Onsager said, "We should tell Feynman that nobody has ever figured out
the order of any transition correctly from first principles... so the fact
that his theory does not allow him to work out the order correctly does not
mean that he hasn't understood all the other aspects of liquid helium
satisfactorily." It turned out to be a compliment, but from the way he
started out, I thought I was really going to get it!
It wasn't more than a day later when I was in my room and the telephone
rang. It was Time magazine. The guy on the line said, "We're very interested
in your work. Do you have a copy of it you could send us?"
I had never been in Time and was very excited. I was proud of my work,
which had been received well at the meeting, so I said, "Sure!"
"Fine. Please send it to our Tokyo bureau." The guy gave me the
address. I was feeling great.
I repeated the address, and the guy said, "That's right. Thank you very
much, Mr. Pais."
"Oh, no!" I said, startled. "I'm not Pais; it's Pais you want? Excuse
me. I'll tell him that you want to speak to him when he comes back."
A few hours later Pais came in: "Hey, Pais! Pais!" I said, in an
excited voice. "Time magazine called! They want you to send 'em a copy of
the paper you're giving."
"Aw!" he says. "Publicity is a whore!"
I was doubly taken aback.
I've since found out that Pais was right, but in those days, I thought
it would be wonderful to have my name in Time magazine.
That was the first time I was in Japan. I was eager to go back, and
said I would go to any university they wanted me to. So the Japanese
arranged a whole series of places to visit for a few days at a time.
By this time I was married to Mary Lou, and we were entertained
wherever we went. At one place they put on a whole ceremony with dancing,
usually performed only for larger groups of tourists, especially for us. At
another place we were met right at the boat by all the students. At another
place, the mayor met us.
One particular place we stayed was a little, modest place in the woods,
where the emperor would stay when he came by. It was a very lovely place,
surrounded by woods, just beautiful, the stream selected with care. It had a
certain calmness, a quiet elegance. That the emperor would go to such a
place to stay showed a greater sensitivity to nature, I think, than what we
were used to in the West.
At all these places everybody working in physics would tell me what
they were doing and I'd discuss it with them. They would tell me the general
problem they were working on, and would begin to write a bunch of equations.
"Wait a minute," I would say, "Is there a particular example of this
general problem?"
"Why yes; of course."
"Good. Give me one example." That was for me: I can't understand
anything in general unless I'm carrying along in my mind a specific example
and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I'm kind of slow
and I don't understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these "dumb"
questions: "Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an an ion this way, or that way?"
But later, when the guy's in the middle of a bunch of equations, he'll
say something and I'll say, "Wait a minute! There's an error! That can't be
right!"
The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he
finds the mistake and wonders, "How the hell did this guy, who hardly
understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these
equations?"
He thinks I'm following the steps mathematically, but that's not what
I'm doing. I have the specific, physical example of what he's trying to
analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the
thing. So when the equation says it should behave so-and-so, and I know
that's the wrong way around, I jump up and say, "Wait! There's a mistake!"
So in Japan I couldn't understand or discuss anybody's work unless they
could give me a physical example, and most of them couldn't find one. Of
those who could, it was often a weak example, one which could be solved by a
much simpler method of analysis.
Since I was perpetually asking not for mathematical equations, but for
physical circumstances of what they were trying to work out, my visit was
summarized in a mimeographed paper circulated among the scientists (it was a
modest but effective system of communication they had cooked up after the
war) with the title, "Feynman's Bombardments, and Our Reactions."
After visiting a number of universities I spent some months at the
Yukawa Institute in Kyoto. I really enjoyed working there. Everything was so
nice: You'd come to work, take your shoes off, and someone would come and
serve you tea in the morning when you felt like it. It was very pleasant.
While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked
much harder at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis and
do things. I took lessons from a Japanese man every day for an hour.
One day he was teaching me the word for "see."
"All right," he said. "You want to say, 'May I see your garden?' What
do you say?"
I made up a sentence with the word that I had just learned.
"No, no!" he said. "When you say to someone, 'Would you like to see my
garden? you use the first 'see.' But when you want to see someone else's
garden, you must use another 'see,' which is more polite."
"Would you like to glance at my lousy garden?" is essentially what
you're saying in the first case, but when you want to look at the other
fella's garden, you have to say something like, "May I observe your gorgeous
garden?" So there's two different words you have to use.
Then he gave me another one: "You go to a temple, and you want to look
at the gardens..."
I made up a sentence, this time with the polite "see."
"No, no!" he said. "In the temple, the gardens are much more elegant.
So you have to say something that would be equivalent to 'May I hang my eyes
on your most exquisite gardens?'
Three or four different words for one idea, because when I'm doing it,
it's miserable; when you're doing it, it's elegant.
I was learning Japanese mainly for technical things, so I decided to
check if this same problem existed among the scientists.
At the institute the next day, I said to the guys in the office, "How
would I say in Japanese, 'I solve the Dirac Equation'?"
They said such-and-so.
"OK. Now I want to say, 'Would you solve the Dirac Equation?' -- how do
I say that?"
"Well, you have to use a different word for 'solve,' " they say.
"Why?" I protested. "When I solve it, I do the same damn thing as when
you solve it!"
"Well, yes, but it's a different word -- it's more polite."
I gave up. I decided that wasn't the language for me, and stopped
learning Japanese.
--------
The 7 Percent Solution
The problem was to find the right laws of beta decay. There appeared to
be two particles, which were called a tau and a theta. They seemed to have
almost exactly the same mass, but one disintegrated into two pions, and the
other into three pions. Not only did they seem to have the same mass, but
they also had the same lifetime, which is a funny coincidence. So everybody
was concerned about this.
At a meeting I went to, it was reported that when these two particles
were produced in a cyclotron at different angles and different energies,
they were always produced in the same proportions -- so many taus compared
to so many thetas.
Now; one possibility, of course, was that it was the same particle,
which sometimes decayed into two pions, and sometimes into three pions. But
nobody would allow that, because there is a law called the parity rule,
which is based on the assumption that all the laws of physics are
mirror-image-symmetrical, and says that a thing that can go into two pions
can't also go into three pions.
At that particular time I was not really quite up to things: I was
always a little behind. Everybody seemed to be smart, and I didn't feel I
was keeping up. Anyway, I was sharing a room with a guy named Martin Block,
an experimenter. And one evening he said to me, "Why are you guys so
insistent on this parity rule? Maybe the tau and theta are the same
particle. What would be the consequences if the parity rule were wrong?"
I thought a minute and said, "It would mean that nature's laws are
different for the right hand and the left hand, that there's a way to define
the right hand by physical phenomena. I don't know that that's so terrible,
though there must be some bad consequences of that, but I don't know. Why
don't you ask the experts tomorrow?"
He said, "No, they won't listen to me. You ask."
So the next day, at the meeting, when we were discussing the tau-theta
puzzle, Oppenheimer said, "We need to hear some new, wilder ideas about this
problem."
So I got up and said, "I'm asking this question for Martin Block: What
would be the consequences if the parity rule was wrong?"
Murray Gell-Mann often teased me about this, saying I didn't have the
nerve to ask the question for myself. But that's not the reason. I thought
it might very well be an important idea.
Lee, of Lee and Yang, answered something complicated, and as usual I
didn't understand very well. At the end of the meeting, Block asked me what
he said, and I said I didn't know, but as far as I could tell, it was still
open -- there was still a possibility. I didn't think it was likely, but I
thought it was possible.
Norm Ramsey asked me if I thought he should do an experiment looking
for parity law violation, and I replied, "The best way to explain it is,
I'll bet you only fifty to one you don't find anything."
He said, "That's good enough for me." But he never did the experiment.
Anyway, the discovery of parity law violation was made, experimentally,
by Wu, and this opened up a whole bunch of new possibilities for beta decay
theory. It also unleashed a whole host of experiments immediately after
that. Some showed electrons coming out of the nuclei spun to the left, and
some to the right, and there were all kinds of experiments, all kinds of
interesting discoveries about parity. But the data were so confusing that
nobody could put things together.
At one point there was a meeting in Rochester -- the yearly Rochester
Conference. I was still always behind, and Lee was giving his paper on the
violation of parity. He and Yang had come to the conclusion that parity was
violated, and now he was giving the theory for it.
During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I
brought the paper home and said to her, "I can't understand these things
that Lee and Yang are saying. It's all so complicated."
"No," she' said, "what you mean is not that you can't understand it,
but that you didn't invent it. You didn't figure it out your own way, from
hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you're a student again, and
take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations.
Then you'll understand it very easily."
I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to
be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it, thinking it was
too difficult.
It reminded me of something I had done a long time ago with left and
right unsymmetrical equations. Now it became kind of clear, when I looked at
Lee's formulas, that the solution to it all was much simpler: Everything
comes out coupled to the left. For the electron and the muon, my predictions
were the same as Lee's, except I changed some signs around. I didn't realize
it at the time, but Lee had taken only the simplest example of muon
coupling, and hadn't proved that all muons would be full to the right,
whereas according to my theory, all muons would have to be full
automatically. Therefore, I had, in fact, a prediction on top of what he
had. I had different signs, but I didn't realize that I also had this
quantity right.
I predicted a few things that nobody had experiments for yet, but when
it came to the neutron and proton, I couldn't make it fit well with what was
then known about neutron and proton coupling: it was kind of messy.
The next day, when I went back to the meeting, a very kind man named
Ken Case, who was going to give a paper on something, gave me five minutes
of his allotted time to present my idea. I said I was convinced that
everything was coupled to the left, and that the signs for the electron and
muon are reversed, but I was struggling with the neutron. Later the
experimenters asked me some questions about my predictions, and then I went
to Brazil for the summer.
When I came back to the United States, I wanted to know what the
situation was with beta decay. I went to Professor Wu's laboratory at
Columbia, and she wasn't there, spinning to the left in the beta decay, came
out on the right in some cases. Nothing fit anything. When I got back to
Caltech, I asked some of the experimenters what the situation was with beta
decay. I remember three guys, Hans Jensen, Aaldert Wapstra, and Felix Boehm,
sitting me down on a little stool, and starting to tell me all these facts:
experimental results from other parts of the country, and their own
experimental results. Since I knew those guys, and how careful they were, I
paid more attention to their results than to the others. Their results,
alone, were not so inconsistent; it was all the others plus theirs.
Finally they get all this stuff into me, and they say, "The situation
is so mixed up that even some of the things they've established for years
are being questioned -- such as the beta decay of the neutron is S and T.
It's so messed up. Murray says it might even be V and A."
I jump up from the stool and say, "Then I understand EVVVVVERYTHING!"
They thought I was joking. But the thing that I had trouble with at the
Rochester meeting -- the neutron and proton disintegration: everything fit
but that, and if it was V and A instead of S and T, that would fit too.
Therefore I had the whole theory!
That night I calculated all kinds of things with this theory. The first
thing I calculated was the rate of disintegration of the muon and the
neutron. They should be connected together, if this theory was right, by a
certain relationship, and it was right to 9 percent. That's pretty close, 9
percent. It should have been more perfect than that, but it was close
enough.
I went on and checked some other things, which fit, and new things fit,
new things fit, and I was very excited. It was the first time, and the only
time, in my career that I knew a law of nature that nobody else knew. (Of
course it wasn't true, but finding out later that at least Murray Gell-Mann
-- and also Sudarshan and Marshak -- had worked out the same theory didn't
spoil my fun.)
The other things I had done before were to take somebody else's theory
and improve the method of calculating, or take an equation, such as the
Schrödinger Equation, to explain a phenomenon, such as helium. We know the
equation, and we know the phenomenon, but how does it work?
I thought about Dirac, who had his equation for a while -- a new
equation which told how an electron behaved -- and I had this new equation
for beta decay, which wasn't as vital as the Dirac Equation, but it was
good. It's the only time I ever discovered a new law.
I called up my sister in New York to thank her for getting me to sit
down and work through that paper by Lee and Yang at the Rochester
Conference. After feeling uncomfortable and behind, now I was in; I had made
a discovery, just from what she suggested. I was able to enter physics
again, so to speak, and I wanted to thank her for that. I told her that
everything fit, except for the 9 percent.
I was very excited, and kept on calculating, and things that fit kept
on tumbling out: they fit automatically, without a strain. I had begun to
forget about the 9 percent by now, because everything else was coming out
right.
I worked very hard into the night, sitting at a small table in the
kitchen next to a window. It was getting later and later -- about 2:00 or
3:00 A.M. I'm working hard, getting all these calculations packed solid with
things that fit, and I'm thinking, and concentrating, and it's dark, and
it's quiet... when suddenly there's a TAC-TAC-TAC-TAC -- loud, on the
window. I look, and there's this white face, right at the window, only
inches away, and I scream with shock and surprise!
It was a lady I knew who was angry at me because I had come back from
vacation and didn't immediately call her up to tell her I was back. I let
her in, and tried to explain that I was just now very busy, that I had just
discovered something, and it was very important. I said, "Please go out and
let me finish it."
She said, "No, I don't want to bother you. I'll just sit here in the
living room."
I said, "Well, all right, but it's very difficult." She didn't exactly
sit in the living room. The best way to say it is she sort of squatted in a
corner, holding her hands together, not wanting to "bother" me. Of course
her purpose was to bother the hell out of me! And she succeeded -- I
couldn't ignore her. I got very angry and upset, and I couldn't stand it. I
had to do this calculating; I was making a big discovery and was terribly
excited, and somehow, it was more important to me than this lady -- at least
at that moment. I don't remember how I finally got her out of there, but it
was very difficult.
After working some more, it got to be very late at night, and I was
hungry. I walked up the main street to a little restaurant five or ten
blocks away, as I had often done before, late at night.
On early occasions I was often stopped by the police, because I would
be walking along, thinking, and then I'd stop -- sometimes an idea comes
that's difficult enough that you can't keep walking; you have to make sure
of something. So I'd stop, and sometimes I'd hold my hands out in the air,
saying to myself, "The distance between these is that way, and then this
would turn over this way..."
I'd be moving my hands, standing in the street, when the police would
come: "What is your name? Where do you live? What are you doing?"
"Oh! I was thinking. I'm sorry; I live here, and go often to the
restaurant..." After a bit they knew who it was, and they didn't stop me any
more.
So I went to the restaurant, and while I'm eating I'm so excited that I
tell a lady that I just made a discovery. She starts in: She's the wife of a
fireman, or forester, or something. She's very lonely -- all this stuff that
I'm not interested in. So that happens.
The next morning when I got to work I went to Wapstra, Boehm, and
Jensen, and told them, "I've got it all worked out. Everything fits."
Christy, who was there, too, said, "What beta-decay constant did you
use?"
"The one from So-and-So's book."
"But that's been found out to be wrong. Recent measurements have shown
it's off by 7 percent."
Then I remember the 9 percent. It was like a prediction for me: I went
home and got this theory that says the neutron decay should be off by 9
percent, and they tell me the next morning that, as a matter of fact, it's 7
percent changed. But is it changed from 9 to 16, which is bad, or from 9 to
2, which is good?
Just then my sister calls from New York: "How about the 9 percent --
what's happened?"
"I've just discovered that there's new data: 7 percent..."
"Which way?"
"I'm trying to find out. I'll call you back."
I was so excited that I couldn't think. It's like when you're rushing
for an airplane, and you don't know whether you're late or not, and you just
can't make it, when somebody says, "It's daylight saving time!" Yes, but
which way? You can't think in the excitement.
So Christy went into one room, and I went into another room, each of us
to be quiet, so we could think it through: This moves this way, and that
moves that way -- it wasn't very difficult, really; it's just exciting.
Christy came out, and I came out, and we both agreed: It's 2 percent,
which is well within experimental error. After all, if they just changed the
constant by 7 percent, the 2 percent could have been an error. I called my
sister back: "Two percent." The theory was right.
(Actually, it was wrong: it was off, really, by 1 percent, for a reason
we hadn't appreciated, which was only understood later by Nicola Cabibbo. So
that 2 percent was not all experimental.)
Murray Gell-Mann compared and combined our ideas and wrote a paper on
the theory. The theory was rather neat; it was relatively simple, and it fit
a lot of stuff. But as I told you, there was an awful lot of chaotic data.
And in some cases, we even went so far as to state that the experiments were
in error.
A good example of this was an experiment by Valentine Telegdi, in which
he measured the number of electrons that go out in each direction when a
neutron disintegrates. Our theory had predicted that the number should be
the same in all directions, whereas Telegdi found that 11 percent more came
out in one direction than the others. Telegdi was an excellent experimenter,
and very careful. And once, when he was giving a talk somewhere, he referred
to our theory and said, "The trouble with theorists is, they never pay
attention to the experiments!"
Telegdi also sent us a letter, which wasn't exactly scathing, but
nevertheless showed he was convinced that our theory was wrong. At the end
he wrote, "The F-G (Feynman-Gell-Mann) theory of beta decay is no F-G."
Murray says, "What should we do about this? You know, Telegdi's pretty
good."
I say, "We just wait."
Two days later there's another letter from Telegdi. He's a complete
convert. He found out from our theory that he had disregarded the
possibility that the proton recoiling from the neutron is not the same in
all directions. He had assumed it was the same. By putting in corrections
that our theory predicted instead of the ones he had been using, the results
straightened out and were in complete agreement.
I knew that Telegdi was excellent, and it would be hard to go upstream
against him. But I was convinced by that time that something must be wrong
with his experiment, and that he would find it -- he's much better at
finding it than we would be. That's why I said we shouldn't try to figure it
out but just wait.
I went to Professor Bacher and told him about our success, and he said,
"Yes, you come out and say that the neutron-proton coupling is V instead of
T. Everybody used to think it was T. Where is the fundamental experiment
that says it's T? Why don't you look at the early experiments and find out
what was wrong with them?"
I went out and found the original article on the experiment that said
the neutron-proton coupling is T, and I was shocked by something. I
remembered reading that article once before (back in the days when I read
every article in the Physical Review -- it was small enough). And I
remembered, when I saw this article again, looking at that curve and
thinking, "That doesn't prove anything!"
You see, it depended on one or two points at the very edge of the range
of the data, and there's a principle that a point on the edge of the range
of the data -- the last point -- isn't very good, because if it was, they'd
have another point further along. And I had realized that the whole idea
that neutron-proton coupling is T was based on the last point, which wasn't
very good, and therefore it's not proved. I remember noticing that!
And when I became interested in beta decay, directly, I read all these
reports by the "beta-decay experts," which said it's T. I never looked at
the original data; I only read those reports, like a dope. Had I been a good
physicist, when I thought of the original idea back at the Rochester
Conference I would have immediately looked up "how strong do we know it's
T?" -- that would have been the sensible thing to do. I would have
recognized right away that I had already noticed it wasn't satisfactorily
proved.
Since then I never pay any attention to anything by "experts." I
calculate everything myself. When people said the quark theory was pretty
good, I got two Ph.D.s, Finn Ravndal and Mark Kislinger, to go through the
whole works with me, just so I could check that the thing was really giving
results that fit fairly well, and that it was a significantly good theory.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. Of
course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn
what not to do, and that's the end of you.
--------
Thirteen Times
One time a science teacher from the local city college came around and
asked me if I'd give a talk there. He offered me fifty dollars, but I told
him I wasn't worried about the money. "That's the city college, right?"
"Yes."
I thought about how much paperwork I usually had to get involved with
when I deal with the government, so I laughed and said, "I'll be glad to
give the talk. There's only one condition on the whole thing" -- I pulled a
number out of a hat and continued -- "that I don't have to sign my name more
than thirteen times, and that includes the check!"
The guy laughs too. "Thirteen times! No problem."
So then it starts. First I have to sign something that says I'm loyal
to the government, or else I can't talk in the city college. And I have to
sign it double, OK? Then I have to sign some kind of release to the city --
I can't remember what. Pretty soon the numbers are beginning to climb up.
I have to sign that I was suitably employed as a professor -- to
ensure, of course, since it's a city thing, that no jerk at the other end
was hiring his wife or a friend to come and not even give the lecture. There
were all kinds of things to ensure, and the signatures kept mounting.
Well, the guy who started out laughing got pretty nervous, but we just
made it. I signed exactly twelve times. There was one more left for the
check, so I went ahead and gave the talk.
A few days later the guy came around to give me the check, and he was
really sweating. He couldn't give me the money unless I signed a form saying
I really gave the talk.
I said, "If I sign the form, I can't sign the check. But you were
there. You heard the talk; why don't you sign it?"
"Look," he said, "Isn't this whole thing rather silly?"
"No. It was an arrangement we made in the beginning. We didn't think it
was really going to get to thirteen, but we agreed on it, and I think we
should stick to it to the end."
He said, "I've been working very hard, calling all around. I've been
trying everything, and they tell me it's impossible. You simply can't get
your money unless you sign the form."
"It's OK," I said. "I've only signed twelve times, and I gave the talk.
I don't need the money."
"But I hate to do this to you."
"It's all right. We made a deal; don't worry."
The next day he called me up. "They can't not give you the money!
They've already earmarked the money and they've got it set aside, so they
have to give it to you!"
"OK, if they have to give me the money, let them give me the money."
"But you have to sign the form."
"I won't sign the form!"
They were stuck. There was no miscellaneous pot which was for money
that this man deserves but won't sign for.
Finally, it got straightened out. It took a long time, and it was very
complicated -- but I used the thirteenth signature to cash my check.
--------
It Sounds Greek to Me!
I don't know why, but I'm always very careless, when I go on a trip,
about the address or telephone number or anything of the people who invited
me. I figure I'll be met, or somebody else will know where we're going;
it'll get straightened out somehow.
One time, in 1957, I went to a gravity conference at the University of
North Carolina. I was supposed to be an expert in a different field who
looks at gravity.
I landed at the airport a day late for the conference (I couldn't make
it the first day), and I went out to where the taxis were. I said to the
dispatcher, "I'd like to go to the University of North Carolina."
"Which do you mean," he said, "the State University of North Carolina
at Raleigh, or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill?"
Needless to say, I hadn't the slightest idea. "Where are they?" I
asked, figuring that one must be near the other.
"One's north of here, and the other is south of here, about the same
distance."
I had nothing with me that showed which one it was, and there was
nobody else going to the conference a day late like I was.
That gave me an idea. "Listen," I said to the dispatcher. "The main
meeting began yesterday, so there were a whole lot of guys going to the
meeting who must have come through here yesterday. Let me describe them to
you: They would have their heads kind of in the air, and they would be
talking to each other, not paying attention to where they were going, saying
things to each other, like 'G-mu-nu. G-mu-nu.' "
His face lit up. "Ah, yes," he said. "You mean Chapel Hill!" He called
the next taxi waiting in line. "Take this man to the university at Chapel
Hill."
"Thank you," I said, and I went to the conference.
--------
But Is It Art?
Once I was at a party playing bongos, and I got going pretty well. One
of the guys was particularly inspired by the drumming. He went into the
bathroom, took off his shirt, smeared shaving cream in funny designs all
over his chest, and came out dancing wildly, with cherries hanging from his
ears. Naturally, this crazy nut and I became good friends right away. His
name is Jerry Zorthian; he's an artist.
We often had long discussions about art and science. I'd say things
like, "Artists are lost: they don't have any subject! They used to have the
religious subjects, but they lost their religion and now they haven't got
anything. They don't understand the technical world they live in; they don't
know anything about the beauty of the real world -- the scientific world --
so they don't have anything in their hearts to paint."
Jerry would reply that artists don't need to have a physical subject;
there are many emotions that can be expressed through art. Besides, art can
be abstract. Furthermore, scientists destroy the beauty of nature when they
pick it apart and turn it into mathematical equations.
One time I was over at Jerry's for his birthday, and one of these dopey
arguments lasted until 3:00 a.m. The next morning I called him up: "Listen,
Jerry," I said, "the reason we have these arguments that never get anywhere
is that you don't know a damn thing about science, and I don't know a damn
thing about art. So, on alternate Sundays, I'll give you a lesson in
science, and you give me a lesson in art."
"OK," he said. "I'll teach you how to draw."
"That will be impossible," I said, because when I was in high school,
the only thing I could draw was pyramids on deserts -- consisting mainly of
straight lines -- and from time to time I would attempt a palm tree and put
in a sun. I had absolutely no talent. I sat next to a guy who was equally
adept. When he was permitted to draw anything, it consisted of two flat,
elliptical blobs, like tires stacked on one another, with a stalk coming out
of the top, culminating in a green triangle. It was supposed to be a tree.
So I bet Jerry that he wouldn't be able to teach me to draw.
"Of course you'll have to work," he said.
I promised to work, but still bet that he couldn't teach me to draw. I
wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I
wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It's
difficult to describe because it's an emotion. It's analogous to the feeling
one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in
the whole universe: there's a generality aspect that you feel when you think
about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all
run "behind the scenes" by the same organization, the same physical laws.
It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works
inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity
of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful
it is. It's a feeling of awe -- of scientific awe -- which I felt could be
communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It
could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the
universe.
Jerry turned out to be a very good teacher. He told me first to go home
and draw anything. So I tried to draw a shoe; then I tried to draw a flower
in a pot. It was a mess!
The next time we met I showed him my attempts: "Oh, look!" he said.
"You see, around in back here, the line of the flower pot doesn't touch the
leaf." (I had meant the line to come up to the leaf.) "That's very good.
It's a way of showing depth. That's very clever of you."
"And the fact that you don't make all the lines the same thickness
(which I didn't mean to do) is good. A drawing with all the lines the same
thickness is dull." It continued like that: Everything that I thought was a
mistake, he used to teach me something in a positive way. He never said it
was wrong; he never put me down. So I kept on trying, and I gradually got a
little bit better, but I was never satisfied.
To get more practice I also signed up for a correspondence school
course, with International Correspondence Schools, and I must say they were
good. They started me off drawing pyramids and cylinders, shading them and
so on. We covered many areas: drawing, pastels, watercolors, and paints.
Near the end I petered out: I made an oil painting for them, but I never
sent it in. They kept sending me letters urging me to continue. They were
very good.
I practiced drawing all the time, and became very interested in it. If
I was at a meeting that wasn't getting anywhere -- like the one where Carl
Rogers came to Caltech to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a
psychology department -- I would draw the other people. I had a little pad
of paper I kept with me and I practiced drawing wherever I went. So, as
Jerry taught me, I worked very hard.
Jerry, on the other hand, didn't learn much physics. His mind wandered
too easily. I tried to teach him something about electricity and magnetism,
but as soon as I mentioned "electricity," he'd tell me about some motor he
had that didn't work, and how might he fix it. When I tried to show him how
an electromagnet works by making a little coil of wire and hanging a nail on
a piece of string, I put the voltage on, the nail swung into the coil, and
Jerry said, "Ooh! It's just like fucking!" So that was the end of that.
So now we have a new argument-whether he's a better teacher than I was,
or I'm a better student than he was.
I gave up the idea of trying to get an artist to appreciate the feeling
I had about nature so he could portray it. I would now have to double my
efforts in learning to draw so I could do it myself. It was a very ambitious
undertaking, and I kept the idea entirely to myself, because the odds were I
would never be able to do it.
Early on in the process of learning to draw, some lady I knew saw my
attempts and said, "You should go down to the Pasadena Art Museum. They have
drawing classes there, with models -- nude models."
"No," I said; "I can't draw well enough: I'd feel very embarrassed."
"You're good enough; you should see some of the others!"
So I worked up enough courage to go down there. In the first lesson
they told us about newsprint -- very large sheets of low-grade paper, the
size of a newspaper -- and the various kinds of pencils and charcoal to get.
For the second class a model came, and she started off with a ten-minute
pose.
I started to draw the model, and by the time I'd done one leg, the ten
minutes were up. I looked around and saw that everyone else had already
drawn a complete picture, with shading in the back -- the whole business.
I realized I was way out of my depth. But finally, at the end, the
model was going to pose for thirty minutes. I worked very hard, and with
great effort I was able to draw her whole outline. This time there was half
a hope. So this time I didn't cover up my drawing, as I had done with all
the previous ones.
We went around to look at what the others had done, and I discovered
what they could really do: they draw the model, with details and shadows,
the pocketbook that's on the bench she's sitting on, the platform,
everything! They've all gone zip, zip, zip, zip, zip with the charcoal, all
over, and I figure it's hopeless -- utterly hopeless.
I go back to cover up my drawing, which consists of a few lines crowded
into the upper left-hand corner of the newsprint -- I had, until then, only
been drawing on 8 1/2 x 11 paper -- but some others in the class are
standing nearby: "Oh, look at this one," one of them says. "Every line
counts!"
I didn't know what that meant, exactly, but I felt encouraged enough to
come to the next class. In the meantime, Jerry kept telling me that drawings
that are too full aren't any good. His job was to teach me not to worry
about the others, so he'd tell me they weren't so hot.
I noticed that the teacher didn't tell people much (the only thing he
told me was my picture was too small on the page). Instead, he tried to
inspire us to experiment with new approaches. I thought of how we teach
physics: We have so many techniques -- so many mathematical methods -- that
we never stop telling the students how to do things. On the other hand, the
drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very
heavy, the teacher can't say, "Your lines are too heavy," because some
artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines. The
teacher doesn't want to push you in some particular direction. So the
drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and
not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always
teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving
physical problems.
They were always telling me to "loosen up," to become more relaxed
about drawing. I figured that made no more sense than telling someone who's
just learning to drive to "loosen up" at the wheel. It isn't going to work.
Only after you know how to do it carefully can you begin to loosen up. So I
resisted this perennial loosen-up stuff.
One exercise they had invented for loosening us up was to draw without
looking at the paper. Don't take your eyes off the model; just look at her
and make the lines on the paper without looking at what you're doing.
One of the guys says, "I can't help it. I have to cheat. I bet
everybody's cheating!"
"I'm not cheating!" I say.