d be about time, so I began to
work in earnest and two minutes later, CLINK -- it opened.
The colonel's jaw dropped and his eyes bugged out. "Colonel," I said,
in a serious tone, "let me tell you something about these locks: When the
door to the safe or the top drawer of the filing cabinet is left open, it's
very easy for someone to get the combination. That's what I did while you
were reading my report, just to demonstrate the danger. You should insist
that everybody keep their filing cabinet drawers locked while they're
working, because when they're open, they're very, very vulnerable."
"Yeah! I see what you mean! That's very interesting!" We were on the
same side after that.
The next time I went to Oak Ridge, all the secretaries and people who
knew who I was were telling me, "Don't come through here! Don't come through
here!"
The colonel had sent a note around to everyone in the plant which said,
"During his last visit, was Mr. Feynman at any time in your office, near
your office, or walking through your office?" Some people answered yes;
others said no. The ones who said yes got another note: "Please change the
combination of your safe."
That was his solution: I was the danger. So they all had to change
their combinations on account of me. It's a pain in the neck to change a
combination and remember the new one, so they were all mad at me and didn't
want me to come near them: they might have to change their combination once
again. Of course, their filing cabinets were still left open while they were
working!
A library at Los Alamos held all of the documents we had ever worked
on: It was a solid, concrete room with a big, beautiful door which had a
metal wheel that turns -- like a safe-deposit vault. During the war I had
tried to look at it closely. I knew the girl who was the librarian, and I
begged her to let me play with it a little bit. I was fascinated by it: it
was the biggest lock I ever saw! I discovered that I could never use my
method of picking off the last two numbers to get in. In fact, while turning
the knob while the door was open, I made the lock close, so it was sticking
out, and they couldn't close the door again until the girl came and opened
the lock again. That was the end of my fiddling around with that lock. I
didn't have time to figure out how it worked; it was much beyond my
capacity.
During the summer after the war I had some documents to write and work
to finish up, so I went back to Los Alamos from Cornell, where I had taught
during the year. In the middle of my work I had to refer to a document that
I had written before but couldn't remember, and it was down in the library.
I went down to get the document, and there was a soldier walking back
and forth, with a gun. It was a Saturday, and after the war the library was
closed on Saturdays.
Then I remembered what a good friend of mine, Frederic de Hoffman, had
done. He was in the Declassification Section. After the war the army was
thinking of declassifying some documents, and he had to go back and forth to
the library so much -- look at this document, look at that document, check
this, check that -- that he was going nuts! So he had a copy of every
document -- all the secrets to the atomic bomb -- in nine filing cabinets in
his office.
I went down to his office, and the lights were on. It looked as if
whoever was there -- perhaps his secretary -- had just stepped out for a few
minutes, so I waited. While I was waiting I started to fiddle around with
the combination wheel on one of the filing cabinets. (By the way, I didn't
have the last two numbers for de Hoffman's safes; they were put in after the
war, after I had left.)
I started to play with one of the combination wheels and began to think
about the safecracker books. I thought to myself, "I've never been much
impressed by the tricks described in those books, so I've never tried them,
but let's see if we can open de Hoffman's safe by following the book."
First trick, the secretary: she's afraid she's going to forget the
combination, so she writes it down somewhere. I started to look in some of
the places mentioned in the book. The desk drawer was locked, but it was an
ordinary lock like Leo Lavatelli taught me how to open -- ping! I look along
the edge: nothing.
Then I looked through the secretary's papers. I found a sheet of paper
that all the secretaries had, with the Greek letters carefully made -- so
they could recognize them in mathematical formulas -- and named. And there,
carelessly written along the top of the paper, was pi = 3.14159. Now, that's
six digits, and why does a secretary have to know the numerical value of pi?
It was obvious; there was no other reason!
I went over to the filing cabinets and tried the first one: 31-41-59.
It didn't open. Then I tried 59-41-31. That didn't work either. Then
95-14-13. Backwards, forwards, upside down, turn it this way, turn it that
-- nothing!
I closed the desk drawer and started to walk out the door, when I
thought of the safecracker books again: Next, try the psychology method. I
said to myself, "Freddy de Hoffman is just the kind of guy to use a
mathematical constant for a safe combination."
I went back to the first filing cabinet and tried 27-18-28 -- CLICK! It
opened! (The mathematical constant second in importance to pi is the base of
natural logarithms, e:2.71828...) There were nine filing cabinets, and I had
opened the first one, but the document I wanted was in another one -- they
were in alphabetical order by author. I tried the second filing cabinet:
27-18-28 -- CLICK! It opened with the same, combination. I thought, "This is
wonderful! I've opened the secrets to the atomic bomb, but if I'm ever going
to tell this story, I've got to make sure that all the combinations are
really the same!" Some of the filing cabinets were in the next room, so I
tried 27-18-28 on one of them, and it opened. Now I'd opened three safes --
all the same.
I thought to myself, "Now I could write a safecracker book that would
beat every one, because at the beginning I would tell how I opened safes
whose contents were bigger and more valuable than what any safecracker
anywhere had opened -- except for a life, of course -- but compared to the
furs or the gold bullion, I have them all beat: I opened the safes which
contained all the secrets to the atomic bomb: the schedules for the
production of the plutonium, the purification procedures, how much material
is needed, how the bomb works, how the neutrons are generated, what the
design is, the dimensions -- the entire information that was known at Los
Alamos: the whole shmeer!"
I went back to the second filing cabinet and took out the document I
wanted. Then I took a red grease pencil and a piece of yellow paper that was
lying around in the office and wrote, "I borrowed document no. LA4312 --
Feynman the safe-cracker." I put the note on top of the papers in the filing
cabinet and closed it.
Then I went to the first one I had opened and wrote another note: "This
one was no harder to open than the other one -- Wise Guy" and shut the
cabinet.
Then in the other cabinet, in the other room, I wrote, "When the
combinations are all the same, one is no harder to open than another -- Same
Guy" and I shut that one. I went back to my office and wrote my report.
That evening I went to the cafeteria and ate supper. There was Freddy
de Hoffman. He said he was going over to his office to work, so just for fun
I went with him.
He started to work, and soon he went into the other room to open one of
the filing cabinets in there -- something I hadn't counted on -- and he
happened to open the filing cabinet I had put the third note in, first. He
opened the drawer, and he saw this foreign object in there -- this bright
yellow paper with something scrawled on it in bright red crayon.
I had read in books that when somebody is afraid, his face gets sallow,
but I had never seen it before. Well, it's absolutely true. His face turned
a gray, yellow green -- it was really frightening to see. He picked up the
paper, and his hand was shaking. "L-l-look at this!" he said, trembling.
The note said, "When the combinations are all the same, one is no
harder to open than another -- Same Guy."
"What does it mean?" I said.
"All the c-c-combinations of my safes are the s-s-same!" he stammered.
"That ain't such a good idea."
"I-I know that n-now!" he said, completely shaken.
Another effect of the blood draining from the face must be that the
brain doesn't work right. "He signed who it was! He signed who it was!" he
said.
"What?" (I hadn't put my name on that one.)
"Yes," he said, "it's the same guy who's been trying to get into
Building Omega!"
All during the war, and even after, there were these perpetual rumors:
"Somebody's been trying to get into Building Omega!" You see, during the war
they were doing experiments for the bomb in which they wanted to get enough
material together for the chain reaction to just get started. They would
drop one piece of material through another, and when it went through, the
reaction would start and they'd measure how many neutrons they got. The
piece would fall through so fast that nothing should build up and explode.
Enough of a reaction would begin, however, so they could tell that things
were really starting correctly, that the rates were right, and everything
was going according to prediction -- a very dangerous experiment!
Naturally, they were not doing this experiment in the middle of Los
Alamos, but off several miles, in a canyon several mesas over, all isolated.
This Building Omega had its own fence around it with guard towers. In the
middle of the night when everything's quiet, some rabbit comes out of the
brush and smashes against the fence and makes a noise. The guard shoots. The
lieutenant in charge comes around. What's the guard going to say -- that it
was only a rabbit? No. "Somebody's been trying to get into Building Omega
and I scared him off!"
So de Hoffman was pale and shaking, and he didn't realize there was a
flaw in his logic: it was not clear that the same guy who'd been trying to
get into Building Omega was the same guy who was standing next to him. He
asked me what to do. "Well, see if any documents are missing." "It looks all
right," he said. "I don't see any missing." I tried to steer him to the
filing cabinet I took my document out of. "Well, uh, if all the combinations
are the same, perhaps he's taken something from another drawer."
"Right!" he said, and he went back into his office and opened the first
filing cabinet and found the second note I wrote: "This one was no harder
than the other one -- Wise Guy."
By that time it didn't make any difference whether it was "Same Guy" or
"Wise Guy": It was completely clear to him that it was the guy who was
trying to get into Building Omega. So to convince him to open the filing
cabinet with my first note in it was particularly difficult, and I don't
remember how I talked him into it.
He started to open it, so I began to walk down the hall, because I was
a little bit afraid that when he found out who did it to him, I was going to
get my throat cut!
Sure enough, he came running down the hall after me, but instead of
being angry, he practically put his arms around me because he was so
completely relieved that this terrible burden of the atomic secrets being
stolen was only me doing mischief.
A few days later de Hoffman told me that he needed something from
Kerst's safe. Donald Kerst had gone back to Illinois and was hard to reach.
"If you can open all my safes using the psychological method," de Hoffman
said (I had told him how I did it), "maybe you could open Kerst's safe that
way."
By now the story had gotten around, so several people came to watch
this fantastic process where I was going to open Kerst's safe -- cold. There
was no need for me to be alone. I didn't have the last two numbers to
Kerst's safe, and to use the psychology method I needed people around who
knew Kerst.
We all went over to Kerst's office and I checked the drawers for clues;
there was nothing. Then I asked them, "What kind of a combination would
Kerst use -- a mathematical constant?"
"Oh, no!" de Hoffman said. "Kerst would do something very simple."
I tried 10-20-30, 20-40-60, 60-40-20, 30-20-10. Nothing.
Then I said, "Do you think he would use a date?"
"Yeah!" they said. "He's just the kind of guy to use a date."
We tried various dates: 8-6-45, when the bomb went off; 86-19-45; this
date; that date; when the project started. Nothing worked.
By this time most of the people had drifted off. They didn't have the
patience to watch me do this, but the only way to solve such a thing is
patience!
Then I decided to try everything from around 1900 until now. That
sounds like a lot, but it's not: the first number is a month, one through
twelve, and I can try that using only three numbers: ten, five, and zero.
The second number is a day, from one to thirty-one, which I can try with six
numbers. The third number is the year, which was only forty-seven numbers at
that time, which I could try with nine numbers. So the 8000 combinations had
been reduced to 162, something I could try in fifteen or twenty minutes.
Unfortunately I started with the high end of the numbers for the
months, because when I finally opened it, the combination was 0-5-35.
I turned to de Hoffman. "What happened to Kerst around January 5,
1935?"
"His daughter was born in 1936," de Hoffman said. "It must be her
birthday."
Now I had opened two safes cold. I was getting good. Now I was
professional.
That same summer after the war, the guy from the property section was
trying to take back some of the things the government had bought, to sell
again as surplus. One of the things was a Captain's safe. We all knew about
this safe. The Captain, when he arrived during the war, decided that the
filing cabinets weren't safe enough for the secrets he was going to get, so
he had to have a special safe.
The Captain's office was on the second floor of one of the flimsy
wooden buildings that we all had our offices in, and the safe he ordered was
a heavy steel safe. The workmen had to put down platforms of wood and use
special jacks to get it up the steps. Since there wasn't much amusement, we
all watched this big safe being moved up to his office with great effort,
and we all made jokes about what kind of secrets he was going to keep in
there. Some fella said we oughta put our stuff in his safe, and let him put
his stuff in ours. So everyone knew about this safe.
The property section man wanted it for Surplus, but first it had to be
emptied, and the only people who knew the combination were the Captain, who
was in Bikini, and Alvarez, who'd forgotten it. The man asked me to open it.
I went up to his old office and said to the secretary, "Why don't you
phone the Captain and ask him the combination?"
"I don't want to bother him," she said.
"Well, you're gonna bother me for maybe eight hours. I won't do it
unless you make an attempt to call him."
"OK, OK!" she said. She picked up the telephone and I went into the
other room to look at the safe. There it was, that huge, steel safe, and its
doors were wide open.
I went back to the secretary. "It's open."
"Marvelous!" she said, as she put down the phone.
"No," I said, "it was already open."
"Oh! I guess the property section was able to open it after all."
I went down to the man in the property section. "I went up to the safe
and it was already open."
"Oh, yeah," he said; "I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I sent our regular
locksmith up there to drill it, but before he drilled it he tried to open
it, and he opened it."
So! First information: Los Alamos now has a regular locksmith. Second
information: This man knows how to drill safes, something I know nothing
about. Third information:
He can open a safe cold -- in a few minutes. This is a real
professional, a real source of information. This guy I have to meet.
I found out he was a locksmith they had hired after the war (when they
weren't as concerned about security) to take care of such things. It turned
out that he didn't have enough work to do opening safes, so he also repaired
the Marchant calculators we had used. During the war I repaired those things
all the time -- so I had a way to meet him.
Now I have never been surreptitious or tricky about meeting somebody; I
just go right up and introduce myself. But in this case it was so important
to meet this man, and I knew that before he would tell me any of his secrets
on how to open safes, I would have to prove myself.
I found out where his room was -- in the basement of the theoretical
physics section, where I worked -- and I knew he worked in the evening, when
the machines weren't being used. So, at first I would walk past his door on
my way to my office in the evening. That's all; I'd just walk past.
A few nights later, just a "Hi." After a while, when he saw it was the
same guy walking past, he'd say "Hi," or "Good evening."
A few weeks of this slow process and I see he's working on the Marchant
calculators. I say nothing about them; it isn't time yet.
We gradually say a little more: "Hi! I see you're working pretty hard!"
"Yeah, pretty hard" -- that kind of stuff.
Finally, a breakthrough: he invites me for soup. It's going very good
now. Every evening we have soup together. Now I begin to talk a little bit
about the adding machines, and he tells me he has a problem. He's been
trying to put a succession of spring-loaded wheels back onto a shaft, and he
doesn't have the right tool, or something; he's been working on it for a
week. I tell him that I used to work on those machines during the war, and
"I'll tell you what: you just leave the machine out tonight, and I'll have a
look at it tomorrow."
"OK," he says, because he's desperate.
The next day I looked at the damn thing and tried to load it by holding
all the wheels in my hand. It kept snapping back. I thought to myself, "If
he's been trying the same thing for a week, and I'm trying it and can't do
it, it ain't the way to do it!" I stopped and looked at it very carefully,
and I noticed that each wheel had a little hole -- just a little hole. Then
it dawned on me: I sprung the first one; then I put a piece of wire through
the little hole. Then I sprung the second one and put the wire through it.
Then the next one, the next one -- like putting beads on a string -- and I
strung the whole thing the first time I tried it, got it all in line, pulled
the wire out, and everything was OK.
That night I showed him the little hole and how I did it, and from then
on we talked a lot about machines; we got to be good friends. Now, in his
office there were a lot of little cubbyholes that contained locks half taken
apart, and pieces from safes, too. Oh, they were beautiful! But I still
didn't say a word about locks and safes.
Finally, I figured the day was coming, so I decided to put out a little
bit of bait about safes: I'd tell him the only thing worth a damn that I
knew about them -- that you can take the last two numbers off while it's
open. "Hey!" I said, looking over at the cubbyholes. "I see you're working
on Mosler safes."
"Yeah."
"You know, these locks are weak. If they're open, you can take the last
two numbers off..."
"You can?" he said, finally showing some interest.
"Yeah."
"Show me how," he said. I showed him how to do it, and he turned to me.
"What's your name?" All this time we had never exchanged names.
"Dick Feynman," I said.
"God! You're Feynman!" he said in awe. "The great safecracker! I've
heard about you; I've wanted to meet you for so long! I want to learn how to
crack a safe from you."
"What do you mean? You know how to open safes cold."
"I don't."
"Listen, I heard about the Captain's safe, and I've been working pretty
hard all this time because I wanted to meet you. And you tell me you don't
know how to open a safe cold."
"That's right."
"Well you must know how to drill a safe."
"I don't know how to do that either."
"WHAT?" I exclaimed. "The guy in the property section said you picked
up your tools and went up to drill the Captain's safe."
"Suppose you had a job as a locksmith," he said, "and a guy comes down
and asks you to drill a safe. What would you do?"
"Well," I replied, "I'd make a fancy thing of putting my tools
together, pick them up and take them to the safe. Then I'd put my drill up
against the safe somewhere at random and I'd go vvvvvvvvvvv, so I'd save my
job."
"That's exactly what I was going to do."
"But you opened it! You must know how to crack safes."
"Oh, yeah. I knew that the locks come from the factory set at 25-0-25
or 50-25-50, so I thought, 'Who knows; maybe the guy didn't bother to change
the combination,' and the second one worked."
So I did learn something from him -- that he cracked safes by the same
miraculous methods that I did. But even funnier was that this big shot
Captain had to have a super, super safe, and had people go to all that
trouble to hoist the thing up into his office, and he didn't even bother to
set the combination.
I went from office to office in my building, trying those two factory
combinations, and I opened about one safe in five.
--------
Uncle Sam Doesn't Need You!
After the war the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel to get the
guys for the occupation forces in Germany. Up until then the army deferred
people for some reason other than physical first (I was deferred because I
was working on the bomb), but now they reversed that and gave everybody a
physical first.
That summer I was working for Hans Bethe at General Electric in
Schenectady, New York, and I remember that I had to go some distance -- I
think it was to Albany -- to take the physical.
I get to the draft place, and I'm handed a lot of forms to fill out,
and then I start going around to all these different booths. They check your
vision at one, your hearing at another, they take your blood sample at
another, and so forth.
Anyway, finally you come to booth number thirteen: psychiatrist. There
you wait, sitting on one of the benches, and while I'm waiting I can see
what is happening. There are three desks, with a psychiatrist behind each
one, and the "culprit" sits across from the psychiatrist in his BVDs and
answers various questions.
At that time there were a lot of movies about psychiatrists. For
example, there was Spellbound, in which a woman who used to be a great piano
player has her hands stuck in some awkward position and she can't move them,
and her family calls in a psychiatrist to try to help her, and the
psychiatrist goes upstairs into a room with her, and you see the door close
behind them, and downstairs the family is discussing what's going to happen,
and then she comes out of the room, hands still stuck in the horrible
position, walks dramatically down the stairs over to the piano and sits
down, lifts her hands over the keyboard, and suddenly -- dum diddle dum
diddle dum, dum, dum -- she can play again. Well, I can't stand this kind of
baloney, and I had decided that psychiatrists are fakers, and I'll have
nothing to do with them. So that was the mood I was in when it was my turn
to talk to the psychiatrist.
I sit down at the desk, and the psychiatrist starts looking through my
papers. "Hello, Dick!" he says in a cheerful voice. "Where do you work?"
I'm thinking, "Who does he think he is, calling me by my first name?"
and I say coldly, "Schenectady."
"Who do you work for, Dick?" says the psychiatrist, smiling again.
"General Electric."
"Do you like your work, Dick?" he says, with that same big smile on his
face.
"So-so." I just wasn't going to have anything to do with him.
Three nice questions, and then the fourth one is completely different.
"Do you think people talk about you?" he asks, in a low, serious tone.
I light up and say, "Sure! When I go home, my mother often tells me how
she was telling her friends about me." He isn't listening to the
explanation; instead, he's writing something down on my paper.
Then again, in a low, serious tone, he says, "Do you think people stare
at you?"
I'm all ready to say no, when he says, ''For instance, do you think any
of the boys waiting on the benches are staring at you now?"
While I had been waiting to talk to the psychiatrist, I had noticed
there were about twelve guys on the benches waiting for the three
psychiatrists, and they've got nothing else to look at, so I divide twelve
by three -- that makes four each -- but I'm conservative, so I say, "Yeah,
maybe two of them are looking at us."
He says, "Well just turn around and look" -- and he's not even
bothering to look himself!
So I turn around, and sure enough, two guys are looking. So I point to
them and I say, "Yeah -- there's that guy, and that guy over there looking
at us." Of course, when I'm turned around and pointing like that, other guys
start to look at us, so I say, "Now him, and those two over there -- and now
the whole bunch." He still doesn't look up to check. He's busy writing more
things on my paper.
Then he says, "Do you ever hear voices in your head?"
"Very rarely," and I'm about to describe the two occasions on which it
happened when he says, "Do you talk to yourself?"
"Yeah, sometimes when I'm shaving, or thinking; once in a while." He's
writing down more stuff.
"I see you have a deceased wife -- do you talk to her?"
This question really annoyed me, but I contained myself and said,
"Sometimes, when I go up on a mountain and I'm thinking about her."
More writing. Then he asks, "Is anyone in your family in a mental
institution?"
"Yeah, I have an aunt in an insane asylum."
"Why do you call it an insane asylum?" he says, resentfully. "Why don't
you call it a mental institution?"
"I thought it was the same thing."
"Just what do you think insanity is?" he says, angrily.
"It's a strange and peculiar disease in human beings," I say honestly.
"There's nothing any more strange or peculiar about it than
appendicitis!" he retorts.
"I don't think so. In appendicitis we understand the causes better, and
something about the mechanism of it, whereas with insanity it's much more
complicated and mysterious." I won't go through the whole debate; the point
is that I meant insanity is physiologically peculiar, and he thought I meant
it was socially peculiar.
Up until this time, although I had been unfriendly to the psychiatrist,
I had nevertheless been honest in everything I said. But when he asked me to
put out my hands, I couldn't resist pulling a trick a guy in the
"bloodsucking line" had told me about. I figured nobody was ever going to
get a chance to do this, and as long as I was halfway under water, I would
do it. So I put out my hands with one palm up and the other one down.
The psychiatrist doesn't notice. He says, "Turn them over."
I turn them over. The one that was up goes down, and the one that was
down goes up, and he still doesn't notice, because he's always looking very
closely at one hand to see if it is shaking. So the trick had no effect.
Finally, at the end of all these questions, he becomes friendly again.
He lights up and says, "I see you have a Ph.D., Dick. Where did you study?"
"MIT and Princeton. And where did you study?"
"Yale and London. And what did you study, Dick?"
"Physics. And what did you study?"
"Medicine."
"And this is medicine?"
"Well, yes. What do you think it is? You go and sit down over there and
wait a few minutes!"
So I sit on the bench again, and one of the other guys waiting sidles
up to me and says, "Gee! You were in there twenty-five minutes! The other
guys were in there only five minutes!"
"Yeah."
"Hey," he says. "You wanna know how to fool the psychiatrist? All you
have to do is pick your nails, like this."
"Then why don't you pick your nails like that?"
"Oh," he says, "I wanna get in the army!"
"You wanna fool the psychiatrist?" I say. "You just tell him that!"
After a while I was called over to a different desk to see another
psychiatrist. While the first psychiatrist had been rather young and
innocent-looking, this one was gray-haired and distinguished-looking --
obviously the superior psychiatrist. I figure all of this is now going to
get straightened out, but no matter what happens, I'm not going to become
friendly.
The new psychiatrist looks at my papers, puts a big smile on his face,
and says, "Hello, Dick. I see you worked at Los Alamos during the war."
"Yeah."
"There used to be a boys' school there, didn't there?"
"That's right."
"Were there a lot of buildings in the school?"
"Only a few."
Three questions -- same technique -- and the next question is
completely different. "You said you hear voices in your head. Describe that,
please."
"It happens very rarely, when I've been paying attention to a person
with a foreign accent. As I'm falling asleep I can hear his voice very
clearly. The first time it happened was while I was a student at MIT. I
could hear old Professor Vallarta say, 'Dee-a dee-a electric field-a.' And
the other time was in Chicago during the war, when Professor Teller was
explaining to me how the bomb worked. Since I'm interested in all kinds of
phenomena, I wondered how I could hear these voices with accents so
precisely, when I couldn't imitate them that well... Doesn't everybody have
something like that happen once in a while?"
The psychiatrist put his hand over his face, and I could see through
his fingers a little smile (he wouldn't answer the question).
Then the psychiatrist checked into something else. "You said that you
talk to your deceased wife. What do you say to her?"
I got angry. I figure it's none of his damn business, and I say, "I
tell her I love her, if it's all right with you!"
After some more bitter exchanges he says, "Do you believe in the
supernormal?"
I say, "I don't know what the 'supernormal' is."
"What? You, a Ph.D. in physics, don't know what the supernormal is?"
"That's right."
"It's what Sir Oliver Lodge and his school believe in."
That's not much of a clue, but I knew it. "You mean the supernatural."
"You can call it that if you want."
"All right, I will."
"Do you believe in mental telepathy?"
"No. Do you?"
"Well, I'm keeping an open mind."
"What? You, a psychiatrist, keeping an open mind? Ha!" It went on like
this for quite a while.
Then at some point near the end he says, "How much do you value life?"
"Sixty-four."
"Why did you say 'sixty-four'?"
"How are you supposed to measure the value of life?"
"No! I mean, why did you say 'sixty-four,' and not 'seventy-three,' for
instance?"
"If I had said 'seventy-three,' you would have asked me the same
question!"
The psychiatrist finished with three friendly questions, just as the
other psychiatrist had done, handed me my papers, and I went off to the next
booth.
While I'm waiting in the line, I look at the paper which has the
summary of all the tests I've taken so far. And just for the hell of it I
show my paper to the guy next to me, and I ask him in a rather
stupid-sounding voice, "Hey! What did you get in 'Psychiatric'? Oh! You got
an 'N.' I got an 'N' in everything else, but I got a 'D' in 'Psychiatric.'
What does that mean?" I knew what it meant: "N" is normal, "D" is deficient.
The guy pats me on the shoulder and says, "Buddy, it's perfectly all
right. It doesn't mean anything. Don't worry about it!" Then he walks way
over to the other corner of the room, frightened: It's a lunatic!
I started looking at the papers the psychiatrists had written, and it
looked pretty serious! The first guy wrote: Thinks people talk about him.
Thinks people stare at him.
Auditory hypnogogic hallucinations.
Talks to self.
Talks to deceased wife.
Maternal aunt in mental institution.
Very peculiar stare. (I knew what that was -- that was when I said,
"And this is medicine?")
The second psychiatrist was obviously more important, because his
scribble was harder to read. His notes said things like "auditory hypnogogic
hallucinations confirmed." ("Hypnogogic" means you get them while you're
falling asleep.)
He wrote a lot of other technical-sounding notes, and I looked them
over, and they looked pretty bad. I figured I'd have to get all of this
straightened out with the army somehow.
At the end of the whole physical examination there's an army officer
who decides whether you're in or you're out. For instance, if there's
something the matter with your hearing, he has to decide if it's serious
enough to keep you out of the army. And because the army was scraping the
bottom of the barrel for new recruits, this officer wasn't going to take
anything from anybody. He was tough as nails. For instance, the fellow ahead
of me had two bones sticking out from the back of his neck -- some kind of
displaced vertebra, or something -- and this army officer had to get up from
his desk and feel them -- he had to make sure they were real!
I figure this is the place I'll get this whole misunderstanding
straightened out. When it's my turn, I hand my papers to the officer, and
I'm ready to explain everything, but the officer doesn't look up. He sees
the "D" next to "Psychiatric," immediately reaches for the rejection stamp,
doesn't ask me any questions, doesn't say anything; he just stamps my papers
"REJECTED," and hands me my 4-F paper, still looking at his desk.
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 Harts 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