, and when you pull the rope out tight, its five feet from the base of the pole. How high is the pole?I developed some equations for solving problems like that, and as a result I noticed some connectionperhaps it was sin2 + cos2 = 1that reminded me of trigonometry. Now, a few years earlier, perhaps when I was eleven or twelve, I had read a book on trigonometry that I had checked out from the library, but the book was by now long gone. I remembered only that trigonometry had something to do with relations between sines and cosines. So I began to work out all the relations by drawing triangles, and each one I proved by myself. I also calculated the sine, cosine, and tangent of every five degrees, starting with the sine of five degrees as given, by addition and half-angle formulas that I had worked out.A few years later, when we studied trigonometry in school, I still had my notes and I saw that my demonstrations were often different from those in the book. Sometimes, for a thing where I didnt notice a simple way to do it, I went all over the place till I got it. Other times, my way was most cleverthe standard demonstration in the book was much more complicated! So sometimes I had em heat, and sometimes it was the other way around.While I was doing all this trigonometry, I didnt like the symbols for sine, cosine, tangent, and so on. To me, sin f looked like s times i times n times f! So I invented another symbol, like a square root sign, that was a sigma with a long arm sticking out of it, and I put the f underneath. For the tangent it was a tau with the top of the tau extended, and for the cosine I made a kind of gamma, but it looked a little bit like the square root sign.Now the inverse sine was the same sigma, but left-to-right reflected so that it started with the horizontal line with the value underneath, and then the sigma. _That_ was the inverse sine, NOT sink fthat was crazy! They had that in books! To me, sin_i meant i/sine, the reciprocal. So my symbols were better.I didnt like f(x)that looked to me like f times x. I also didnt like dy/dxyou have a tendency to cancel the dsso I made a diflerent sign, something like an & sign. For logarithms it was a big L extended to the right, with the thing you take the log of inside, and so on.I thought my symbols were just as good, if not better, than the regular symbolsit doesnt make any difference _what_ symbols you usebut I discovered later that it _does_ make a difference. Once when I was explaining something to another kid in high school, without thinking I started to make these symbols, and he said, What the hell are those? I realized then that if Im going to talk to anybody else, Ill have to use the standard symbols, so I eventually gave up my own symbols.I had also invented a set of symbols for the typewriter, like FORTRAN has to do, so I could type equations. I also fixed typewriters, with paper clips and rubber bands (the rubber bands didnt break down like they do here in Los Angeles), hut I wasnt a professional repairman; Id just fix them so they would work. But the whole problem of discovering what was the matter, and figuring out what you have to do to fix itthat was interesting to me, like a puzzle.String BeansI must have been seventeen or eighteen when I worked one summer in a hotel run by my aunt. I dont know how much I gottwenty-two dollars a month, I thinkand I alternated eleven hours one day and thirteen the next as a desk clerk or as a busboy in the restaurant. And during the afternoon, when you were desk clerk, you had to bring milk up to Mrs. D, an invalid woman who never gave us a tip. Thats the way the world was: You worked long hours and got nothing for it, every day.This was a resort hotel, by the beach, on the outskirts of New York City. The husbands would go to work in the city and leave the wives behind to play cards, so you would always have to get the bridge tables out. Then at night the guys would play poker, so youd get the tables ready for themclean out the ashtrays and so on. I was always up until late at night, like two oclock, so it really was thirteen and eleven hours a day.There were certain things I didnt like, such as tipping. I thought we should be paid more, and not have to have any tips. But when I proposed that to the boss, I got nothing but laughter. She told everybody, Richard doesnt want his tips, hee, hee, hee; he doesnt want his tips, ha, ha, ha. The world is full of this kind of dumb smart-alec who doesnt understand anything.Anyway, at one stage there was a group of men who, when theyd come back from working in the city, would right away want ice for their drinks. Now the other guy working with me had really been a desk clerk. He was older than I was, and a lot more professional. One time he said to me, Listen, were always bringing ice up to that guy Ungar and he never gives us a tipnot even ten cents. Next time, when they ask for ice, just dont do a damn thing. Then theyll call you back, and when they call you back, you say, Oh, Im sorry. I forgot. Were all forgetful sometimes.So I did it, and Ungar gave me fifteen cents! But now, when I think back on it, I realize that the other desk clerk, the professional, had _really_ known what to dotell the _other_ guy to take the risk of getting into trouble. He put me to the job of training this fella to give tips. _He_ never said anything; he made _me_ do it!I had to clean up tables in the dining room as a busboy. You pile all this stuff from the tables on to a tray at the side, and when it gets high enough you carry it into the kitchen. So you get a new tray, right? You _should_ do it in two stepstake the old tray away, and put in a new one-but I thought, Im going to do it in one step. So I tried to slide the new tray under, and pull the old tray out at the same time, and it slippedBANG! All the stuff went on the floor. And then, naturally, the question was, What were you doing? How did it fall? Well, how could I explain that I was trying to invent a new way to handle trays?Among the desserts there was some kind of coffee cake that came out very pretty on a doily, on a little plate. But if you would go in the back youd see a man called the pantry man. His problem was to get the stuff ready for desserts. Now this man must have been a miner, or somethingheavybuilt, with very stubby, rounded, thick fingers. Hed take this stack of doilies, which are manufactured by some sort of stamping process, all stuck together, and hed take these stubby fingers and try to separate the doilies to put them on the plates. I always heard him say, Damn deez doilies! while he was doing this, and I remember thinking, What a contrastthe person sitting at the table gets this nice cake on a doilied plate, while the pantry man back there with the stubby thumbs is saying, Damn deez doilies! So that was the difference between the real world and what it looked like.My first day on the job the pantry lady explained that she usually made a ham sandwich, or something, for the guy who was on the late shift. I said that I liked desserts, so if there was a dessert left over from supper, Id like that. The next night I was on the late shift till 2:00 A.M. with these guys playing poker. I was sitting around with nothing to do, getting bored, when suddenly I remembered there was a dessert to eat. I went over to the icebox and opened it up, and there shed left _six_ desserts! There was a chocolate pudding, a piece of cake, some peach slices, some rice pudding, some jellothere was everything! So I sat there and ate the six dessertsit was sensational!The next day she said to me, I left a dessert for you.It was wonderful, I said, abolutely wonderful!But I left you six desserts because I didnt know which one you liked the best.So from that time on she left six desserts. They werent always different, but there were always six desserts.One time when I was desk clerk a girl left a book by the telephone at the desk while she went to eat dinner, so I looked at. it. It was _The Life of Leonardo_, and I couldnt resist: The girl let me borrow it and I read the whole thing.I slept in a little room in the back of the hotel, and there was some stew about turning out the lights when you leave your room, which I couldnt ever remember to do. Inspired by the Leonardo book, I made this gadget which consisted of a system of strings and weightsCoke bottles full of water that would operate when Id open the door, lighting the pull-chain light inside. You open the door, and things would go, and light the light; then you close the door behind you, and the light would go out. But my _real_ accomplishment came later.I used to cut vegetables in the kitchen. String beans had to be cut into one-inch pieces. The way you were supposed to do it was: You hold two beans in one hand, the knife in the other, and you press the knife against the beans and your thumb, almost cutting yourself. It was a slow process. So I put my mind to it, and I got a pretty good idea. I sat down at the wooden table outside the kitchen, put a bowl in my lap, and stuck a very sharp knife into the table at a forty-five-degree angle away from me. Then I put a pile of the string beans on each side, and Id pick out a bean, one in each hand, and bring it towards me with enough speed that it would slice, and the pieces would slide into the bowl that was in my lap.So Im slicing beans one after the other_chig, chig, chig, chig, chig_and everybodys giving me the beans, and Im going like sixty when the boss comes by and says, What are you _doing_?I say, Look at the way I have of cutting beans!and just at that moment I put a finger through instead of a bean. Blood came out and went on the beans, and there was a big excitement: Look at how many beans you spoiled! What a stupid way to do things! and so on. So I was never able to make any improvement, which would have been easywith a guard, or somethingbut no, there was no chance for improvement.I had another invention, which had a similar difficulty. We had to slice potatoes after theyd been cooked, for some kind of potato salad. They were sticky and wet, and difficult to handle. I thought of a whole lot of knives, parallel in a rack, coming down and slicing the whole thing. I thought about this a long time, and finally I got the idea of wires in a rack,So I went to the five-and-ten to buy some knives or wires, and saw exactly the gadget I wanted: it was for slicing eggs. The next time the potatoes came out I got my little egg-slicer out and sliced all the potatoes in no time, and sent them back to the chef. The chef was a German, a great big guy who was King of the Kitchen, and he came storming out, blood vessels sticking out of his neck, livid red. Whats the matter with the potatoes? he says. Theyre not sliced!I had them sliced, but they were all stuck together. He says, How can I separate them?Stick em in water, I suggest.IN WATER? EAGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!Another time I had a _really_ good idea. When I was desk clerk I had to answer the telephone. When a call came in, something buzzed, and a flap came down on the switchboard so you could tell which line it was. Sometimes, when I was helping the women with the bridge tables or sitting on the front porch in the middle of the afternoon (when there were very few calls), Id be some distance from the switchboard when suddenly it would go. Id come running to catch it, but the way the desk was made, in order to get to the switchboard you had to go quite a distance further down, then around, in behind, and then back up to see where the call was coming fromit took extra time.So I got a good idea. I tied threads to the flaps on the switchboard, and strung them over the top of the desk and then down, and at the end of each thread I tied a little piece of paper. Then I put the telephone talking piece up on top of the desk, so I could reach it from the front. Now, when a call came, I could tell which flap was down by which piece of paper was up, so I could answer the phone appropriately, from the front, to save time. Of course I still had to go around back to switch it in, but at least I was answering it. Id say, Just a moment, and then go around to switch it in.I thought that was perfect, but the boss came by one day, and she wanted to answer the phone, and she couldnt figure it outtoo complicated. What are all these papers doing? Why is the telephone on this side? Why dont you... _raaaaaaaa!_I tried to explainit was my own auntthat there was no reason _not_ to do that, but you cant say that to anybody whos _smart_, who _runs a hotel!_ I learned there that innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world.- Who Stole the Door? -At MIT the different fraternities all had smokers where they tried to get the new freshmen to be their pledges, and the summer before I went to MIT I was invited to a meeting in New York of Phi Beta Delta, a Jewish fraternity. In those days, if you were Jewish or brought up in a Jewish family, you didnt have a chance in any other fraternity. Nobody else would look at you. I wasnt particularly looking to be with other Jews, and the guys from the Phi Beta Delta fraternity didnt care how Jewish I wasin fact, I didnt believe anything about that stuff, and was certainly not in any way religious. Anyway, some guys from the fraternity asked me some questions and gave me a little bit of advicethat I ought to take the first-year calculus exam so I wouldnt have to take the course-which turned out to be good advice. I liked the fellas who came down to New York from the fraternity, and the two guys who talked me into it, I later became their roommate.There was another Jewish fraternity at MIT, called SAM, and their idea was to give me a ride up to Boston and I could stay with them. I accepted the ride, and stayed upstairs in one of the rooms that first night.The next morning I looked out the window and saw the two guys from the other fraternity (that I met in New York) walking up the steps. Some guys from the Sigma Alpha Mu ran out to talk to them and there was a big discussion.I yelled out the window, Hey, Im supposed to be with _those_ guys! and I rushed out of the fraternity without realizing that they were all operating, competing for my pledge. I didnt have any feelings of gratitude for the ride, or anything.The Phi Beta Delta fraternity had almost collapsed the year before, because there were two different cliques that had split the fraternity in half. There was a group of socialite characters, who liked to have dances and fool around in their cars afterwards, and so on, and there was a group of guys who did nothing but study, and never went to the dances.Just before I came to the fraternity they had had a big meeting and had made an important compromise. They were going to get together and help each other out. Everyone had to have a grade level of at least such-and-such. If they were sliding behind, the guys who studied all the time would teach them and help them do their work. On the other side, everybody had to go to every dance. If a guy didnt know how to get a date, the other guys would _get_ him a date. If the guy didnt know how to dance, theyd _teach_ him to dance. One group was teaching the other how to think, while the other guys were teaching them how to be social.That was just right for me, because I was _not_ very good socially. I was so timid that when I had to take the mail out and walk past some seniors sitting on the steps with some girls, I was petrified: I didnt know how to walk past them! And it didnt help any when a girl would say, Oh, hes cute!It was only a little while after that the sophomores brought their girlfriends and their girlfriends friends over to teach us to dance. Much later, one of the guys taught me how to drive his car. They worked very hard to get us intellectual characters to socialize and be more relaxed, and vice versa. It was a good balancing out.I had some difficulty understanding what exactly it meant to be social. Soon after these social guys had taught me how to meet girls, I saw a nice waitress in a restaurant where I was eating by myself one day. With great effort I finally got up enough nerve to ask her to be my date at the next fraternity dance, and she said yes.Back at the fraternity, when we were talking about the dates for the next dance, I told the guys I didnt need a date this timeI had found one on my own. I was very proud of myself.When the upperclassmen found out my date was a waitress, they were horrified. They told me that was not possible; they would get me a proper date. They made me feel as though I had strayed, that I was amiss. They decided to take over the situation. They went to the restaurant, found the waitress, talked her out of it, and got me another girl. They were trying to educate their wayward son, so to speak, but they were wrong, I think. I was only a freshman then, and I didnt have enough confidence yet to stop them from breaking my date.When I became a pledge they had various ways of hazing. One of the things they did was to take us, blindfolded, far out into the countryside in the dead of winter and leave us by a frozen lake about a hundred feet apart. We were in the middle of absolutely _nowhere_no houses, no nothingand we were supposed to find our way back to the fraternity. We were a little bit scared, because we were young, and we didnt say muchexcept for one guy, whose name was Maurice Meyer: you couldnt stop him from joking around, making dumb puns, and having this happy-go-lucky attitude of Ha, ha, theres nothing to worry about. Isnt this fun!We were getting mad at Maurice. He was always walking a little bit behind and laughing at the whole situation, while the rest of us didnt know how we were ever going to get out of this.We came to an intersection not far from the lakethere were still no houses or anythingand the rest of us were discussing whether we should go this way or that way, when Maurice caught up to us and said, Go _this_ way.What the hell do _you_ know, Maurice? we said, frustrated. Youre always making these jokes. Why should we go _this_ way?Simple: Look at the telephone lines. Where theres more wires, its going toward the central station.This guy, who looked like he wasnt paying attention to anything, had come up with a terrific idea! We walked straight into town without making an error.On the following day there was going to be a schoolwide freshman versus sophomore mudeo (various forms of wrestling and tug of wars that take place in the mud). Late in the evening, into our fraternity comes a whole bunch of sophomoressome from our fraternity and some from outside and they kidnap us: they want us to be tired the next day so they can win.The sophomores tied up all the freshmen relatively easilyexcept me. I didnt want the guys in the fraternity to find out that I was a sissy. (I was never any good in sports. I was always terrified if a tennis ball would come over the fence and land near me, because I never could get it over the fence-it usually went about a radian off of where it was supposed to go.) I figured this was a new situation, a new world, and I could make a new reputation. So in order that I wouldnt look like I didnt know how to fight, I fought like a son of a gun as best I could (not knowing what I was doing), and it took three or four guys many tries before they were finally able to tie me up. The sophomores took us to a house, far away in the woods, and tied us all down to a wooden floor with big U tacks.I tried all sorts of ways to escape, but there were sophomores guarding us, and none of my tricks worked. I remember distinctly one young man they were afraid to tie down because he was so terrified: his face was pale yellowgreen and he was shaking. I found out later he was from Europe-this was in the early thirtiesand he didnt realize that these guys all tied down to the floor was some kind of a joke; he knew what kinds of things were going on in Europe. The guy was frightening to look at, he was so scared.By the time the night was over, there were only three sophomores guarding twenty of us freshmen, but we didnt know that. The sophomores had driven their cars in and out a few times to make it sound as if there was a lot of activity, and we didnt notice it was always the same cars and the same people. So we didnt win that one.My father and mother happened to come up that morning to see how their son was doing in Boston, and the fraternity kept putting them off until we came back from being kidnapped. I was so bedraggled and dirty from struggling so hard to escape and from lack of sleep that they were really horrified to discover what their son looked like at MIT!I had also gotten a stiff neck, and I remember standing in line for inspection that afternoon at ROTC, not being able to look straight forward. The commander grabbed my head and turned it, shouting, Straighten up!I winced, as my shoulders went at an angle: I cant help it, sir!Oh, excuse _me_! he said, apologetically.Anyway, the fact that I fought so long and hard not to be tied up gave me a terrific reputation, and I never had to worry about that sissy business againa tremendous relief.I often listened to my roommatesthey were both seniorsstudying for their theoretical physics course. One day they were working pretty hard on something that seemed pretty clear to me, so I said, Why dont you use the Baronallais equation?Whats that! they exclaimed. What are you talking about!I explained to them what I meant and how it worked in this case, and it solved the problem. It turned out it was Bernoullis equation that I meant, but I had read all this stuff in the encyclopedia without talking to anybody about it, so I didnt know how to pronounce anything.But my roommates were very excited, and from then on they discussed their physics problems with meI wasnt so lucky with many of themand the next year, when I took the course, I advanced rapidly. That was a very good way to get educated, working on the senior problems and learning how to pronounce things.I liked to go to a place called the Raymor and Playmore Ballroomtwo ballrooms that were connected togetheron Tuesday nights. My fraternity brothers didnt go to these open dances; they preferred their own dances, where the girls they brought were upper crust ones they had met properly. I didnt care, when I met somebody, where they were from, or what their background was, so I would go to these danceseven though my fraternity brothers disapproved (I was a junior by this time, and they couldnt stop me)and I had a very good time.One time I danced with a certain girl a few times, and didnt say much. Finally, she said to me, Who hants vewwy nice-ee.I couldnt quite make it outshe had some difficulty in speechbut I thought she said, You dance very nicely.Thank you, I said. Its been an honor.We went over to a table where a friend of hers had found a boy she was dancing with and we sat, the four of us, together. One girl was very hard of hearing, and the other girl was nearly deaf.When the two girls conversed they would do a large amount of signaling very rapidly back and forth, and grunt a little bit. It didnt bother me; the girl danced well, and she was a nice person.After a few more dances, were sitting at the table again, and theres a large amount of signaling back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until finally she says something to me which I gathered means, shed like us to take them to some hotel.I ask the other guy if he wants to go.What do they want us to go to this hotel for? he asks.Hell, I dont know. We didnt talk well enough! But I dont _have_ to know. Its just fun, seeing whats going to happen; its an adventure!The other guys afraid, so he says no. So I take the two girls in a taxi to the hotel, and discover that theres a dance organized by the deaf and dumb, believe it or not. They all belonged to a club. It turns out many of them can feel the rhythm enough to dance to the music and applaud the band at the end of each number.It was very, very interesting! I felt as if I was in a foreign country and couldnt speak the language: I could speak, but nobody could hear me. Everybody was talking with signs to everybody else, and I couldnt understand anything! I asked my girl to teach me some signs and I learned a few, like you learn a foreign language, just for fun.Everyone was so happy and relaxed with each other, making jokes and smiling all the time; they didnt seem to have any real difficulty of any kind communicating with each other. It was the same as with any other language, except for one thing: as theyre making signs to each other, their heads were always turning from one side to the other. I realized what that was. When someone wants to make a side remark or interrupt you, he cant yell, Hey, Jack! He can only make a signal, which you wont catch unless youre in the habit of looking around all the time.They were completely comfortable with each other. It was _my_ problem to be comfortable. It was a wonderful experience.The dance went on for a long time, and when it closed down we went to a cafeteria. They were all ordering things by pointing to them. I remember somebody asking in signs, Where-are-you-from? and my girl spelling out N-e-w Y-o-r-k. I still remember a guy signing to me Good sport!he holds his thumb up, and then touches an imaginary lapel, for sport. Its a nice system.Everybody was sitting around, making jokes, and getting me into their world very nicely. I wanted to buy a bottle of milk, so I went up to the guy at the counter and mouthed the word milk without saying anything.The guy didnt understand.I made the symbol for milk, which is two fists moving as if youre milking a cow, and he didnt catch that either.I tried to point to the sign that showed the price of milk, but he still didnt catch on.Finally, some stranger nearby ordered milk, and I pointed to it.Oh! Milk! he said, as I nodded my head yes.He handed me the bottle, and I said, Thank you very much!You SON of a GUN! he said, smiling.I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of plastic for drawing smooth curvesa curly, funny-looking thing) and said, I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?I thought for a moment and said, Sure they do. The curves are very special curves. Lemme show ya, and I picked up my French curve and began to turn it slowly. The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal.All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by this discoveryeven though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already learned that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of _any_ curve is zero (horizontal). They didnt put two and two together. They didnt even know what they knew.I dont know whats the matter with people: they dont learn by understanding; they learn by some other wayby rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!I did the same kind of trick four years later at Princeton when I was talking with an experienced character, an assistant of Einstein, who was surely working with gravity all the time. I gave him a problem: You blast off in a rocket which has a clock on board, and theres a clock on the ground. The idea is that you have to be back when the clock on the ground says one hour has passed. Now you want it so that when you come back, your clock is as far ahead as possible. According to Einstein, if you go very high, your clock will go faster, because the higher something is in a gravitational field, the faster its clock goes. But if you try to go too high, since youve only got an hour, you have to go so fast to get there that the speed slows your clock down. So you cant go too high. The question is, exactly what program of speed and height should you make so that you get the maximum time on your clock?This assistant of Einstein worked on it for quite a bit before he realized that the answer is the real motion of matter. If you shoot something up in a normal way, so that the time it takes the shell to go up and come down is an hour, thats the correct motion. Its the fundamental principle of Einsteins gravitythat is, whats called the proper time is at a maximum for the actual curve. But when I put it to him, about a rocket with a clock, he didnt recognize it. It was just like the guys in mechanical drawing class, but this time it wasnt dumb freshmen. So this kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people.When I was a junior or senior I used to eat at a certain restaurant in Boston. I went there by myself, often on successive evenings. People got to know me, and I had the same waitress all the time.I noticed that they were always in a hurry, rushing around, so one day, just for fun, I left my tip, which was usually ten cents (normal for those days), in two nickels, under two glasses: I filled each glass to the very top, dropped a nickel in, and with a card over it, turned it over so it was upside down on the table. Then I slipped out the card (no water leaks out because no air can come inthe rim is too close to the table for that).I put the tip under two glasses because I knew they were always in a hurry. If the tip was a dime in one glass, the waitress, in her haste to get the table ready for the next customer, would pick up the glass, the water would spill out, and that would be the end of it. But after she does that with the first glass, what the hell is she going to do with the second one? She cant just have the nerve to lift it up now!On the way out I said to my waitress, Be careful, Sue. Theres something funny about the glasses you gave me theyre filled in on the top, and theres a hole on the bottom!The next day I came back, and I had a new waitress. My regular waitress wouldnt have anything to do with me. Sues very angry at you, my new waitress said. After she picked up the first glass and water went all over the place, she called the boss out. They studied it a little bit, but they couldnt spend all day figuring out what to do, so they finally picked up the other one, and water went out _again_, all over the floor. It was a terrible mess; Sue slipped later in the water. Theyre _all_ mad at you.I laughed.She said, Its not funny! How would _you_ like it if someone did that to youwhat would _you_ do?Id get a soup plate and then slide the glass very carefully over to the edge of the table, and let the water run into the soup plateit doesnt have to run onto the floor. Then Id take the nickel out.Oh, thats a goood idea, she said.That evening I left my tip under a coffee cup, which I left upside down on the table.The next night I came and I had the same new waitress.Whats the idea of leaving the cup upside down last time?Well, I thought that even though you were in a hurry, youd have to go back into the kitchen and get a soup plate; then youd have to _sloooowly_ and carefully slide the cup over to the edge of the table...I _did_ that, she complained, but there was no _water_ in it!My masterpiece of mischief happened at the fraternity. One morning I woke up very early, about five oclock, and couldnt go back to sleep, so I went downstairs from the sleeping rooms and discovered some signs hanging on strings which said things like DOOR! DOOR! WHO STOLE THE DOOR? I saw that someone had taken a door off its hinges, and in its place they hung a sign that said, PLEASE CLOSE THE DOOR!the sign that used to be on the door that was missing.I immediately figured out what the idea was. In that room a guy named Pete Bernays and a couple of other guys liked to work very hard, and always wanted it quiet. If you wandered into their room looking for something, or to ask them how they did problem such and such, when you would leave you would always hear these guys scream, Please close the door!Somebody had gotten tired of this, no doubt, and had taken the door off. Now this room, it so happened, had two doors, the way it was built, so I got an idea: I took the other door off its hinges, carried it downstairs, and hid it in the basement behind the oil tank. Then I quietly went back upstairs and went to bed.Later in the morning I made believe I woke up and came downstairs a little late. The other guys were milling around, and Pete and his friends were all upset: The doors to their room were missing, and they had to study, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was coming down the stairs and they said, Feynman! Did you take the doors?Oh, yeah! I said. I took the door. You can see the scratches on my knuckles here, that I got when my hands scraped against the wall as I was carrying it down into the basement.They werent satisfied with my answer; in fact, they didnt believe me.The guys who took the first door had left so many cluesthe handwriting on the signs, for instancethat they were soon found out. My idea was that when it was found out who stole the first door, everybody would think they also stole the other door. It worked perfectly: The guys who took the first door were pummeled and tortured and worked on by everybody, until finally, with much pain and difficulty, they convinced their tormentors that they had only taken one door, unbelievable as it might be.I listened to all this, and I was happy.The other door stayed missing for a whole week, and it became more and more important to the guys who were trying to study in that room that the other door be found.Finally, in order to solve the problem, the president of the fraternity says at the dinner table, We have to solve this problem of the other door. I havent been able to solve the problem myself, so I would like suggestions from the rest of you as to how to straighten this out, because Pete and the others are trying to study.Somebody makes a suggestion, then someone else.After a little while, I get up and make a suggestion. All right, I say in a sarcastic voice, whoever you are who stole the door, we know youre wonderful. Youre so _clever_! We cant figure out _who_ you are, so you must be some sort of super-genius. You dont have to tell us who you are; all we want to know is where the door is. So if you will leave a note somewhere, telling us where the door is, we will honor you and admit _forever_ that you are a super-marvel, that you are so _smart_ that you could take the other door without our being able to figure out who you are. But for Gods sake, just leave the note somewhere, and we will be forever grateful to you for it.The next guy makes his suggestion: I have another idea, he says. I think that you, as president, should ask each man on his word of honor towards the fraternity to say whether he took the door or not.The president says, Thats a _very_ good idea. On the fraternity word of honor! So he goes around the table, and asks each guy, one by one: Jack, did _you_ take the door?No, sir, I did not take the door.Tim: Did _you_ take the door?No, sir! I did not take the door!Maurice. Did _you_ take the door?No, I did not take the door, sir.Feynman, did _you_ take the door?Yeah, _I_ took the door.Cut it out, Feynman; this is _serious_! Sam! Did _you_ take the door... it went all the way around. Everyone was _shocked_. There must be some real _rat_ in the fraternity who didnt respect the fraternity word of honor!That night I left a note with a little picture of the oil tank and the door next to it, and the next day they found the door and put it back.Sometime later I finally admitted to taking the other door, and I was accused by everybody of lying. They couldnt remember what I had said. All they could remember was their conclusion after the president of the fraternity had gone around the table and asked everybody, that nobody admitted taking the door. The idea they remembered, but not the words.People often think Im a faker, but Im usually honest, in a certain wayin such a way that often nobody believes me!Latin or Italian?There was an Italian radio station in Brooklyn, and as a boy I used to listen to it all the time. I LOVed the ROLLing SOUNds going over me, as if I was in the ocean, and the waves werent very high. I used to sit there and have the water come over me, in this BEAUtiful iTALian. In the Italian programs there was always some kind of family situation where there were discussions and arguments between the mother and father: High voice: _Nio teco TIEto capeto TUtto_...Loud, low voice: _DRO tone pala TUtto!!_ (with hand slapping).It was great! So I learned to make all these emotions: I could cry; I could laugh; all this stuff. Italian is a lovely language.There were a number of Italian people living near us in New York. Once while I was riding my bicycle, some Italian truck driver got upset at me, leaned out of his truck, and, gesturing, yelled something like, _Me aRRUcha LAMpe etta Tiche!_I felt like a crapper. What did he say to me? What should I yell back?So I asked an Italian friend of mine at school, and he said, Just say, _A te! A te!_which means The same to you! The same to you!I thought it was a great idea. I would say _A te! A te!_ backgesturing, of course. Then, as I gained confidence, I developed my abilities further. I would be riding my bicycle, and some lady would be driving in her car and get in the way, and Id say, _PUzzia a la maLOche!_and shed shrink! Some terrible Italian boy had cursed a terrible curse at her!It was not so easy to recognize it as fake Italian. Once, when I was at Princeton, as I was going into the parking lot at Palmer Laboratory on my bicycle, somebody got in the way.My habit was always the same: I gesture to the guy, _oREzze caB ONca MIche!_, slapping the back of one hand against the other.And way up on the other side of a long area of grass, theres an Italian gardner putting in some plants. He stops, waves, and shouts happily, _REzza ma LIa!_I call back, _RONte BALta!_, returning the greeting. He didnt know I didnt know, and I didnt know what he said, and he didnt know what I said. But it was OK! It was great! It works! Afrer all, when they hear the intonation, they recognize it immediately as Italianmaybe its Milano instead of Romano, what the hell. But hes an iTALian! So its just great. But you have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen.One time I came home from college for a vacation, and my sister was sort of unhappy, almost crying: her Girl Scouts were having a father-daughter banquet, but our father was out on the road, selling uniforms. So I said I would take her, being the brother (Im nine years older, so it wasnt so crazy).When we got there, I sat among the fathers for a while, but soon became sick of them. All these fathers bring their daughters to this nice little banquet, and all they talked about was the stock marketthey dont know how to talk to their own children, much less their childrens friends.During the banquet the girls entertained us by doing little skits, reciting poetry, and so on. Then all of a sudden they bring out this funny-looking apronlike thing, with a hole at the top to put your head through. The girls announce that the fathers are now going to entertain _them_.So each father has to get up and stick his head through and say somethingone guy recites Mary Had a Little Lamband they dont know what to do. I didnt know what to do either, but by the time I got up there, I told them that I was going to recite a little poem, and Im sorry that its not in English, but Im sure they will appreciate it anyway:A TUZZO LANTOPoici di PareTANto SAca TULna TI, na PUta TUchi PUti TI la.RUNto CAta CHANto CHANta MANto CHI la TI da.YALta CAra SULda MI la CHAta Picha Pino TitoBRALda pe te CHIna nana CHUNda lala CHINda lala CHUNda!RONto piti CA le, a TANto CHINto quinta LALdaola TiNta dalla LALta, YENta PUcha lalla TALta!I do this for three or four stanzas, going through all the emotions that I heard on Italian radio, and the kids are unraveled, rolling in the aisles, laughing with happiness.After the banquet was over, the scoutmaster and a schoolteacher came over and told me they had been discussing my poem. One of them thought it was Italian, and the other thought it was Latin. The schoolteacher asks, Which one of us is right?I said, Youll have to go ask the girlsthey understood what language it was right away.Always Trying to EscapeWhen I was a student at MIT I was interested only in science; I was no good at anything else. But at MIT there was a rule: You have to take some humanities courses to get more culture. Besides the English classes required were two electives, so I looked through the list, and right away I found astronomyas a _humanities_ course! So that year I escaped with astronomy. Then next year I looked further down the list, past French literature and courses like that, and found philosophy. It was the closest thing to science I could find.Before I tell you what happened in philosophy, let me tell you about the English class. We had to write a number of themes. For instance, Mill had written something on liberty, and we had to criticize it. But instead of addressing myself to _political_ liberty, as Mill did, I wrote about liberty in social occasionsthe problem of having to fake and lie in order to be polite, and does this perpetual game of faking in social situations lead to the destruction of the moral fiber of society. An interesting question, but not the one we were supposed to discuss.Another essay we had to criticize was by Huxley, On a Piece of Chalk, in which he describes how an ordinary piece of chalk he is holding is the remains from animal bones, and the forces inside the earth lifted it up so that it became part of the White Cliffs, and then it was quarried and is now used to conve ideas through writing on the l)lackboard.But again, instead of criticizing the essay assigned to us, I wrote a parody called, On a Piece of Dust, about how dust makes the colors of the sunset and precipitates the rain, and so on. I was always a faker, always trying to escape.But when we had to write a theme on Goethes _Faust_, it was hopeless! The work was too long to make a parody of it or to invent something else. I was storming back and forth in the fraternity saying, I _cant_ do it. Im just _not_ gonna do it. I aint gonna do it!One of my fraternity brothers said, OK, Feynman, youre not gonna do it. But the professor will think you didnt do it because you dont want to do the work. You oughta write a theme on _something_same number of wordsand hand it in with a note saying that you just couldnt understand the _Faust_, you havent got the heart for it, and that its impossible for you to write a theme on it.So I did that. I wrote a long theme, On the Limitations of Reason. I had thought about scientific techniques for solving problems, and how there are certain limitations: moral values cannot be decided by scientific methods, yak, yak, yak, and so on.Then another fraternity brother offered some more advice. Feynman, he said, it aint gonna work, handing in a theme thats got nothing to do with _Faust_. What you oughta do is work that thing you wrote _into_ the _Faust_.Ridiculous! I said.But the other fraternity guys think its a good idea.All right, all right! I say, protesting. Ill try.So I added half a page to what 1 had already written, and said that Mephistopheles represents reason, and Faust represents the spirit, and Goethe is trying to show the limitations of reason. I stirred it up, cranked it all in, and handed in my theme.The professor had us each come in individually to discuss our theme. I went in expecting the worst.He said, The introductory material is fine, but the _Faust_ material is a bit too brief. Otherwise, its very good B + . I escaped again!Now to the philosophy class. The course was taught by an old bearded professor named Robinson, who always mumbled. I would go to the class, and he would mumble along, and I couldnt understand a _thing_. The other people in the class seemed to understand him better, but they didnt seem to pay any attention. I happened to have a small drill, about one-sixteenth-inch, and to pass the time in that class, I would twist it between my fingers and drill holes in the sole of my shoe, week after week.Finally one day at the end of the class, Professor Robinson went wugga mugga mugga wugga wugga... and everybody got excited! They were all talking to each other and discussing, so I figured hed said something interesting, thank God! I wondered what it was?I asked somebody, and they said, We have to write a theme, and hand it in in four weeks.A theme on what?On what hes been talking about all year.I was stuck. The only thing that I had heard during that entire term that I could remember was a moment when there came this upwelling, muggawuggastreamofconsciousnessmugga wugga, and _phoom!_it sank back into chaos.This stream of consciousness reminded me of a problem my father had given to me many years before. He said, Suppose some Martians were to come down to earth, and Martians never slept, but instead were perpetually active. Suppose they didnt have this crazy phenomenon that we have, called sleep. So they ask you the question: How does it _feel_ to go to sleep? What _happens_ when you go to sleep? Do your thoughts suddenly stop, or do they move less aanndd lleeessss rraaaaapppppiidddddllllllllyyyyyyyyyyy yyy? How does the mind actually turn off?I got interested. Now I had to answer this question: How does the stream of consciousness _end_, when you go to sleep?So every afternoon for the next four weeks I would work on my theme, I would pull down the shades in my room, turn off the lights, and go to sleep. And Id watch what _happened_, when I went to sleep.Then at night, Id go to sleep again, so I had two times each day when I could make observationsit was very good!At first I noticed a lot of subsidiary things that had little to do with falling asleep. I noticed, for instance, that I did a lot of thinking by speaking to myself internally. I could also imagine things visually.Then, when I was getting tired, I noticed that I could think of two things at once. I discovered this when I was talking internally to myself about something, and _while_ I was doing this, I was idly imagining two ropes connected to the end of my bed, going through some pulleys, and winding around a turning cylinder, slowly lifting the bed. I wasnt _aware_ that I was imagining these ropes until I began to worry that one rope would catch on the other rope, and they wouldnt wind up smoothly. But I said, internally, Oh, the tension will take care of that, and this interrupted the first thought I was having, and made me aware that I was thinking of two things at once.I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they become less and less logically interconnected. You dont _notice_ that theyre not logically connected until you ask yourself, What made me think of that? and you try to work your way back, and often you cant remember what the hell _did_ make you think of that!So you get every _illusion_ of logical connection, but the actual fact is that the thoughts become more and more cockeyed until theyre completely disjointed, and beyond that, you fall asleep.After four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and explained the observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out that all of these observations were made while I was _watching_ myself fall asleep, and I dont really know what its like to fall asleep when Im not watching myself. I concluded the theme with a little verse I made up, which pointed out this problem of introspection:_I wonder why. I wonder why.__I wonder why I wonder.__I wonder why I wonder why__I wonder why I wonder!_We hand in our themes, and the next time our class meets, the professor reads one of them: Mum bum wugga mum bum... I cant tell what the guy wrote.He reads another theme: Mugga wugga mum bum wugga wugga... I dont know what that guy wrote either, but at the end of it, he goes:_Uh wugga wuh. Uh wugga wuh.__Uh wugga wugga wugga.__I wugga wuh uh wugga wuh__Uh wugga wugga wugga._Aha! I say. Thats _my_ theme! I honestly didnt recognize it until the end.After I had written the theme I continued to be curious, and I kept practicing this watching myself as I went to sleep. One night, while I was having a dream, I realized I was observing myself _in_ the dream. I had gotten all the way down into the sleep itself!In the first part of the dream Im on top of a train and were approaching a tunnel. I get scared, pull myself down, and we go into the tunnelwhoosh! I say to myself, So you can get the feeling of fear, and you can hear the sound change when you go into the tunnel.I also noticed that I could see colors. Some people had said that you dream in black and white, but no, I was dreaming in color.By this time I was inside one of the train cars, and I can feel the train lurching about. I say to myself, So you can get kinesthetic feelings in a dream. I walk with some difficulty down to the end of the car, and I see a big window, like a store window. Behind it there are-not mannequins, but three live girls in bathing suits, and they look pretty good!I continue walking into the next car, hanging onto the straps overhead as I go, when I say to myself, Hey! It would be interesting to get excitedsexuallyso I think Ill go back into the other car. I discovered that I could turn around, and walk back through the trainI could control the direction of my dream. I get back to the car with the special window, and I see three old guys playing violinsbut they turned back into girls! So I could modify the direction of my dream, but not perfectly.Well, I began to get excited, intellectually as well as sexually, saying things like, Wow! Its working! and I woke up.I made some other observations while dreaming. Apart from always asking myself, Am I _really_ dreaming in color? I wondered, How accurately do you see something?The next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass, and she had red hair. I tried to see if I could see _each_ hair. You know how theres a little area of color just where the sun is reflectingthe diffraction effect, I could see _that_! I could see each hair as sharp as you want: perfect vision!Another time I had a dream in which a thumbtack was stuck in a doorframe. I see the tack, run my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the tack. So the seeing department and the feeling department of the brain seem to be connected. Then I say to myself, Could it be that they _dont_ have to be connected? I look at the doorframe again, and theres no thumbtack. I run my finger down the doorframe, and I _feel_ the tack!Another time Im dreaming and I hear knock-knock; knock-knock. Something was happening in the dream that made this knocking fit, but not perfectlyit seemed sort of foreign. I thought: Absolutely guaranteed that this knocking is coming from _outside_ my dream, and Ive invented this part of the dream to fit with it. Ive _got_ to wake up and find out what the hell it is.The knocking is still going, I wake up, and... Dead silence. There was nothing. So it wasnt connected to the outside.Other people have told me that they have incorporated external noises into their dreams, but when I had this experience, carefully watching from below, and _sure_ the noise was coming from outside the dream, it wasnt.During the time of making observations in my dreams, the process of waking up was a rather fearful one. As youre beginning to wake up theres a moment when you feel rigid and tied down, or underneath many layers of cotton batting. Its hard to explain, but theres a moment when you get the feeling you cant get out; youre not sure you can wake up. So I would have to tell myselfafter I was awakethat thats ridiculous. Theres no disease I know of where a person falls asleep naturally and cant wake up. You can _always_ wake up. And after talking to myself many times like that, I became less and less afraid, and in fact I found the process of waking up rather thrillingsomething like a roller coaster: After a while youre not so scared, and you begin to enjoy it a little bit.You might like to know how this process of observing my dreams stopped (which it has for the most part; its happened just a few times since). Im dreaming one night as usual, making observations, and I see on the wall in front of me a pennant. I answer for the twenty-fifth time, Yes, Im dreaming in color, and then I realize that Ive been sleeping with the back of my head against a brass rod. I put my hand behind my head and I feel that the back of my head is _soft_. I think, Aha! _Thats_ why Ive been able to make all these observations in my dreams: the brass rod has disturbed my visual cortex. All I have to do is sleep with a brass rod under my head, and I can make these observations any time I want. So I think Ill stop making observations on this one, and go into deeper sleep.When I woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was the back of my head soft. Somehow I had become tired of making these observations, and my brain had invented some false reasons as to why I shouldnt do it any more.As a result of these observations I began to get a little theory. One of the reasons that I liked to look at dreams was that I was curious as to how you can see an image, of a person, for example, when your eyes are closed, and nothings coming in. You say it might be random, irregular nerve discharges, but you cant get the nerves to discharge in exactly the same delicate patterns when you are sleeping as when you are awake, looking at something. Well then, how could I see in color, and in better detail, when I was asleep?I decided there must be an interpretation department. When you are actually looking at somethinga man, a lamp, or a wallyou dont just see blotches of color. Something tells you what it is; it has to be interpreted. When youre dreaming, this interpretation department is still operating, but its all slopped up. Its telling you that youre seeing a human hair in the greatest detail, when it isnt true. Its interpreting the random junk entering the brain as a clear image.One other thing about dreams. I had a friend named Deutsch, whose wife was from a family of psychoanalysts in Vienna. One evening, during a long discussion about dreams, he told me that dreams have significance: there are symbols in dreams that can be interpreted psychoanalytically. I didnt believe most of this stuff, but that night I had an interesting dream: Were playing a game on a billiard table with three ballsa white ball, a green ball, and a gray balland the name of the game is titsies. There was something about trying to get the balls into the pocket: the white ball and the green ball are easy to sink into the pocket, but the gray one, I cant get to it.I wake up, and the dream is very easy to interpret: the name of the game gives it away, of course-thems girls! The white ball was easy to figure out, because I was going out, sneakily, with a married woman who worked at the time as a cashier in a cafeteria and wore a white uniform. The green one was also easy, because I had gone out about two nights before to a drive-in movie with a girl in a green dress. But the gray one-what the hell was the gray one? I knew it _had_ to be _somebody_; I _felt_ it. Its like when youre trying to remember a name, and its on the tip of your tongue, hut you cant get it.It took me half a day before I remembered that I had said goodbye to a girl I liked very much, who had gone to Italy about two or three months before. She was a very nice girl, and I had decided that when she came back I was going to see her again. I dont know if she wore a gray suit, but it was perfectly clear, as soon as I thought of her, that she was the gray one.I went back to my friend Deutsch, and I told him he must be rightthere _is_ something to analyzing dreams. But when he heard about my interesting dream, he said, No, that one was too perfecttoo cut and dried. Usually you have to do a bit more analysis.The Chief ResearchChemist of theMetaplast CorporationAfter I finished at MIT I wanted to get a summer job. I had applied two or three times to the Bell Labs, and had gone out a few times to visit. Bill Shockley, who knew me from the lab at MIT, would show me around each time, and I enjoyed those visits terrifically, but I never got a job there.I had letters from some of my professors to two specific companies. One was to the Bausch and Lomb Company for tracing rays through lenses; the other was to Electrical Testing Labs in New York. At that time nobody knew what a physicist even was, and there werent any positions in industry for physicists. Engineers, OK; but physicistsnobody knew how to use them. Its interesting that very soon, after the war, it was the exact opposite: people wanted physicists everywhere. So I wasnt getting anywhere as a physicist looking for a job late in the Depression.About that time I met an old friend of mine on the beach at our home town of Far Rockaway, where we grew up together. We had gone to school together when we were about eleven or twelve, and were very good friends. We were both scientifically minded. He had a laboratory, and I had a laboratory. We often played together, and discussed things together.We used to put on magic showschemistry magicfor the kids on the block. My friend was a pretty good showman, and I kind of liked that too. We did our tricks on a little table, with Bunsen burners at each end going all the time. On the burners we had watch glass plates (flat glass discs) with iodine on them, which made a beautiful purple vapor that went up on each side of the table while the show went on. It was great! We did a lot of tricks, such as turning wine into water, and other chemical color changes. For our finale, we did a trick that used something which we had discovered. I would put my hands (secretly) first into a sink of water, and then into benzine. Then I would accidentally brush by one of the Bunsen burners, and one hand would light up. Id clap my hands, and both hands would then be burning. (It doesnt hurt because it burns fast and the water keeps it cool.) Then Id wave my hands, running around yelling, FIRE! FIRE! and everybody would get all excited. Theyd run out of the room, and that was the end of the show!Later on I told this story at college to my fraternity brothers and they said, Nonsense! You cant _do_ that!(I often had this problem of demonstrating to these fellas something that they didnt believe-like the time we got into an argument as to whether urine just ran out of you by gravity, and I had to demonstrate that that wasnt the case by showing them that you can pee standing on your head. Or the time when somebody claimed that if you took aspirin and Coca-Cola youd fall over in a dead faint directly. I told them I thought it was a lot of baloney, and offered to take aspirin and Coca-Cola together. Then they got into an argument whether you should have the aspirin before the Coke, just after the Coke, or mixed in the Coke. So I had six aspirin and three Cokes, one right after the other. First, I took aspirins and then a Coke, then we dissolved two aspirins in a Coke and I took that, and then I took a Coke and two aspirins. Each time the idiots who believed it were standing around me, waiting to catch me when I fainted. But nothing happened. I do remember that I didnt sleep very well that night, so I got up and did a lot of figuring, and worked out some of the formulas for what is called the Riemann-Zeta function.)All right, guys, I said. Lets go out and get some benzine.They got the henzine ready, I stuck my hand in the water in the sink and then into the benzine and lit it... and it hurt like hell! You see, in the meantime I had grown _hairs_ on the back of my hand, which acted like wicks and held the benzine in place while it burned, whereas when I had done it earlier I had no hairs on the back of my hand. After I _did_ the experiment for my fraternity brothers, I didnt have any hairs on the back of my hands either.Well, my pal and I met on the beach, and he told me that he had a process for metal-plating plastics. I said that was impossible, because theres no conductivity; you cant attach a wire. But he said he could metal-plate anything, and I still remember him picking up a peach pit that was in the sand, and saying he could metal-plate thattrying to impress me.What was nice was that he offered me a job at his little company, which was on the top floor of a building in New York. There were only about four people in the company. His father was the one who was getting the money together and was, I think, the president. He was the vice-president, along with another fella who was a salesman. I was the chief research chemist, and my friends brother, who was not very clever, was the bottle-washer. We had six metal-plating baths.They had this process for metal-plating plastics, and the scheme was: First, deposit silver on the object by precipitating silver from a silver nitrate bath with a reducing agent (like you make mirrors); then stick the object, with silver on it as a conductor, into an electroplating bath, and the silver gets plated.The problem was, does the silver stick to the object?It doesnt. It peels off easily. So there was a step in between, to make the silver stick better to the object. It depended on the material. For things like Bakelite, which was an important plastic in those days, my friend had found that if he sandblasted it first, and then soaked it for many hours in stannous hydroxide, which got into the pores of the Bakelite, the silver would hold onto the surface very nicely.But it worked only on a few plastics, and new kinds of plastics were coming out all the time, such as methyl methacrylate (which we call plexiglass, now), that we couldnt plate directly, at first. And cellulose acetate, which was very cheap, was another one we couldnt plate at first, though we finally discovered that putting it in sodium hydroxide for a little while before using the stannous chloride made it plate very well.I was pretty successful as a chemist in the company. My advantage was that my pal had done no chemistry at all; he had done no experiments; he just knew how to do something once. I set to work putting lots of different knobs in bottles, and putting all kinds of chemicals in. By trying everything and keeping track of everything I found ways of plating a wider range of plastics than he had done before.I was also able to simplify his process. From looking in books I changed the reducing agent from glucose to formaldehyde, and was able to recover 100 percent of the silver immediately, instead of having to recover the silver left in solution at a later time.I also got the stannous hydroxide to dissolve in water by adding a little bit of hydrochloric acidsomething I remembered from a college chemistry courseso a step that used to take _hours_ now took about five minutes.My experiments were always being interrupted by the salesman, who would come back with some plastic from a prospective customer. Id have all these bottles lined up, with everything marked, when all of a sudden, You gotta stop the experiment to do a super job for the sales department! So, a lot of experiments had to be started more than once.One time we got into one hell of a lot of trouble. There was some artist who was trying to make a picture for the cover of a magazine about automobiles. He had very carefully built a wheel out of plastic, and somehow or other this salesman had told him we could plate anything, so the artist wanted us to metal-plate the hub, so it would be a shiny, silver hub. The wheel was made of a new plastic that we didnt know very well how to platethe fact is, the salesman never knew what we _could_ plate, so he was always promising thingsand it didnt work the first time. So, to fix it up we had to get the old silver off, and we couldnt get it off easily. I decided to use concentrated nitric acid on it, which took the silver off all right, but also made pits and holes in the plastic. We were really in hot water _that_ time! In fact, we had lots of hot water experiments.The other fellas in the company decided we should run advertisements in _Modern Plastics_ magazine. A few things we metal-plated were very pretty. They looked good in the advertisements. We also had a few things out in a showcase in front, for prospective customers to look at, but nobody could pick up the things in the advertisements or in the showcase to see how well the plating stayed on. Perhaps some of them were, in fact, pretty good jobs. But they were made specially; they were not regular products.Right after I left the company at the end of the summer to go to Princeton, they got a good offer from somebody who wanted to metal-plate plastic pens. Now people could have silver pens that were light, and easy, and cheap. The pens immediately sold, all over, and it was rather exciting to see people walking around everywhere with these pensand you knew where they came from.But the company hadnt had much experience with the materialor perhaps with the filler that was used in the plastic (most plastics arent pure; they have a filler, which in those days wasnt very well controlled)and the darn things would develop a blister. When you have something in your hand that has a little blister that starts to peel, you cant help fiddling with it. So everybody was fiddling with all the peelings coming off the pens.Now the company had this _emergency_ problem to fix the pens, and my pal decided he needed a big microscope, and so on. He didnt know what he was going to look at, or why, and it cost his company a lot of money for this fake research. The result was, they had trouble: They never solved the problem, and the company failed, because their first big job was such a failure.A few years later I was in Los Alamos, where there was a man named Frederic de Hoffman, who was a sort of scientist; but more, he was also very good at administrating. Not highly trained, he liked mathematics, and worked very hard; he compensated for his lack of training by hard work. Later he became the president or vice president of General Atomics and he was a big industrial character after that. But at the time he was just a very energetic, open-eyed, enthusiastic boy, helping along with the Project as best he could.One day we were eating at the Fuller Lodge, and he told me he had been working in England before coming to Los Alamos.What kind of work were you doing there? I asked.I was working on a process for metal-plating plastics. I was one of the guys in the laboratory.How did it go?It was going along pretty well, but we had our problems.Oh?Just as we were beginning to develop our process, there was a company in New York..._What_ company in New York?It was called the Metaplast Corporation. They were developing further than we were.How could you tell?They were advertising all the time in _Modern Plastics_ with full-page advertisements showing all the things they could plate, and we realized that they were further along than we were.Did you have any stuff from them?No, but you could tell from the advertisements that they were way ahead of what we could do. Our process was pretty good, but it was no use trying to compete with an American process like that.How many chemists did you have working in the lab?We had six chemists working.How many chemists do you think the Metaplast Corporation had?Oh! They must have had a _real_ chemistry department!Would you describe for me what you think the chief research chemist at the Metaplast Corporation might look like, and how his laboratory might work?I would guess they must have twenty-five or fifty chemists, and the chief research chemist has his own officespecial, with glass. You know, like they have in the movies guys coming in all the time with research projects that theyre doing, getting his advice, and rushing off to do more research, people coming in and out all the time. With twenty-five or fifty chemists, how the hell could we compete with them?Youll be interested and amused to know that you are now talking to the chief research chemist of the Metaplast Corporation, whose staff consisted of one bottle-washer!Next page