"Aw, baloney!" they say.
I finish the exercise and they come over to look at what I had drawn.
They found that, indeed, I was NOT cheating; at the very beginning my pencil
point had busted, and there was nothing but impressions on the paper.
When I finally got my pencil to work, I tried it again. I found that my
drawing had a kind of strength -- a funny, semi-Picasso-like strength --
which appealed to me. The reason I felt good about that drawing was, I knew
it was impossible to draw well that way, and therefore it didn't have to be
good -- and that's really what the loosening up was all about. I had thought
that "loosen up" meant "make sloppy drawings," but it really meant to relax
and not worry about how the drawing is going to come out.
I made a lot of progress in the class, and I was feeling pretty good.
Up until the last session, all the models we had were rather heavy and out
of shape; they were rather interesting to draw. But in the last class we had
a model who was a nifty blonde, perfectly proportioned. It was then that I
discovered that I still didn't know how to draw: I couldn't make anything
come out that looked anything like this beautiful girl! With the other
models, if you draw something a little too big or bit too small, it doesn't
make any difference because it's all out of shape anyway. But when you're
trying to draw something that's so well put together, you can't fool
yourself: It's got to be just right!
During one of the breaks I overheard a guy who could really draw asking
this model whether she posed privately. She said yes. "Good. But I don't
have a studio yet. I'll have to work that out first."
I figured I could learn a lot from this guy, and I'd never get another
chance to draw this nifty model unless I did something. "Excuse me," I said
to him, "I have a room downstairs in my house that could be used as a
studio."
They both agreed. I took a few of the guy's drawings to my friend
Jerry, but he was aghast. "Those aren't so good," he said. He tried to
explain why, but I never really understood.
Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking
at art. I had very little appreciation for things artistic, and only very
rarely, such as once when I was in a museum in Japan. I saw a painting done
on brown paper of bamboo, and what was beautiful about it to me was that it
was perfectly poised between being just some brush strokes and being bamboo
-- I could make it go back and forth.
The summer after the drawing class I was in Italy for a science
conference and I thought I'd like to see the Sistine Chapel. I got there
very early in the morning, bought my ticket before anybody else, and ran up
the stairs as soon as the place opened. I therefore had the unusual pleasure
of looking at the whole chapel for a moment, in silent awe, before anybody
else came in.
Soon the tourists came, and there were crowds of people milling around,
talking different languages, pointing at this and that. I'm walking around,
looking at the ceiling for a while. Then my eye came down a little bit and I
saw some big, framed pictures, and I thought, "Gee! I never knew about
these!"
Unfortunately I'd left my guidebook at the hotel, but I thought to
myself, "I know why these panels aren't famous; they aren't any good." But
then I looked at another one, and I said, "Wow! That's a good one." I looked
at the others. "That's good too, so is that one, but that one's lousy." I
had never heard of these panels, but I decided that they were all good
except for two.
I went into a place called the Sala de Raphael -- the Raphael Room --
and I noticed the same phenomenon. I thought to myself, "Raphael is
irregular. He doesn't always succeed. Sometimes he's very good. Sometimes
it's just junk."
When I got back to my hotel, I looked at the guidebook. In the part
about the Sistine Chapel: "Below the paintings by Michelangelo there are
fourteen panels by Botticelli, Perugino" -- all these great artists -- "and
two by So-and-so, which are of no significance." This was a terrific
excitement to me, that I also could tell the difference between a beautiful
work of art and one that's not, without being able to define it. As a
scientist you always think you know what you're doing, so you tend to
distrust the artist who says, "It's great," or "It's no good," and then is
not able to explain to you why, as Jerry did with those drawings I took him.
But here I was, sunk: I could do it too!
In the Raphael Room the secret turned out to be that only some of the
paintings were made by the great master; the rest were made by students. I
had liked the ones by Raphael. This was a big jab for my self-confidence in
my ability to appreciate art.
Anyway, the guy from the art class and the nifty model came over to my
house a number of times and I tried to draw her and learn from him. After
many attempts I finally drew what I felt was a really nice picture -- it was
a portrait of her head -- and I got very excited about this first success.
I had enough confidence to ask an old friend of mine named Steve
Demitriades if his beautiful wife would pose for me, and in return I would
give him the portrait. He laughed. "If she wants to waste her time posing
for you, it's all right with me, ha, ha, ha."
I worked very hard on her portrait, and when he saw it, he turned over
to my side completely: "It's just wonderful!" he exclaimed. "Can you get a
photographer to make copies of it? I want to send one to my mother in
Greece!" His mother had never seen the girl he married. That was very
exciting to me, to think that I had improved to the point where someone
wanted one of my drawings.
A similar thing happened at a small art exhibit that some guy at
Caltech had arranged, where I contributed two drawings and a painting. He
said, "We oughta put a price on the drawings."
I thought, "That's silly! I'm not trying to sell them."
"It makes the exhibition more interesting. If you don't mind parting
with them, just put a price on."
After the show the guy told me that a girl had bought one of my
drawings and wanted to speak to me to find out more about it.
The drawing was called "The Magnetic Field of the Sun." For this
particular drawing I had borrowed one of those beautiful pictures of the
solar prominences taken at the solar laboratory in Colorado. Because I
understood how the sun's magnetic field was holding up the flames and had,
by that time, developed some technique for drawing magnetic field lines (it
was similar to a girl's flowing hair), I wanted to draw something beautiful
that no artist would think to draw: the rather complicated and twisting
lines of the magnetic field, close together here and spreading out there.
I explained all this to her, and showed her the picture that gave me
the idea.
She told me this story: She and her husband had gone to the exhibit,
and they both liked the drawing very much. "Why don't we buy it?" she
suggested.
Her husband was the kind of a man who could never do anything right
away. "Let's think about it a while," he said.
She realized his birthday was a few months ahead, so she went back the
same day and bought it herself.
That night when he came home from work, he was depressed. She finally
got it out of him: He thought it would be nice to buy her that picture, but
when he went back to the exhibit, he was told that the picture had already
been sold. So she had it to surprise him on his birthday.
What I got out of that story was something still very new to me: I
understood at last what art is really for, at least in certain respects. It
gives somebody, individually, pleasure. You can make something that somebody
likes so much that they're depressed, or they're happy, on account of that
damn thing you made! In science, it's sort of general and large: You don't
know the individuals who have appreciated it directly.
I understood that to sell a drawing is not to make money, but to be
sure that it's in the home of someone who really wants it; someone who would
feel bad if they didn't have it. This was interesting.
So I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn't want people to buy
my drawings because the professor of physics isn't supposed to be able to
draw, isn't that wonderful, so I made up a false name. My friend Dudley
Wright suggested "Au Fait," which means "It is done" in French. I spelled it
O-f-e-y, which turned out to be a name the blacks used for "whitey." But
after all, I was whitey, so it was all right.
One of my models wanted me to make a drawing for her, but she didn't
have the money. (Models don't have money; if they did, they wouldn't be
modeling.) She offered to pose three times free if I would give her a
drawing.
"On the contrary," I said. "I'll give you three drawings if you'll pose
once for nothing."
She put one of the drawings I gave her on the wall in her small room,
and soon her boyfriend noticed it. He liked it so much that he wanted to
commission a portrait of her. He would pay me sixty dollars. (The money was
getting pretty good now.)
Then she got the idea to be my agent: She could earn a little extra
money by going around selling my drawings, saying, "There's a new artist in
Altadena..." It was fun to be in a different world! She arranged to have
some of my drawings put on display at Bullock's, Pasadena's most elegant
department store. She and the lady from the art section picked out some
drawings -- drawings of plants that I had made early on (that I didn't like)
-- and had them all framed. Then I got a signed document from Bullock's
saying that they had such-and-such drawings on consignment. Of course nobody
bought any of them, but otherwise I was a big success: I had my drawings on
sale at Bullock's! It was fun to have them there, just so I could say one
day that I had reached that pinnacle of success in the art world.
Most of my models I got through Jerry, but I also tried to get models
on my own. Whenever I met a young woman who looked as if she would be
interesting to draw, I would ask her to pose for me. It always ended up that
I would draw her face, because I didn't know exactly how to bring up the
subject of posing nude.
Once when I was over at Jerry's, I said to his wife Dabney, "I can
never get the girls to pose nude: I don't know how Jerry does it!"
"Well, did you ever ask them?"
"Oh! I never thought of that."
The next girl I met that I wanted to pose for me was a Caltech student.
I asked her if she would pose nude. "Certainly," she said, and there we
were! So it was easy. I guess there was so much in the back of my mind that
I thought it was somehow wrong to ask.
I've done a lot of drawing by now, and I've gotten so I like to draw
nudes best. For all I know it's not art, exactly; it's a mixture. Who knows
the percentages?
One model I met through Jerry had been a Playboy playmate. She was tall
and gorgeous. However, she thought she was too tall. Every girl in the
world, looking at her, would have been jealous. When she would come into a
room, she'd be half stooped over. I tried to teach her, when she was posing,
to please stand up, because she was so elegant and striking. I finally
talked her into that.
Then she had another worry: she's got "dents" near her groin. I had to
get out a book of anatomy to show her that it's the attachment of the
muscles to the ilium, and to explain to her that you can't see these dents
on everybody; to see them, everything must be just right, in perfect
proportion, like she was. I learned from her that every woman is worried
about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.
I wanted to draw a picture of this model in color, in pastels, just to
experiment. I thought I would first make a sketch in charcoal, which would
be later covered with the pastel. When I got through with this charcoal
drawing that I had made without worrying how it was going to look, I
realized that it was one of the best drawings I had ever made. I decided to
leave it, and forget about the pastels for that one. My "agent" looked at it
and wanted to take it around. "You can't sell that," I said, "it's on
newsprint."
"Oh, never mind," she said.
A few weeks later she came back with this picture in a beautiful wooden
frame with a red band and a gold edge. It's a funny thing which must make
artists, generally, unhappy -- how much improved a drawing gets when you put
a frame around it. My agent told me that a particular lady got all excited
about the drawing and they took it to a picture framer. He told them that
there were special techniques for mounting drawings on newsprint: Impregnate
it with plastic, do this, do that. So this lady goes to all that trouble
over this drawing I had made, and then has my agent bring it back to me. "I
think the artist would like to see how lovely it is, framed," she said.
I certainly did. There was another example of the direct pleasure
somebody got out of one of my pictures. So it was a real kick selling the
drawings.
There was a period when there were topless restaurants in town: You
could go there for lunch or dinner, and the girls would dance without a top,
and after a while without anything. One of these places, it turned out, was
only a mile and a half away from my house, so I went there very often. I'd
sit in one of the booths and work a little physics on the paper placemats
with the scalloped edges, and sometimes I'd draw one of the dancing girls or
one of the customers, just to practice.
My wife Gweneth, who is English, had a good attitude about my going to
this place. She said, "The Englishmen have clubs they go to." So it was
something like my club.
There were pictures hanging around the place, but I didn't like them
much. They were these fluorescent colors on black velvet -- kind of ugly --
a girl taking off her sweater, or something. Well, I had a rather nice
drawing I had made of my model Kathy, so I gave it to the owner of the
restaurant to put up on the wall, and he was delighted.
Giving him the drawing turned out to produce some useful results. The
owner became very friendly to me, and would give me free drinks all the
time. Now, every time I would come in to the restaurant a waitress would
come over with my free 7-Up. I'd watch the girls dance, do a little physics,
prepare a lecture, or draw a little bit. If I got a little tired, I'd watch
the entertainment for a while, and then do a little more work. The owner
knew I didn't want to be disturbed, so if a drunk man came over and started
to talk to me, right away a waitress would come and get the guy out of
there. If a girl came over, he would do nothing. We had a very good
relationship. His name was Gianonni.
The other effect of my drawing on display was that people would ask him
about it. One day a guy came over to me and said, "Gianonni tells me you
made that picture."
"Yeah."
"Good. I'd like to commission a drawing."
"All right; what would you like?"
"I want a picture of a nude toreador girl being charged by a bull with
a man's head."
"Well, uh, it would help me a little if I had some idea of what this
drawing is for."
"I want it for my business establishment."
"What kind of business establishment?"
"It's for a massage parlor: you know, private rooms, masseuses -- get
the idea?"
"Yeah, I get the idea." I didn't want to draw a nude toreador girl
being charged by a bull with a man's head, so I tried to talk him out of it.
"How do you think that looks to the customers, and how does it make the
girls feel? The men come in there and you get 'em all excited with this
picture. Is that the way you want 'em to treat the girls?"
He's not convinced.
"Suppose the cops come in and they see this picture, and you're
claiming it's a massage parlor."
"OK, OK," he says; "You're right. I've gotta change it. What I want is
a picture that, if the cops look at it, is perfectly OK for a massage
parlor, but if a customer looks at it, it gives him ideas."
"OK," I said. We arranged it for sixty dollars, and I began to work on
the drawing. First, I had to figure out how to do it. I thought and I
thought, and I often felt I would have been better off drawing the nude
toreador girl in the first place!
Finally I figured out how to do it: I would draw a slave girl in
imaginary Rome, massaging some important Roman -- a senator, perhaps. Since
she's a slave girl, she has a certain look on her face. She knows what's
going to happen next, and she's sort of resigned to it.
I worked very hard on this picture. I used Kathy as the model. Later, I
got another model for the man. I did lots of studies, and soon the cost for
the models was already eighty dollars. I didn't care about the money; I
liked the challenge of having to do a commission. Finally I ended up with a
picture of a muscular man lying on a table with the slave girl massaging
him: she's wearing a kind of toga that covers one breast-the other one was
nude-and I got the expression of resignation on her face just right.
I was just about ready to deliver my commissioned masterpiece to the
massage parlor when Gianonni told me that the guy had been arrested and was
in jail. So I asked the girls at the topless restaurant if they knew any
good massage parlors around Pasadena that would like to hang my drawing in
the lobby.
They gave me names and locations of places in and around Pasadena and
told me things like "When you go to the Such-and-such massage parlor, ask
for Frank -- he's a pretty good guy. If he's not there, don't go in." Or
"Don't talk to Eddie. Eddie would never understand the value of a drawing."
The next day I rolled up my picture, put it in the back of my station
wagon, and my wife Gweneth wished me good luck as I set out to visit the
brothels of Pasadena to sell my drawing.
Just before I went to the first place on my list, I thought to myself,
"You know, before I go anywhere else, I oughta check at the place he used to
have. Maybe it's still open, and perhaps the new manager wants my drawing."
I went over there and knocked on the door. It opened a little bit, and I saw
a girl's eye. "Do we know you?" she asked.
"No, you don't, but how would you like to have a drawing that would be
appropriate for your entrance hall?"
"I'm sorry," she said, "but we've already contracted an artist to make
a drawing for us, and he's working on it."
"I'm the artist," I said, "and your drawing is ready!"
It turns out that the guy, as he was going to jail, told his wife about
our arrangement. So I went in and showed them the drawing.
The guy's wife and his sister, who were now running the place, were not
entirely pleased with it; they wanted the girls to see it. I hung it up on
the wall, there in the lobby, and all the girls came out from the various
rooms in the back and started to make comments.
One girl said she didn't like the expression on the slave girl's face.
"She doesn't look happy," she said. "She should be smiling."
I said to her, "Tell me -- while you're massaging a guy, and he's not
lookin' at you, are you smiling?"
"Oh, no!" she said. "I feel exactly like she looks! But it's not right
to put it in the picture."
I left it with them, but after a week of worrying about it back and
forth, they decided they didn't want it. It turned out that the real reason
that they didn't want it was the one nude breast. I tried to explain that my
drawing was a tone-down of the original request, but they said they had
different ideas about it than the guy did. I thought the irony of people
running such an establishment being prissy about one nude breast was
amusing, and I took the drawing home.
My businessman friend Dudley Wright saw the drawing and I told him the
story about it. He said, "You oughta triple its price. With art, nobody is
really sure of its value, so people often think, 'If the price is higher, it
must be more valuable!'"
I said, "You're crazy!" but, just for fun, I bought a twenty-dollar
frame and mounted the drawing so it would be ready for the next customer.
Some guy from the weather forecasting business saw the drawing I had
given Gianonni and asked if I had others. I invited him and his wife to my
"studio" downstairs in my home, and they asked about the newly framed
drawing. "That one is two hundred dollars." (I had multiplied sixty by three
and added twenty for the frame.) The next day they came back and bought it.
So the massage parlor drawing ended up in the office of a weather
forecaster.
One day there was a police raid on Gianonni's, and some of the dancers
were arrested. Someone wanted to stop Gianonni from putting on topless
dancing shows, and Gianonni didn't want to stop. So there was a big court
case about it; it was in all the local papers.
Gianonni went around to all the customers and asked them if they would
testify in support of him. Everybody had an excuse: "I run a day camp, and
if the parents see that I'm going to this place, they won't send their kids
to my camp..." Or, "I'm in the such-and-such business, and if it's
publicized that I come down here, we'll lose customers."
I think to myself, "I'm the only free man in here. I haven't any
excuse! I like this place, and I'd like to see it continue, I don't see
anything wrong with topless dancing." So I said to Gianonni, "Yes, I'll be
glad to testify."
In court the big question was, is topless dancing acceptable to the
community -- do community standards allow it?
The lawyer from the defense tried to make me into an expert on
community standards. He asked me if I went into other bars.
"Yes."
"And how many times per week would you typically go to Gianonni's?"
"Five, six times a week." (That got into the papers: The Caltech
professor of physics goes to see topless dancing six times a week.)
"What sections of the community were represented at Gianonni's?"
"Nearly every section: there were guys from the real estate business, a
guy from the city governing board, workmen from the gas station, guys from
engineering firms, a professor of physics..."
"So would you say that topless entertainment is acceptable to the
community, given that so many sections of it are watching it and enjoying
it?"
"I need to know what you mean by 'acceptable to the community.' Nothing
is accepted by everybody, so what percentage of the community must accept
something in order for it to be 'acceptable to the community'?"
The lawyer suggests a figure. The other lawyer objects. The judge calls
a recess, and they all go into chambers for 15 minutes before they can
decide that "acceptable to the community" means accepted by 50% of the
community.
In spite of the fact that I made them be precise, I had no precise
numbers as evidence, so I said, "I believe that topless dancing is accepted
by more than 50% of the community, and is therefore acceptable to the
community."
Gianonni temporarily lost the case, and his, or another one very
similar to it, went ultimately to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, his
place stayed open, and I got still more free 7-Ups.
Around that time there were some attempts to develop an interest in art
at Caltech. Somebody contributed the money to convert an old plant sciences
building into some art studios. Equipment and supplies were bought and
provided for the students, and they hired an artist from South Africa to
coordinate and support the art activities around Caltech.
Various people came in to teach classes. I got Jerry Zorthian to teach
a drawing class, and some guy came in to teach lithography, which I tried to
learn.
The South African artist came over to my house one time to look at my
drawings. He said he thought it would be fun to have a one-man show. This
time I was cheating: If I hadn't been a professor at Caltech, they would
have never thought my pictures were worth it.
"Some of my better drawings have been sold, and I feel uncomfortable
calling the people," I said.
"You don't have to worry, Mr. Feynman," he reassured me. "You won't
have to call them up. We will make all the arrangements and operate the
exhibit officially and correctly."
I gave him a list of people who had bought my drawings, and they soon
received a telephone call from him: "We understand that you have an Ofey."
"Oh, yes!"
"We are planning to have an exhibition of Ofeys, and we're wondering if
you would consider lending it to us." Of course they were delighted.
The exhibition was held in the basement of the Athenaeum, the Caltech
faculty club. Everything was like the real thing: All the pictures had
titles, and those that had been taken on consignment from their owners had
due recognition: "Lent by Mr. Gianonni," for instance.
One drawing was a portrait of the beautiful blonde model from the art
class, which I had originally intended to be a study of shading: I put a
light at the level of her legs a bit to the side and pointed it upwards. As
she sat, I tried to draw the shadows as they were -- her nose cast its
shadow rather unnaturally across her face -- so they wouldn't look so bad. I
drew her torso as well, so you could also see her breasts and the shadows
they made. I stuck it in with the other drawings in the exhibit and called
it "Madame Curie Observing the Radiations from Radium." The message I
intended to convey was, nobody thinks of Madame Curie as a woman, as
feminine, with beautiful hair, bare breasts, and all that. They only think
of the radium part.
A prominent industrial designer named Henry Dreyfuss invited various
people to a reception at his home after the exhibition -- the woman who had
contributed money to support the arts, the president of Caltech and his
wife, and so on.
One of these art-lovers came over and started up a conversation with
me: "Tell me, Professor Feynman, do you draw from photographs or from
models?"
"I always draw directly from a posed model."
"Well, how did you get Madame Curie to pose for you?"
Around that time the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a similar
idea to the one I had, that artists are far away from an understanding of
science. My idea was that artists don't understand the underlying generality
and beauty of nature and her laws (and therefore cannot portray this in
their art). The museum's idea was that artists should know more about
technology: they should become more familiar with machines and other
applications of science.
The art museum organized a scheme in which they would get some of the
really good artists of the day to go to various companies which volunteered
some time and money to the project. The artists would visit these companies
and snoop around until they saw something interesting that they could use in
their work. The museum thought it might help if someone who knew something
about technology could be a sort of liaison with the artists from time to
time as they visited the companies. Since they knew I was fairly good at
explaining things to people and I wasn't a complete jackass when it came to
art (actually, I think they knew I was trying to learn to draw) -- at any
rate, they asked me if I would do that, and I agreed.
It was lots of fun visiting the companies with the artists. What
typically happened was, some guy would show us a tube that discharged sparks
in beautiful blue, twisting patterns. The artists would get all excited and
ask me how they could use it in an exhibit. What were the necessary
conditions to make it work?
The artists were very interesting people. Some of them were absolute
fakes: they would claim to be an artist, and everybody agreed they were an
artist, but when you'd sit and talk to them, they'd make no sense
whatsoever! One guy in particular, the biggest faker, always dressed funny;
he had a big black bowler hat. He would answer your questions in an
incomprehensible way, and when you'd try to find out more about what he said
by asking him about some of the words he used, off we'd be in another
direction! The only thing he contributed, ultimately, to the exhibit for art
and technology was a portrait of himself. Other artists I talked to would
say things that made no sense at first, but they would go to great lengths
to explain their ideas to me. One time I went somewhere, as a part of this
scheme, with Robert Irwin. It was a two-day trip, and after a great effort
of discussing back and forth, I finally understood what he was trying to
explain to me, and I thought it was quite interesting and wonderful.
Then there were the artists who had absolutely no idea about the real
world. They thought that scientists were some kind of grand magicians who
could make anything, and would say things like, "I want to make a picture in
three dimensions where the figure is suspended in space and it glows and
flickers." They made up the world they wanted, and had no idea what was
reasonable or unreasonable to make.
Finally there was an exhibit, and I was asked to be on a panel which
judged the works of art. Although there was some good stuff that was
inspired by the artists' visiting the companies, I thought that most of the
good works of art were things that were turned in at the last minute out of
desperation, and didn't really have anything to do with technology. All of
the other members of the panel disagreed, and I found myself in some
difficulty. I'm no good at criticizing art, and I shouldn't have been on the
panel in the first place.
There was a guy there at the county art museum named Maurice Tuchman
who really knew what he was talking about when it came to art. He knew that
I had had this one-man show at Caltech. He said, "You know, you're never
going to draw again."
"What? That's ridiculous! Why should I never..."
"Because you've had a one-man show, and you're only an amateur."
Although I did draw after that, I never worked as hard, with the same
energy and intensity, as I did before. I never sold a drawing after that,
either. He was a smart fella, and I learned a lot from him. I could have
learned a lot more, if I weren't so stubborn!
--------
Is Electricity Fire?
In the early fifties I suffered temporarily from a disease of middle
age: I used to give philosophical talks about science -- how science
satisfies curiosity, how it gives you a new world view, how it gives man the
ability to do things, how it gives him power -- and the question is, in view
of the recent development of the atomic bomb, is it a good idea to give man
that much power? I also thought about the relation of science and religion,
and it was about this time when I was invited to a conference in New York
that was going to discuss "the ethics of equality."
There had already been a conference among the older people, somewhere
on Long Island, and this year they decided to have some younger people come
in and discuss the position papers they had worked out in the other
conference.
Before I got there, they sent around a list of "books you might find
interesting to read, and please send us any books you want others to read,
and we will store them in the library so that others may read them."
So here comes this wonderful list of books. I start down the first
page: I haven't read a single one of the books, and I feel very uneasy -- I
hardly belong. I look at the second page: I haven't read a single one. I
found out, after looking through the whole list, that I haven't read any of
the books. I must be an idiot, an illiterate! There were wonderful books
there, like Thomas Jefferson On Freedom, or something like that, and there
were a few authors I had read. There was a book by Heisenberg, one by
Schrödinger, and one by Einstein, but they were something like Einstein, My
Later Fears and Schrödinger, What Is Life -- different from what I had read.
So I had a feeling that I was out of my depth, and that I shouldn't be in
this. Maybe I could just sit quietly and listen.
I go to the first big introductory meeting, and a guy gets up and
explains that we have two problems to discuss. The first one is fogged up a
little bit -- something about ethics and equality, but I don't understand
what the problem exactly is. And the second one is, "We are going to
demonstrate by our efforts a way that we can have a dialogue among people of
different fields." There was an international lawyer, a historian, a Jesuit
priest, a rabbi, a scientist (me), and so on.
Well, right away my logical mind goes like this: The second problem I
don't have to pay any attention to, because if it works, it works; and if it
doesn't work, it doesn't work -- we don't have to prove that we can have a
dialogue, and discuss that we can have a dialogue, if we haven't got any
dialogue to talk about! So the primary problem is the first one, which I
didn't understand.
I was ready to put my hand up and say, "Would you please define the
problem better," but then I thought, "No, I'm the ignoramus; I'd better
listen. I don't want to start trouble right away."
The subgroup I was in was supposed to discuss the "ethics of equality
in education." In the meetings of our subgroup the Jesuit priest was always
talking about "the fragmentation of knowledge." He would say, "The real
problem in the ethics of equality in education is the fragmentation of
knowledge." This Jesuit was looking back into the thirteenth century when
the Catholic Church was in charge of all education, and the whole world was
simple. There was God, and everything came from God; it was all organized.
But today, it's not so easy to understand everything. So knowledge has
become fragmented. I felt that "the fragmentation of knowledge" had nothing
to do with "it," but "it" had never been defined, so there was no way for me
to prove that.
Finally I said, "What is the ethical problem associated with the
fragmentation of knowledge?" He would only answer me with great clouds of
fog, and I'd say, "I don't understand," and everybody else would say they
did understand, and they tried to explain it to me, but they couldn't
explain it to me!
So the others in the group told me to write down why I thought the
fragmentation of knowledge was not a problem of ethics. I went back to my
dormitory room and I wrote out carefully, as best I could, what I thought
the subject of "the ethics of equality in education" might be, and I gave
some examples of the kinds of problems I thought we might be talking about.
For instance, in education, you increase differences. If someone's good at
something, you try to develop his ability, which results in differences, or
inequalities. So if education increases inequality, is this ethical? Then,
after giving some more examples, I went on to say that while "the
fragmentation of knowledge" is a difficulty because the complexity of the
world makes it hard to learn things, in light of my definition of the realm
of the subject, I couldn't see how the fragmentation of knowledge had
anything to do with anything approximating what the ethics of equality in
education might more or less be.
The next day I brought my paper into the meeting, and the guy said,
"Yes, Mr. Feynman has brought up some very interesting questions we ought to
discuss, and we'll put them aside for some possible future discussion." They
completely missed the point. I was trying to define the problem, and then
show how "the fragmentation of knowledge" didn't have anything to do with
it. And the reason that nobody got anywhere in that conference was that they
hadn't clearly defined the subject of "the ethics of equality in education,"
and therefore no one knew exactly what they were supposed to talk about.
There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read --
something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing,
and my eyes were coming out: I couldn't make head nor tail of it! I figured
it was because I hadn't read any of the books on that list. I had this
uneasy feeling of "I'm not adequate," until finally I said to myself, "I'm
gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell
it means."
So I stopped -- at random -- and read the next sentence very carefully.
I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: "The
individual member of the social community often receives his information via
visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated.
You know what it means? "People read."
Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could
translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: "Sometimes
people read; sometimes people listen to the radio," and so on, but written
in such a fancy way that I couldn't understand it at first, and when I
finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.
There was only one thing that happened at that meeting that was
pleasant or amusing. At this conference, every word that every guy said at
the plenary session was so important that they had a stenotypist there,
typing every goddamn thing. Somewhere on the second day the stenotypist came
up to me and said, "What profession are you? Surely not a professor."
"I am a professor," I said.
"Of what?"
"Of physics -- science."
"Oh! That must be the reason," he said.
"Reason for what?"
He said, "You see, I'm a stenotypist, and I type everything that is
said here. Now, when the other fellas talk, I type what they say, but I
don't understand what they're saying. But every time you get up to ask a
question or to say something, I understand exactly what you mean -- what the
question is, and what you're saying -- so I thought you can't be a
professor!"
There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology
place, a very nice, very Jewish man, gave a speech. It was a good speech,
and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, when I'm
telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and
true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various
countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we
have atomic weapons, any war and we're doomed, so therefore the right way
out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences
from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we
should give up nearly everything to the other countries until we're all
even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial
feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses
on the way home.
The next day one of the guys in our group said, "I think that speech
last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the
summary of our conference."
I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is
based on a theory that there's only X amount of stuff in the world, that
somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and
therefore