ed fruit and whatnot delivered by Western Union with a
message that read, "From our family to yours, Happy Thanksgiving -- The
Families."
It was from a family I had never heard of in Long Beach, obviously
someone wanting to send this to his friend's family who got the name and
address wrong, so I thought I'd better straighten it out. I called up
Western Union, got the telephone number of the people who sent the stuff,
and I called them.
"Hello, my name is Mr. Feynman. I received a package..."
"Oh, hello, Mr. Feynman, this is Pete Pamilio" and he says it in such a
friendly way that I think I'm supposed to know who he is! I'm normally such
a dunce that I can't remember who anyone is.
So I said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Pamilio, but I don't quite remember who you
are..."
It turned out he was a representative of one of the publishers whose
books I had to judge on the curriculum commission.
"I see. But this could be misunderstood."
"It's only family to family."
"Yes, but I'm judging a book that you're publishing, and maybe someone
might misinterpret your kindness!" I knew what was happening, but I made it
sound like I was a complete idiot.
Another thing like this happened when one of the publishers sent me a
leather briefcase with my name nicely written in gold on it. I gave them the
same stuff: "I can't accept it; I'm judging some of the books you're
publishing. I don't think you understand that!"
One commissioner, who had been there for the greatest length of time,
said, "I never accept the stuff; it makes me very upset. But it just goes
on."
But I really missed one opportunity. If I had only thought fast enough,
I could have had a very good time on that commission. I got to the hotel in
San Francisco in the evening to attend my very first meeting the next day,
and I decided to go out to wander in the town and eat something. I came out
of the elevator, and sitting on a bench in the hotel lobby were two guys who
jumped up and said, "Good evening, Mr. Feynman. Where are you going? Is
there something we can show you in San Francisco?" They were from a
publishing company, and I didn't want to have anything to do with them.
"I'm going out to eat."
"We can take you out to dinner."
"No, I want to be alone."
"Well, whatever you want, we can help you."
I couldn't resist. I said, "Well, I'm going out to get myself in
trouble."
"I think we can help you in that, too."
"No, I think I'll take care of that myself." Then I thought, "What an
error! I should have let all that stuff operate and keep a diary, so the
people of the state of California could find out how far the publishers will
go!" And when I found out about the two-million-dollar difference, God knows
what the pressures are!
--------
Alfred Nobel's Other Mistake
In Canada they have a big association of physics students. They have
meetings; they give papers, and so on. One time the Vancouver chapter wanted
to have me come and talk to them. The girl in charge of it arranged with my
secretary to fly all the way to Los Angeles without telling me. She just
walked into my office. She was really cute, a beautiful blonde. (That
helped; it's not supposed to, but it did.) And I was impressed that the
students in Vancouver had financed the whole thing. They treated me so
nicely in Vancouver that now I know the secret of how to really be
entertained and give talks: Wait for the students to ask you.
One time, a few years after I had won the Nobel Prize, some kids from
the Irvine students' physics club came around and wanted me to talk. I said,
"I'd love to do it. What I want to do is talk just to the physics club. But
-- I don't want to be immodest -- I've learned from experience that there'll
be trouble."
I told them how I used to go over to a local high school every year to
talk to the physics club about relativity, or whatever they asked about.
Then, after I got the Prize, I went over there again, as usual, with no
preparation, and they stuck me in front of an assembly of three hundred
kids.
It was a mess!
I got that shock about three or four times, being an idiot and not
catching on right away. When I was invited to Berkeley to give a talk on
something in physics, I prepared something rather technical, expecting to
give it to the usual physics department group. But when I got there, this
tremendous lecture hall is full of people! And I know there's not that many
people in Berkeley who know the level at which I prepared my talk. My
problem is, I like to please the people who come to hear me, and I can't do
it if everybody and his brother wants to hear: I don't know my audience
then.
After the students understood that I can't just easily go over
somewhere and give a talk to the physics club, I said, "Let's cook up a
dull-sounding title and a dull-sounding professor's name, and then only the
kids who are really interested in physics will bother to come, and those are
the ones we want, OK? You don't have to sell anything."
A few posters appeared on the Irvine campus: Professor Henry Warren
from the University of Washington is going to talk about the structure of
the proton on May 17th at 3:00 in Room D102.
Then I came and said, "Professor Warren had some personal difficulties
and was unable to come and speak to you today, so he telephoned me and asked
me if I would talk to you about the subject, since I've been doing some work
in the field. So here I am." It worked great.
But then, somehow or other, the faculty adviser of the club found out
about the trick, and he got very angry at them. He said, "You know, if it
were known that Professor Feynman was coming down here, a lot of people
would like to have listened to him."
The students explained, "That's just it!" But the adviser was mad that
he hadn't been allowed in on the joke.
Hearing that the students were in real trouble, I decided to write a
letter to the adviser and explained that it was all my fault, that I
wouldn't have given the talk unless this arrangement had been made; that I
had told the students not to tell anyone; I'm very sorry; please excuse me,
blah, blah, blah... That's the kind of stuff I have to go through on account
of that damn prize!
Just last year I was invited by the students at the University of
Alaska in Fairbanks to talk, and had a wonderful time, except for the
interviews on local television. I don't need interviews; there's no point to
it. I came to talk to the physics students, and that's it. If everybody in
town wants to know that, let the school newspaper tell them. It's on account
of the Nobel Prize that I've got to have an interview -- I'm a big shot,
right?
A friend of mine who's a rich man -- he invented some kind of simple
digital switch -- tells me about these people who contribute money to make
prizes or give lectures: "You always look at them carefully to find out what
crockery they're trying to absolve their conscience of."
My friend Matt Sands was once going to write a book to be called Alfred
Nobel's Other Mistake.
For many years I would look, when the time was coming around to give
out the Prize, at who might get it. But after a while I wasn't even aware of
when it was the right "season." I therefore had no idea why someone would be
calling me at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. "Professor Feynman?"
"Hey! Why are you bothering me at this time in the morning?"
"I thought you'd like to know that you've won the Nobel Prize."
"Yeah, but I'm sleeping! It would have been better if you had called me
in the morning."-- and I hung up.
My wife said, "Who was that?"
"They told me I won the Nobel Prize."
"Oh, Richard, who was it?" I often kid around and she is so smart that
she never gets fooled, but this time I caught her.
The phone rings again: "Professor Feynman, have you heard..."
(In a disappointed voice) "Yeah."
Then I began to think, "How can I turn this all off? I don't want any
of this!" So the first thing was to take the telephone off the hook, because
calls were coming one right after the other. I tried to go back to sleep,
but found it was impossible.
I went down to the study to think: What am I going to do? Maybe I won't
accept the Prize. What would happen then? Maybe that's impossible.
I put the receiver back on the hook and the phone rang right away. It
was a guy from Time magazine. I said to him, "Listen, I've got a problem, so
I want this off the record. I don't know how to get out of this thing. Is
there some way not to accept the Prize?"
He said, "I'm afraid, sir, that there isn't any way you can do it
without making more of a fuss than if you leave it alone." It was obvious.
We had quite a conversation, about fifteen or twenty minutes, and the Time
guy never published anything about it.
I said thank you very much to the Time guy and hung up. The phone rang
immediately: it was the newspaper.
"Yes, you can come up to the house. Yes, it's all right. Yes, Yes,
Yes..."
One of the phone calls was a guy from the Swedish consulate. He was
going to have a reception in Los Angeles. I figured that since I decided to
accept the Prize, I've got to go through with all this stuff.
The consul said, "Make a list of the people you would like to invite,
and we'll make a list of the people we are inviting. Then I'll come to your
office and we'll compare the lists to see if there are any duplicates, and
we'll make up the invitations..."
So I made up my list. It had about eight people -- my neighbor from
across the street, my artist friend Zorthian, and so on.
The consul came over to my office with his list: the Governor of the
State of California, the This, the That; Getty, the oilman; some actress --
it had three hundred people! And, needless to say, there was no duplication
whatsoever!
Then I began to get a little bit nervous. The idea of meeting all these
dignitaries frightened me.
The consul saw I was worried. "Oh, don't worry," he said. "Most of them
don't come."
Well, I had never arranged a party that I invited people to, and knew
to expect them not to come! I don't have to kowtow to anybody and give them
the delight of being honored with this invitation that they can refuse; it's
stupid! By the time I got home I was really upset with the whole thing. I
called the consul back and said, "I've thought it over, and I realize that I
just can't go through with the reception." He was delighted. He said,
"You're perfectly right." I think he was in the same position -- having to
set up a party for this jerk was just a pain in the ass. It turned out, in
the end, everybody was happy. Nobody wanted to come, including the guest of
honor! The host was much better off, too!
I had a certain psychological difficulty all the way through this
period. You see, I had been brought up by my father against royalty and pomp
(he was in the uniforms business, so he knew the difference between a man
with a uniform on, and with the uniform off -- it's the same man). I had
actually learned to ridicule this stuff all my life, and it was so strong
and deeply cut into me that I couldn't go up to a king without some strain.
It was childish, I know, but I was brought up that way, so it was a problem.
People told me that there was a rule in Sweden that after you accept
the Prize, you have to back away from the king without turning around. You
come down some steps, accept the Prize, and then go back up the steps. So I
said to myself, "All right, I'm gonna fix them!" -- and I practiced jumping
up stairs, backwards, to show how ridiculous their custom was. I was in a
terrible mood! That was stupid and silly, of course. I found out this wasn't
a rule any more; you could turn around when you left the king, and walk like
a normal human being, in the direction you were intending to go, with your
nose in front.
I was pleased to find that not all the people in Sweden take the royal
ceremonies as seriously as you might think. When you get there, you discover
that they're on your side. The students had, for example, a special ceremony
in which they granted each Nobel-Prize-winner the special "Order of the
Frog." When you get this little frog, you have to make a frog noise.
When I was younger I was anti-culture, but my father had some good
books around. One was a book with the old Greek play The Frogs in it, and I
glanced at it one time and I saw in there that a frog talks. It was written
as "brek, kek, kek." I thought, "No frog ever made a sound like that; that's
a crazy way to describe it!" so I tried it, and after practicing it awhile,
I realized that it's very accurately what a frog says.
So my chance glance into a book by Aristophanes turned out to be
useful, later on: I could make a good frog noise at the students' ceremony
for the Nobel-Prize-winners! And jumping backwards fit right in, too. So I
liked that part of it; that ceremony went well.
While I had a lot of fun, I did still have this psychological
difficulty all the way through. My greatest problem was the Thank-You speech
that you give at the King's Dinner. When they give you the Prize they give
you some nicely bound books about the years before, and they have all the
Thank-You speeches written out as if they're some big deal. So you begin to
think it's of some importance what you say in this Thank-You speech, because
it's going to be published. What I didn't realize was that hardly anyone was
going to listen to it carefully, and nobody was going to read it! I had lost
my sense of proportion: I couldn't just say thank you very much,
blah-blah-blah-blah-blah; it would have been so easy to do that, but no, I
have to make it honest. And the truth was, I didn't really want this Prize,
so how do I say thank you when I don't want it?
My wife says I was a nervous wreck, worrying about what I was going to
say in the speech, but I finally figured out a way to make a perfectly
satisfactory-sounding speech that was nevertheless completely honest. I'm
sure those who heard the speech had no idea what this guy had gone through
in preparing it.
I started out by saying that I had already received my prize in the
pleasure I got in discovering what I did, from the fact that others used my
work, and so on. I tried to explain that I had already received everything I
expected to get, and the rest was nothing compared to it. I had already
received my prize.
But then I said I received, all at once, a big pile of letters -- I
said it much better in the speech -- reminding me of all these people that I
knew: letters from childhood friends who jumped up when they read the
morning newspaper and cried out, "I know him! He's that kid we used to play
with!" and so on; letters like that, which were very supportive and
expressed what I interpreted as a kind of love. For that I thanked them.
The speech went fine, but I was always getting into slight difficulties
with royalty. During the King's Dinner I was sitting next to a princess who
had gone to college in the United States. I assumed, incorrectly, that she
had the same attitudes as I did. I figured she was just a kid like everybody
else. I remarked on how the king and all the royalty had to stand for such a
long time, shaking hands with all the guests at the reception before the
dinner. "In America," I said, "we could make this more efficient. We would
design a machine to shake hands."
"Yes, but there wouldn't be very much of a market for it here," she
said, uneasily. "There's not that much royalty."
"On the contrary, there'd be a very big market. At first, only the king
would have a machine, and we could give it to him free. Then, of course,
other people would want a machine, too. The question now becomes, who will
be allowed to have a machine? The prime minister is permitted to buy one;
then the president of the senate is allowed to buy one, and then the most
important senior deputies. So there's a very big, expanding market, and
pretty soon, you wouldn't have to go through the reception line to shake
hands with the machines; you'd send your machine!"
I also sat next to the lady who was in charge of organizing the dinner.
A waitress came by to fill my wineglass, and I said, "No, thank you. I don't
drink."
The lady said, "No, no. Let her pour the drink."
"But I don't drink."
She said, "It's all right. Just look. You see, she has two bottles. We
know that number eighty-eight doesn't drink." (Number eighty-eight was on
the back of my chair.) "They look exactly the same, but one has no alcohol."
"But how do you know?" I exclaimed.
She smiled. "Now watch the king," she said. "He doesn't drink either."
She told me some of the problems they had had this particular year. One
of them was, where should the Russian ambassador sit? The problem always is,
at dinners like this, who sits nearer to the king. The Prize-winners
normally sit closer to the king than the diplomatic corps does. And the
order in which the diplomats sit is determined according to the length of
time they have been in Sweden. Now at that time, the United States
ambassador had been in Sweden longer than the Russian ambassador. But that
year, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Mr. Sholokhov, a
Russian, and the Russian ambassador wanted to be Mr. Sholokhov's translator
-- and therefore to sit next to him. So the problem was how to let the
Russian ambassador sit closer to the king without offending the United
States ambassador and the rest of the diplomatic corps.
She said, "You should have seen what a fuss they went through --
letters back and forth, telephone calls, and so on -- before I ever got
permission to have the ambassador sit next to Mr. Sholokhov. It was finally
agreed that the ambassador wouldn't officially represent the embassy of the
Soviet Union that evening; rather, he was to be only the translator for Mr.
Sholokhov."
After the dinner we went off into another room, where there were
different conversations going on. There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark
sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty
chair at their table and sat down.
She turned to me and said, "Oh! You're one of the Nobel-Prize-winners.
In what field did you do your work?"
"In physics," I said.
"Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can't talk
about it."
"On the contrary," I answered. "It's because somebody knows something
about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows
anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can
talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about
international finance -- gold transfers we can't talk about, because those
are understood -- so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that
we can all talk about!"
I don't know how they do it. There's a way of forming ice on the
surface of the face, and she did it! She turned to talk to somebody else.
After a while I could tell I was completely cut out of the
conversation, so I got up and started away. The Japanese ambassador, who was
also sitting at that table, jumped up and walked after me. "Professor
Feynman," he said, "there is something I should like to tell you about
diplomacy."
He went into a long story about how a young man in Japan goes to the
university and studies international relations because he thinks he can make
a contribution to his country. As a sophomore he begins to have slight
twinges of doubt about what he is learning. After college he takes his first
post in an embassy and has still more doubts about his understanding of
diplomacy, until he finally realizes that nobody knows anything about
international relations. At that point, he can become an ambassador! "So
Professor Feynman," he said, "next time you give examples of things that
everybody talks about that nobody knows about, please include international
relations!"
He was a very interesting man, and we got to talking. I had always been
interested in how it is the different countries and different peoples
develop differently. I told the ambassador that there was one thing that
always seemed to me to be a remarkable phenomenon: how Japan had developed
itself so rapidly to become such a modern and important country in the
world. "What is the aspect and character of the Japanese people that made it
possible for the Japanese to do that?" I asked.
The ambassador answered in a way I like to hear: "I don't know," he
said. "I might suppose something, but I don't know if it's true. The people
of Japan believed they had only one way of moving up: to have their children
educated more than they were; that it was very important for them to move
out of their peasantry to become educated. So there has been a great energy
in the family to encourage the children to do well in school, and to be
pushed forward. Because of this tendency to learn things all the time, new
ideas from the outside would spread through the educational system very
easily. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Japan has advanced so
rapidly."
All in all, I must say I enjoyed the visit to Sweden, in the end.
Instead of coming home immediately, I went to CERN, the European center for
nuclear research in Switzerland, to give a talk. I appeared before my
colleagues in the suit that I had worn to the King's Dinner -- I had never
given a talk in a suit before -- and I began by saying, "Funny thing, you
know; in Sweden we were sitting around, talking about whether there are any
changes as a result of our having won the Nobel Prize, and as a matter of
fact, I think I already see a change: I rather like this suit."
Everybody says "Booooo!" and Weisskopf jumps up and tears off his coat
and says, "We're not gonna wear suits at lectures!"
I took my coat off, loosened my tie, and said, "By the time I had been
through Sweden, I was beginning to like this stuff, but now that I'm back in
the world, everything's all right again. Thanks for straightening me out!"
They didn't want me to change. So it was very quick: at CERN they undid
everything that they had done in Sweden.
It's nice that I got some money -- I was able to buy a beach house --
but altogether, I think it would have been much nicer not to have had the
Prize -- because you never, any longer, can be taken straightforwardly in
any public situation.
In a way, the Nobel Prize has been something of a pain in the neck,
though there was at least one time that I got some fun out of it. Shortly
after I won the Prize, Gweneth and I received an invitation from the
Brazilian government to be the guests of honor at the Carnaval celebrations
in Rio. We gladly accepted and had a great time. We went from one dance to
another and reviewed the big street parade that featured the famous samba
schools playing their wonderful rhythms and music. Photographers from
newspapers and magazines were taking pictures all the time -- "Here, the
Professor from America is dancing with Miss Brazil."
It was fun to be a "celebrity," but we were obviously the wrong
celebrities. Nobody was very excited about the guests of honor that year. I
found out later how our invitation had come about. Gina Lollobrigida was
supposed to be the guest of honor, but just before Carnaval, she said no.
The Minister of Tourism, who was in charge of organizing Carnaval, had some
friends at the Center for Physical Research who knew I had played in a samba
band, and since I had recently won the Nobel Prize, I was briefly in the
news. In a moment of panic the Minister and his friends got this crazy idea
to replace Gina Lollobrigida with the professor of physics!
Needless to say, the Minister did such a bad job on that Carnaval that
he lost his position in the government.
--------
Bringing Culture to the Physicists
Nina Byers, a professor at UCLA, became in charge of the physics
colloquium sometime in the early seventies. The colloquia are normally a
place where physicists from other universities come and talk pure technical
stuff. But partly as a result of the atmosphere of that particular period of
time, she got the idea that the physicists needed more culture, so she
thought she would arrange something along those lines: Since Los Angeles is
near Mexico, she would have a colloquium on the mathematics and astronomy of
the Mayans -- the old civilization of Mexico.
(Remember my attitude to culture: This kind of thing would have driven
me crazy if it were in my university!)
She started looking for a professor to lecture on the subject, and
couldn't find anybody at UCLA who was quite an expert. She telephoned
various places and still couldn't find anybody.
Then she remembered Professor Otto Neugebauer, of Brown University, the
great expert on Babylonian mathematics.* She telephoned him in Rhode Island
and asked if he knew someone on the West Coast who could lecture on Mayan
mathematics and astronomy.
* When I was a young professor at Cornell, Professor Neugebauer had
come one year to give a sequence of lectures, called the Messenger Lectures,
on Babylonian mathematics. They were wonderful. Oppenheimer lectured the
next year. I remember thinking to myself, "Wouldn't it be nice to come,
someday, and be able to give lectures like that!" Some years later, when I
was refusing invitations to lecture at various places, I was invited to give
the Messenger Lectures at Cornell. Of course I couldn't refuse, because I
had put that in my mind so I accepted an invitation to go over to Bob
Wilson's house for a weekend and we discussed various ideas. The result was
a series of lectures called "The Character of Physical Law."
"Yes," he said. "I do. He's not a professional anthropologist or a
historian; he's an amateur. But he certainly knows a lot about it. His name
is Richard Feynman."
She nearly died! She's trying to bring some culture to the physicists,
and the only way to do it is to get a physicist!
The only reason I knew anything about Mayan mathematics was that I was
getting exhausted on my honeymoon in Mexico with my second wife, Mary Lou.
She was greatly interested in art history, particularly that of Mexico. So
we went to Mexico for our honeymoon and we climbed up pyramids and down
pyramids; she had me following her all over the place. She showed me many
interesting things, such as certain relationships in the designs of various
figures, but after a few days (and nights) of going up and down in hot and
steamy jungles, I was exhausted.
In some little Guatemalan town in the middle of nowhere we went into a
museum that had a case displaying a manuscript full of strange symbols,
pictures, and bars and dots. It was a copy (made by a man named Villacorta)
of the Dresden Codex, an original book made by the Mayans found in a museum
in Dresden. I knew the bars and dots were numbers. My father had taken me to
the New York World's Fair when I was a little kid, and there they had
reconstructed a Mayan temple. I remembered him telling me how the Mayans had
invented the zero and had done many interesting things.
The museum had copies of the codex for sale, so I bought one. On each
page at the left was the codex copy, and on the right a description and
partial translation in Spanish.
I love puzzles and codes, so when I saw the bars and dots, I thought,
"I'm gonna have some fun!" I covered up the Spanish with a piece of yellow
paper and began playing this game of deciphering the Mayan bars and dots,
sitting in the hotel room, while my wife climbed up and down the pyramids
all day.
I quickly figured out that a bar was equal to five dots, what the
symbol for zero was, and so on. It took me a little longer to figure out
that the bars and dots always carried at twenty the first time, but they
carried at eighteen the second time (making cycles of 360). I also worked
out all kinds of things about various faces: they had surely meant certain
days and weeks.
After we got back home I continued to work on it. Altogether, it's a
lot of fun to try to decipher something like that, because when you start
out you don't know anything -- you have no clue to go by. But then you
notice certain numbers that appear often, and add up to other numbers, and
so on.
There was one place in the codex where the number 584 was very
prominent. This 584 was divided into periods of 236, 90, 250, and 8. Another
prominent number was 2920, or 584 x 5 (also 365 x 8). There was a table of
multiples of 2920 up to 13 x 2920, then there were multiples of 13 x 2920
for a while, and then -- funny numbers! They were errors, as far as I could
tell. Only many years later did I figure out what they were.
Because figures denoting days were associated with this 584 which was
divided up so peculiarly, I figured if it wasn't some mythical period of
some sort, it might be something astronomical. Finally I went down to the
astronomy library and looked it up, and found that 583.92 days is the period
of Venus as it appears from the earth. Then the 236, 90, 250, 8 became
apparent: it must be the phases that Venus goes through. It's a morning
star, then it can't be seen (it's on the far side of the sun); then it's an
evening star, and finally it disappears again (it's between the earth and
the sun). The 90 and the 8 are different because Venus moves more slowly
through the sky when it is on the far side of the sun compared to when it
passes between the earth and the sun. The difference between the 236 and the
250 might indicate a difference between the eastern and western horizons in
Maya land.
I discovered another table nearby that had periods of 11,959 days. This
turned out to be a table for predicting lunar eclipses. Still another table
had multiples of 91 in descending order. I never did figure that one out
(nor has anyone else).
When I had worked out as much as I could, I finally decided to look at
the Spanish commentary to see how much I was able to figure out. It was
complete nonsense. This symbol was Saturn, this symbol was a god -- it
didn't make the slightest bit of sense. So I didn't have to have covered the
commentary; I wouldn't have learned anything from it anyway.
After that I began to read a lot about the Mayans, and found that the
great man in this business was Eric Thompson, some of whose books I now
have.
When Nina Byers called me up I realized that I had lost my copy of the
Dresden Codex. (I had lent it to Mrs. H. E. Robertson, who had found a Mayan
codex in an old trunk of an antique dealer in Paris. She had brought it back
to Pasadena for me to look at -- I still remember driving home with it on
the front seat of my car, thinking, "I've gotta be careful driving: I've got
the new codex" -- but as soon as I looked at it carefully, I could see
immediately that it was a complete fake. After a little bit of work I could
find where each picture in the new codex had come from in the Dresden Codex.
So I lent her my book to show her, and I eventually forgot she had it.) So
the librarians at UCLA worked very hard to find another copy of Villacorta's
rendition of the Dresden Codex, and lent it to me.
I did all the calculations all over again, and in fact I got a little
bit further than I did before: I figured out that those "funny numbers"
which I thought before were errors were really integer multiples of
something closer to the correct period (583.923) -- the Mayans had realized
that 584 wasn't exactly right!*
* While I was studying this table of corrections for the period of
Venus, I discovered a rare exaggeration by Mr. Thompson. He wrote that by
looking at the table, you can deduce how the Mayans calculated the correct
period of Venus -- use this number four times and that difference once and
you get an accuracy of one day in 4000 years, which is really quite
remarkable, especially since the Mayans observed for only a few hundred
years.
Thompson happened to pick a combination which fit what he thought was
the right period for Venus, 583.92. But when you put in a more exact figure,
something like 583.923, you find the Mayans were off by more. Of course, by
choosing a different combination you can get the numbers in the table to
give you 583.923 with the same remarkable accuracy!
After the colloquium at UCLA Professor Byers presented me with some
beautiful color reproductions of the Dresden Codex. A few months later
Caltech wanted me to give the same lecture to the public in Pasadena. Robert
Rowan, a real estate man, lent me some very valuable stone carvings of Mayan
gods and ceramic figures for the Caltech lecture. It was probably highly
illegal to take something like that out of Mexico, and they were so valuable
that we hired security guards to protect them.
A few days before the Caltech lecture there was a big splurge in the
New York Times, which reported that a new codex had been discovered. There
were only three codices (two of which are hard to get anything out of) known
to exist at the time -- hundreds of thousands had been burned by Spanish
priests as "works of the Devil." My cousin was working for the AP, so she
got me a glossy picture copy of what the New York Times had published and I
made a slide of it to include in my talk.
This new codex was a fake. In my lecture I pointed out that the numbers
were in the style of the Madrid codex, but were 236, 90, 250, 8 -- rather a
coincidence! Out of the hundred thousand books originally made we get
another fragment, and it has the same thing on it as the other fragments! It
was obviously, again, one of these put-together things which had nothing
original in it.
These people who copy things never have the courage to make up
something really different. If you find something that is really new, it's
got to have something different. A real hoax would be to take something like
the period of Mars, invent a mythology to go with it, and then draw pictures
associated with this mythology with numbers appropriate to Mars -- not in an
obvious fashion; rather, have tables of multiples of the period with some
mysterious "errors," and so on. The numbers should have to be worked out a
little bit. Then people would say, "Geez! This has to do with Mars!" In
addition, there should be a number of things in it that are not
understandable, and are not exactly like what has been seen before. That
would make a good fake.
I got a big kick out of giving my talk on "Deciphering Mayan
Hieroglyphics." There I was, being something I'm not, again. People filed
into the auditorium past these glass cases, admiring the color reproductions
of the Dresden Codex and the authentic Mayan artifacts watched over by an
armed guard in uniform; they heard a two-hour lecture on Mayan mathematics
and astronomy from an amateur expert in the field (who even told them how to
spot a fake codex), and then they went out, admiring the cases again. Murray
Gell-Mann countered in the following weeks by giving a beautiful set of six
lectures concerning the linguistic relations of all the languages of the
world.
--------
Found Out in Paris
I gave a series of lectures in physics that the Addison-Wesley Company
made into a book, and one time at lunch we were discussing what the cover of
the book should look like. I thought that since the lectures were a
combination of the real world and mathematics, it would be a good idea to
have a picture of a drum, and on top of it some mathematical diagrams --
circles and lines for the nodes of the oscillating drumheads, which were
discussed in the book.
The book came out with a plain, red cover, but for some reason, in the
preface, there's a picture of me playing a drum. I think they put it in
there to satisfy this idea they got that "the author wants a drum
somewhere." Anyway, everybody wonders why that picture of me playing drums
is in the preface of the Feynman Lectures, because it doesn't have any
diagrams on it, or any other things which would make it clear. (It's true
that I like drumming, but that's another story.)
At Los Alamos things were pretty tense from all the work, and there
wasn't any way to amuse yourself: there weren't any movies, or anything like
that. But I discovered some drums that the boys' school, which had been
there previously, had collected: Los Alamos was in the middle of New Mexico,
where there are lots of Indian villages. So I amused myself -- sometimes
alone, sometimes with another guy -- just making noise, playing on these
drums. I didn't know any particular rhythm, but the rhythms of the Indians
were rather simple, the drums were good, and I had fun.
Sometimes I would take the drums with me into the woods at some
distance, so I wouldn't disturb anybody, and would beat them with a stick,
and sing. I remember one night walking around a tree, looking at the moon,
and beating the drum, making believe I was an Indian.
One day a guy came up to me and said, "Around Thanksgiving you weren't
out in the woods beating a drum, were you?"
"Yes, I was," I said.
"Oh! Then my wife was right!" Then he told me this story:
One night he heard some drum music in the distance, and went upstairs
to the other guy in the duplex house that they live in, and the other guy
heard it too. Remember, all these guys were from the East. They didn't know
anything about Indians, and they were very interested: the Indians must have
been having some kind of ceremony, or something exciting, and the two men
decided to go out to see what it was.
As they walked along, the music got louder as they came nearer, and
they began to get nervous. They realized that the Indians probably had
scouts out watching so that nobody would disturb their ceremony. So they got
down on their bellies and crawled along the trail until the sound was just
over the next hill, apparently. They crawled up over the hill and discovered
to their surprise that it was only one Indian, doing the ceremony all by
himself -- dancing around a tree, beating the drum with a stick, chanting.
The two guys backed away from him slowly, because they didn't want to
disturb him: He was probably setting up some kind of spell, or something.
They told their wives what they saw, and the wives said, "Oh, it must
have been Feynman -- he likes to beat drums."
"Don't be ridiculous!" the men said. "Even Feynman wouldn't be that
crazy!"
So the next week they set about trying to figure out who the Indian
was. There were Indians from the nearby reservation working at Los Alamos,
so they asked one Indian, who was a technician in the technical area, who it
could be. The Indian asked around, but none of the other Indians knew who it
might be, except there was one Indian whom nobody could talk to. He was an
Indian who knew his race: He had two big braids down his back and held his
head high; whenever he walked anywhere he walked with dignity, alone; and
nobody could talk to him. You would be afraid to go up to him and ask him
anything; he had too much dignity. He was a furnace man. So nobody ever had
the nerve to ask this<