can think about the elementary things
that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It
doesn't do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to
present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any
new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are easy to
think about; if you can't think of a new thought, no harm done; what you
thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of
something new, you're rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at
it.
The questions of the students are often the source of new research.
They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then
given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think
about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not
be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think
about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the
neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these
things.
So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would
never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation
for me where I don't have to teach. Never.
But once I was offered such a position.
During the war, when I was still in Los Alamos, Hans Bethe got me this
job at Cornell, for $3700 a year. I got an offer from some other place for
more, but I like Bethe, and I had decided to go to Cornell and wasn't
worried about the money. But Bethe was always watching out for me, and when
he found out that others were offering more, he got Cornell to give me a
raise to $4000 even before I started.
Cornell told me that I would be teaching a course in mathematical
methods of physics, and they told me what day I should come -- November 6, I
think, but it sounds funny that it could be so late in the year. I took the
train from Los Alamos to Ithaca, and spent most of my time writing final
reports for the Manhattan Project. I still remember that it was on the night
train from Buffalo to Ithaca that I began to work on my course.
You have to understand the pressures at Los Alamos. You did everything
as fast as you could; everybody worked very, very hard; and everything was
finished at the last minute. So, working out my course on the train a day or
two before the first lecture seemed natural to me.
Mathematical methods of physics was an ideal course for me to teach. It
was what I had done during the war -- apply mathematics to physics. I knew
which methods were really useful, and which were not. I had lots of
experience by that time, working so hard for four years using mathematical
tricks. So I laid out the different subjects in mathematics and how to deal
with them, and I still have the papers -- the notes I made on the train.
I got off the train in Ithaca, carrying my heavy suitcase on my
shoulder, as usual. A guy called out, "Want a taxi, sir?"
I had never wanted to take a taxi: I was always a young fella, short on
money, wanting to be my own man. But I thought to myself, "I'm a professor
-- I must be dignified." So I took my suitcase down from my shoulder and
carried it in my hand, and said, "Yes."
"Where to?" "The hotel." "Which hotel?"
"One of the hotels you've got in Ithaca."
"Have you got a reservation?"
"No."
"It's not so easy to get a room."
"We'll just go from one hotel to another. Stay and wait for me."
I try the Hotel Ithaca: no room. We go over to the Traveller's Hotel:
they don't have any room either. I say to the taxi guy, "No use driving
around town with me; it's gonna cost a lot of money, I'll walk from hotel to
hotel." I leave my suitcase in the Traveller's Hotel and I start to wander
around, looking for a room. That shows you how much preparation I had, a new
professor.
I found some other guy wandering around looking for a room too. It
turned out that the hotel room situation was utterly impossible. After a
while we wandered up some sort of a hill, and gradually realized we were
coming near the campus of the university.
We saw something that looked like a rooming house, with an open window,
and you could see bunk beds in there. By this time it was night, so we
decided to ask if we could sleep there. The door was open, but there was
nobody in the whole place. We walked up into one of the rooms, and the other
guy said, "Come on, let's just sleep here!"
I didn't think that was so good. It seemed like stealing to me.
Somebody had made the beds; they might come home and find us sleeping in
their beds, and we'd get into trouble. So we go out. We walk a little
further, and we see, under a streetlight, an enormous mass of leaves that
had been collected -- it was autumn -- from the lawns. I say, "Hey! We could
crawl in these leaves and sleep here!" I tried it; they were rather soft. I
was tired of walking around, it would have been perfectly all right. But I
didn't want to get into trouble right away. Back at Los Alamos people had
teased me (when I played drums and so on) about what kind of "professor"
Cornell was going to get. They said I'd get a reputation right off by doing
something silly, so I was trying to be a little dignified. I reluctantly
gave up the idea of sleeping in the pile of leaves.
We wandered around a little more, and came to a big building, some
important building of the campus. We went in, and there were two couches in
the hallway. The other guy said, "I'm sleeping here!" and collapsed onto the
couch.
I didn't want to get into trouble, so I found a janitor down in the
basement and asked him whether I could sleep on the couch, and he said
"Sure."
The next morning I woke up, found a place to eat breakfast, and started
rushing around as fast as I could to find out when my first class was going
to be. I ran into the physics department: "What time is my first class? Did
I miss it?"
The guy said, "You have nothing to worry about. Classes don't start for
eight days."
That was a shock to me! The first thing I said was, "Well, why did you
tell me to be here a week ahead?"
"I thought you'd like to come and get acquainted, find a place to stay
and settle down before you begin your classes."
I was back to civilization, and I didn't know what it was!
Professor Gibbs sent me to the Student Union to find a place to stay.
It's a big place, with lots of students milling around. I go up to a big
desk that says HOUSING and I say, "I'm new, and I'm looking for a room."
The guy says, "Buddy, the housing situation in Ithaca is tough. In
fact, it's so tough that, believe it or not, a professor had to sleep on a
couch in this lobby last night!"
I look around, and it's the same lobby! I turn to him and I say, "Well,
I'm that professor, and the professor doesn't want to do it again!"
My early days at Cornell as a new professor were interesting and
sometimes amusing. A few days after I got there, Professor Gibbs came into
my office and explained to me that ordinarily we don't accept students this
late in the term, but in a few cases, when the applicant is very, very good,
we can accept him. He handed me an application and asked me to look it over.
He comes back: "Well, what do you think?"
"I think he's first rate, and I think we ought to accept him. I think
we're lucky to get him here."
"Yes, but did you look at his picture?"
"What possible difference could that make?" I exclaimed.
"Absolutely none, sir! Glad to hear you say that. I wanted to see what
kind of a man we had for our new professor." Gibbs liked the way I came
right back at him without thinking to myself, "He's the head of the
department, and I'm new here, so I'd better be careful what I say." I
haven't got the speed to think like that; my first reaction is immediate,
and I say the first thing that comes into my mind.
Then another guy came into my office. He wanted to talk to me about
philosophy, and I can't really quite remember what he said, but he wanted me
to join some kind of a club of professors. The club was some sort of
anti-Semitic club that thought the Nazis weren't so bad. He tried to explain
to me how there were too many Jews doing this and that -- some crazy thing.
So I waited until he got all finished, and said to him, "You know, you made
a big mistake: I was brought up in a Jewish family." He went out, and that
was the beginning of my loss of respect for some of the professors in the
humanities, and other areas, at Cornell University.
I was starting over, after my wife's death, and I wanted to meet some
girls. In those days there was a lot of social dancing. So there were a lot
of dances at Cornell, mixers to get people together, especially for the
freshmen and others returning to school.
I remember the first dance that I went to. I hadn't been dancing for
three or four years while I was at Los Alamos; I hadn't even been in
society. So I went to this dance and danced as best I could, which I thought
was reasonably all right. You can usually tell somebody's dancing with you
and they feel pretty good about it.
As we danced I would talk with the girl a little bit; she would ask me
some questions about myself, and I would ask some about her. But when I
wanted to dance with a girl I had danced with before, I had to look for her.
"Would you like to dance again?"
"No, I'm sorry; I need some air." Or, "Well, I have to go to the
ladies' room" -- this and that excuse, from two or three girls in a row!
What was the matter with me? Was my dancing lousy? Was my personality lousy?
I danced with another girl, and again came the usual questions: "Are
you a student, or a graduate student?" (There were a lot of students who
looked old then because they had been in the army.)
"No, I'm a professor."
"Oh? A professor of what?"
"Theoretical physics."
"I suppose you worked on the atomic bomb."
"Yes, I was at Los Alamos during the war."
She said, "You're a damn liar!" -- and walked off. That relieved me a
great deal. It explained everything. I had been telling all the girls the
simple-minded, stupid truth, and I never knew what the trouble was. It was
perfectly obvious that I was being shunned by one girl after another when I
did everything perfectly nice and natural and was polite, and answered the
questions. Everything would look very pleasant, and then thwoop -- it
wouldn't work. I didn't understand it until this woman fortunately called me
a damn liar.
So then I tried to avoid all the questions, and it had the opposite
effect:
"Are you a freshman?"
"Well, no."
"Are you a graduate student?"
"No."
"What are you?"
"I don't want to say."
"Why won't you tell us what you are?"
"I don't want to..." -- and they'd keep talking to me! I ended up with
two girls over at my house and one of them told me that I really shouldn't
feel uncomfortable about being a freshman; there were plenty of guys my age
who were starting out in college, and it was really all right. They were
sophomores, and were being quite motherly, the two of them. They worked very
hard on my psychology, but I didn't want the situation to get so distorted
and so misunderstood, so I let them know I was a professor. They were very
upset that I had fooled them. I had a lot of trouble being a young professor
at Cornell.
Anyway, I began to teach the course in mathematical methods in physics,
and I think I also taught another course -- electricity and magnetism,
perhaps. I also intended to do research. Before the war, while I was getting
my degree, I had many ideas: I had invented new methods of doing quantum
mechanics with path integrals, and I had a lot of stuff I wanted to do.
At Cornell, I'd work on preparing my courses, and I'd go over to the
library a lot and read through the Arabian Nights and ogle the girls that
would go by. But when it came time to do some research, I couldn't get to
work. I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn't do research!
This went on for what I felt was a few years, but when I go back and
calculate the timing, it couldn't have been that long. Perhaps nowadays I
wouldn't think it was such a long time, but then, it seemed to go on for a
very long time. I simply couldn't get started on any problem: I remember
writing one or two sentences about some problem in gamma rays and then I
couldn't go any further. I was convinced that from the war and everything
else (the death of my wife) I had simply burned myself out.
I now understand it much better. First of all, a young man doesn't
realize how much time it takes to prepare good lectures, for the first time,
especially -- and to give the lectures, and to make up exam problems, and to
check that they're sensible ones. I was giving good courses, the kind of
courses where I put a lot of thought into each lecture. But I didn't realize
that that's a lot of work! So here I was, "burned out," reading the Arabian
Nights and feeling depressed about myself.
During this period I would get offers from different places --
universities and industry -- with salaries higher than my own. And each time
I got something like that I would get a little more depressed. I would say
to myself, "Look, they're giving me these wonderful offers, but they don't
realize that I'm burned out! Of course I can't accept them. They expect me
to accomplish something, and I can't accomplish anything! I have no
ideas..."
Finally there came in the mail an invitation from the Institute for
Advanced Study: Einstein... von Neumann... Wyl... all these great minds!
They write to me, and invite me to be a professor there! And not just a
regular professor. Somehow they knew my feelings about the Institute: how
it's too theoretical; how there's not enough real activity and challenge. So
they write, "We appreciate that you have a considerable interest in
experiments and in teaching, so we have made arrangements to create a
special type of professorship, if you wish: half professor at Princeton
University, and half at the Institute."
Institute for Advanced Study! Special exception! A position better than
Einstein, even! It was ideal; it was perfect; it was absurd!
It was absurd. The other offers had made me feel worse, up to a point.
They were expecting me to accomplish something. But this offer was so
ridiculous, so impossible for me ever to live up to, so ridiculously out of
proportion. The other ones were just mistakes; this was an absurdity! I
laughed at it while I was shaving, thinking about it.
And then I thought to myself, "You know, what they think of you is so
fantastic, it's impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to
live up to it!"
It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what
other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be
like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.
It wasn't a failure on my part that the Institute for Advanced Study
expected me to be that good; it was impossible. It was clearly a mistake --
and the moment I appreciated the possibility that they might be wrong, I
realized that it was also true of all the other places, including my own
university. I am what I am, and if they expected me to be good and they're
offering me some money for it, it's their hard luck.
Then, within the day, by some strange miracle -- perhaps he overheard
me talking about it, or maybe he just understood me -- Bob Wilson, who was
head of the laboratory there at Cornell, called me in to see him. He said,
in a serious tone, "Feynman, you're teaching your classes well; you're doing
a good job, and we're very satisfied. Any other expectations we might have
are a matter of luck. When we hire a professor, we're taking all the risks.
If it comes out good, all right. If it doesn't, too bad. But you shouldn't
worry about what you're doing or not doing." He said it much better than
that, and it released me from the feeling of guilt.
Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I
used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I
used to do whatever I felt like doing -- it didn't have to do with whether
it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was
interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I'd
see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could
figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I
didn't have to do it; it wasn't important for the future of science;
somebody else had already done it. That didn't make any difference: I'd
invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never
accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching
classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for
pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without
worrying about any importance whatsoever.
Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around,
throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble,
and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was
pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the
wobbling.
I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the
rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion
rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate -- two to one. It came out of a
complicated equation! Then I thought, "Is there some way I can see in a more
fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it's two to
one?"
I don't remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the
motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to
make it come out two to one.
I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, "Hey, Hans! I noticed
something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it's
two to one is..." and I showed him the accelerations.
He says, "Feynman, that's pretty interesting, but what's the importance
of it? Why are you doing it?"
"Hah!" I say. "There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for
the fun of it." His reaction didn't discourage me; I had made up my mind I
was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.
I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how
electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac Equation
in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it
(it was a very short time) I was "playing" -- working, really -- with the
same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I
went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned,
wonderful things.
It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like
uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to
resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there
was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came
from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
--------
Any Questions?
When I was at Cornell I was asked to give a series of lectures once a
week at an aeronautics laboratory in Buffalo. Cornell had made an
arrangement with the laboratory which included evening lectures in physics
to be given by somebody from the university. There was some guy already
doing it, but there were complaints, so the physics department came to me. I
was a young professor at the time and I couldn't say no very easily, so I
agreed to do it.
To get to Buffalo they had me go on a little airline which consisted of
one airplane. It was called Robinson Airlines (it later became Mohawk
Airlines) and I remember the first time I flew to Buffalo, Mr. Robinson was
the pilot. He knocked the ice off the wings and we flew away.
All in all, I didn't enjoy the idea of going to Buffalo every Thursday
night. The university was paying me $35 in addition to my expenses. I was a
Depression kid, and I figured I'd save the $35, which was a sizable amount
of money in those days.
Suddenly I got an idea: I realized that the purpose of the $35 was to
make the trip to Buffalo more attractive, and the way to do that is to spend
the money. So I decided to spend the $35 to entertain myself each time I
went to Buffalo, and see if I could make the trip worthwhile.
I didn't have much experience with the rest of the world. Not knowing
how to get started, I asked the taxi driver who picked me up at the airport
to guide me through the ins and outs of entertaining myself in Buffalo. He
was very helpful, and I still remember his name -- Marcuso, who drove car
number 169. I would always ask for him when I came into the airport on
Thursday nights.
As I was going to give my first lecture I asked Marcuso, "Where's an
interesting bar where lots of things are going on?" I thought that things
went on in bars.
"The Alibi Room," he said. "It's a lively place where you can meet lots
of people. I'll take you there after your lecture." After the lecture
Marcuso picked me up and drove me to the Alibi Room. On the way, I say,
"Listen, I'm gonna have to ask for some kind of drink. What's the name of a
good whiskey?"
"Ask for Black and White, water on the side," he counseled. The Alibi
Room was an elegant place with lots of people and lots of activity. The
women were dressed in furs, everybody was friendly, and the phones were
ringing all the time. I walked up to the bar and ordered my Black and White,
water on the side. The bartender was very friendly, quickly found a
beautiful woman to sit next to me, and introduced her. I bought her drinks.
I liked the place and decided to come back the following week.
Every Thursday night I'd come to Buffalo and be driven in car number
169 to my lecture and then to the Alibi Room. I'd walk into the bar and
order my Black and White, water on the side. After a few weeks of this it
got to the point where as soon as I would come in, before I reached the bar,
there would be a Black and White, water on the side, waiting for me. "Your
regular, sir," was the bartender's greeting.
I'd take the whole shot glass down at once, to show I was a tough guy,
like I had seen in the movies, and then I'd sit around for about twenty
seconds before I drank the water. After a while I didn't even need the
water.
The bartender always saw to it that the empty chair next to mine was
quickly filled by a beautiful woman, and everything would start off all
right, but just before the bar closed, they all had to go off somewhere. I
thought it was possibly because I was getting pretty drunk by that time.
One time, as the Alibi Room was closing, the girl I was buying drinks
for that night suggested we go to another place where she knew a lot of
people. It was on the second floor of some other building which gave no hint
that there was a bar upstairs. All the bars in Buffalo had to close at two
o'clock, and all the people in the bars would get sucked into this big hall
on the second floor, and keep right on going -- illegally, of course.
I tried to figure out a way that I could stay in bars and watch what
was going on without getting drunk. One night I noticed a guy who had been
there a lot go up to the bar and order a glass of milk. Everybody knew what
his problem was: he had an ulcer, the poor fella. That gave me an idea.
The next time I come into the Alibi Room the bartender says, "The
usual, sir?"
"No. Coke. Just plain Coke," I say, with a disappointed look on my
face.
The other guys gather around and sympathize: "Yeah, I was on the wagon
three weeks ago," one says. "It's really tough, Dick, it's really tough,"
says another.
They all honored me. I was "on the wagon" now, and had the guts to
enter that bar, with all its "temptations," and just order Coke -- because,
of course, I had to see my friends. And I maintained that for a month! I was
a real tough bastard.
One time I was in the men's room of the bar and there was a guy at the
urinal. He was kind of drunk, and said to me in a mean-sounding voice, "I
don't like your face. I think I'll push it in."
I was scared green. I replied in an equally mean voice, "Get out of my
way, or I'll pee right through ya!"
He said something else, and I figured it was getting pretty close to a
fight now. I had never been in a fight. I didn't know what to do, exactly,
and I was afraid of getting hurt. I did think of one thing: I moved away
from the wall, because I figured if I got hit, I'd get hit from the back,
too. Then I felt a sort of funny crunching in my eye -- it didn't hurt much
-- and the next thing I know, I'm slamming the son of a gun right back,
automatically. It was remarkable for me to discover that I didn't have to
think; the "machinery" knew what to do.
"OK. That's one for one," I said. "Ya wanna keep on goin?"
The other guy backed off and left. We would have killed each other if
the other guy was as dumb as I was.
I went to wash up, my hands are shaking, blood is leaking out of my
gums -- I've got a weak place in my gums -- and my eye hurt. After I calmed
down I went back into the bar and swaggered up to the bartender: "Black and
White, water on the side," I said. I figured it would calm my nerves.
I didn't realize it, but the guy I socked in the men's room was over in
another part of the bar, talking with three other guys. Soon these three
guys -- big, tough guys -- came over to where I was sitting and leaned over
me. They looked down threateningly, and said, "What's the idea of pickin' a
fight with our friend?"
Well I'm so dumb I don't realize I'm being intimidated; all I know is
right and wrong. I simply whip around and snap at them, "Why don't ya find
out who started what first, before ya start makin' trouble?"
The big guys were so taken aback by the fact that their intimidation
didn't work that they backed away and left.
After a while one of the guys came back and said to me, "You're right,
Curly's always doin' that. He's always gettin' into fights and askin' us to
straighten it out."
"You're damn tootin' I'm right!" I said, and the guy sat down next to
me.
Curly and the other two fellas came over and sat down on the other side
of me, two seats away. Curly said something about my eye not looking too
good, and I said his didn't look to be in the best of shape either.
I continue talking tough, because I figure that's the way a real man is
supposed to act in a bar.
The situation's getting tighter and tighter, and people in the bar are
worrying about what's going to happen. The bartender says, "No fighting in
here, boys! Calm down!"
Curly hisses, "That's OK; we'll get 'im when he goes out."
Then a genius comes by. Every field has its first-rate experts. This
fella comes over to me and says, "Hey, Dan! I didn't know you were in town!
It's good to see you!"
Then he says to Curly, "Say, Paul! I'd like you to meet a good friend
of mine, Dan, here. I think you two guys would like each other. Why don't
you shake?"
We shake hands. Curly says, "Uh, pleased to meet you."
Then the genius leans over to me and very quietly whispers, "Now get
out of here fast!"
"But they said they would..."
"Just go!" he says.
I got my coat and went out quickly. I walked along near the walls of
the buildings, in case they went looking for me. Nobody came out, and I went
to my hotel. It happened to be the night of the last lecture, so I never
went back to the Alibi Room, at least for a few years.
(I did go back to the Alibi Room about ten years later, and it was all
different. It wasn't nice and polished like it was before; it was sleazy and
had seedy-looking people in it. I talked to the bartender, who was a
different man, and told him about the old days. "Oh, yes!" he said. "This
was the bar where all the bookmakers and their girls used to hang out." I
understood then why there were so many friendly and elegant-looking people
there, and why the phones were ringing all the time.)
The next morning, when I got up and looked in the mirror, I discovered
that a black eye takes a few hours to develop fully. When I got back to
Ithaca that day, I went to deliver some stuff over to the dean's office. A
professor of philosophy saw my black eye and exclaimed, "Oh, Mr. Feynman!
Don't tell me you got that walking into a door?"
"Not at all," I said. "I got it in a fight in the men's room of a bar
in Buffalo."
"Ha, ha, ha!" he laughed.
Then there was the problem of giving the lecture to my regular class. I
walked into the lecture hall with my head down, studying my notes. When I
was ready to start, I lifted my head and looked straight at them, and said
what I always said before I began my lecture -- but this time, in a tougher
tone of voice: "Any questions?"
--------
I Want My Dollar!
When I was at Cornell I would often come back home to Far Rockaway to
visit. One time when I happened to be home, the telephone rings: it's LONG
DISTANCE, from California. In those days, a long distance call meant it was
something very important, especially a long distance call from this
marvelous place, California, a million miles away.
The guy on the other end says, "Is this Professor Feynman, of Cornell
University?"
"That's right."
"This is Mr. So-and-so from the Such-and-such Aircraft Company." It was
one of the big airplane companies in California, but unfortunately I can't
remember which one. The guy continues: "We're planning to start a laboratory
on nuclear-propelled rocket airplanes. It will have an annual budget of
so-and-so-many million dollars..." Big numbers.
I said, "Just a moment, sir; I don't know why you're telling me all
this."
"Just let me speak to you," he says; "just let me explain everything.
Please let me do it my way." So he goes on a little more, and says how many
people are going to be in the laboratory, so-and-so-many people at this
level, and so-and-so-many Ph.D.'s at that level...
"Excuse me, sir," I say, "but I think you have the wrong fella."
"Am I talking to Richard Feynman, Richard P. Feynman?"
"Yes, but you're..."
"Would you please let me present what I have to say, sir, and then
we'll discuss it."
"All right!" I sit down and sort of close my eyes to listen to all this
stuff, all these details about this big project, and I still haven't the
slightest idea why he's giving me all this information.
Finally, when he's all finished, he says, "I'm telling you about our
plans because we want to know if you would like to be the director of the
laboratory."
"Have you really got the right fella?" I say. "I'm a professor of
theoretical physics. I'm not a rocket engineer, or an airplane engineer, or
anything like that."
"We're sure we have the right fellow."
"Where did you get my name then? Why did you decide to call me?"
"Sir, your name is on the patent for nuclear-powered, rocket-propelled
airplanes."
"Oh," I said, and I realized why my name was on the patent, and I'll
have to tell you the story. I told the man, "I'm sorry, but I would like to
continue as a professor at Cornell University."
What had happened was, during the war at Los Alamos, there was a very
nice fella in charge of the patent office for the government, named Captain
Smith. Smith sent around a notice to everybody that said something like, "We
in the patent office would like to patent every idea you have for the United
States government, for which you are working now. Any idea you have on
nuclear energy or its application that you may think everybody knows about,
everybody doesn't know about: Just come to my office and tell me the idea."
I see Smith at lunch, and as we're walking back to the technical area,
I say to him, "That note you sent around: That's kind of crazy to have us
come in and tell you every idea."
We discussed it back and forth -- by this time we're in his office --
and I say, "There are so many ideas about nuclear energy that are so
perfectly obvious, that I'd be here all day telling you stuff."
"LIKE WHAT?"
"Nothin' to it!" I say. "Example: nuclear reactor... under water...
water goes in... steam goes out the other side... Pshshshsht -- it's a
submarine. Or: nuclear reactor... air comes rushing in the front... heated
up by nuclear reaction... out the back it goes... Boom! Through the air --
it's an airplane. Or: nuclear reactor... you have hydrogen go through the
thing... Zoom! -- it's a rocket. Or: nuclear reactor... only instead of
using ordinary uranium, you use enriched uranium, with beryllium oxide at
high temperature to make it more efficient... It's an electrical power
plant. There's a million ideas!" I said, as I went out the door. Nothing
happened.
About three months later, Smith calls me in the office and says,
"Feynman, the submarine has already been taken. But the other three are
yours." So when the guys at the airplane company in California are planning
their laboratory, and try to find out who's an expert in rocket-propelled
whatnots, there's nothing to it: They look at who's got the patent on it!
Anyway, Smith told me to sign some papers for the three ideas I was giving
to the government to patent. Now, it's some dopey legal thing, but when you
give the patent to the government, the document you sign is not a legal
document unless there's some exchange, so the paper I signed said, "For the
sum of one dollar, I, Richard P. Feynman, give this idea to the
government..."
I sign the paper.
"Where's my dollar?"
"That's just a formality," he says. "We haven't got any funds set up to
give a dollar."
"You've got it all set up that I'm signing for the dollar," I say. "I
want my dollar!"
"This is silly," Smith protests.
"No, it's not," I say. "It's a legal document. You made me sign it, and
I'm an honest man. There's no fooling around about it."
"All right, all right!" he says, exasperated. "I'll give you a dollar,
from my pocket!"
"OK."
I take the dollar, and I realize what I'm going to do. I go down to the
grocery store, and I buy a dollar's worth -- which was pretty good, then --
of cookies and goodies, those chocolate goodies with marshmallow inside, a
whole lot of stuff.
I come back to the theoretical laboratory, and I give them out: "I got
a prize, everybody! Have a cookie! I got a prize! A dollar for my patent! I
got a dollar for my patent!"
Everybody who had one of those patents -- a lot of people had been
sending them in -- everybody comes down to Captain Smith: they want their
dollar!
He starts shelling them out of his pocket, but soon realizes that it's
going to be a hemorrhage! He went crazy trying to set up a fund where he
could get the dollars these guys were insisting on. I don't know how he
settled up.
--------
You Just Ask Them?
When I was first at Cornell I corresponded with a girl I had met in New
Mexico while I was working on the bomb. I got to thinking, when she
mentioned some other fella she knew, that I had better go out there quickly
at the end of the school year and try to save the situation. But when I got
out there, I found it was too late, so I ended up in a motel in Albuquerque
with a free summer and nothing to do.
The Casa Grande Motel was on Route 66, the main highway through town.
About three places further down the road there was a little nightclub that
had entertainment. Since I had nothing to do, and since I enjoyed watching
and meeting people in bars, I very often went to this nightclub.
When I first went there I was talking with some guy at the bar, and we
noticed a whole table full of nice young ladies -- TWA hostesses, I think
they were --who were having some sort of birthday party. The other guy said,
"Come on, let's get up our nerve and ask them to dance."
So we asked two of them to dance, and afterwards they invited us to sit
with the other girls at the table. After a few drinks, the waiter came
around: "Anybody want anything?"
I liked to imitate being drunk, so although I was completely sober, I
turned to the girl I'd been dancing with and asked her in a drunken voice,
"YaWANanything?"
"What can we have?" she asks.
"Annnnnnnnnnnnything you want -- ANYTHING!"
"All right! We'll have champagne!" she says happily.
So I say in a loud voice that everybody in the bar can hear, "OK!
Ch-ch-champagne for evvverybody!"
Then I hear my friend talking to my girl, saying what a dirty trick it
is to "take all that dough from him because he's drunk," and I'm beginning
to think maybe I made a mistake.
Well, nicely enough, the waiter comes over to me, leans down, and says
in a low voice, "Sir, that's sixteen dollars a bottle."
I decide to drop the idea of champagne for everybody, so I say in an
even louder voice than before, "NEVER MIND!"
I was therefore quite surprised when, a few moments later, the waiter
came back to the table with all his fancy stuff -- a white towel over his
arm, a tray full of glasses, an ice bucket full of ice, and a bottle of
champagne. He thought I meant, "Never mind the price," when I meant, "Never
mind the champagne!"
The waiter served champagne to everybody, I paid out the sixteen
dollars, and my friend was mad at my girl because he thought she had got me
to pay all this dough. But as far as I was concerned, that was the end of it
-- though it turned out later to be the beginning of a new adventure.
I went to that nightclub quite often and as the weeks went by, the
entertainment changed. The performers were on a circuit that went through
Amarillo and a lot of other places in Texas, and God knows where else. There
was also a permanent singer who was at the nightclub, whose name was Tamara.
Every time a new group of performers came to the club, Tamara would
introduce me to one of the girls from the group. The girl would come and sit
down with me at my table, I would buy her a drink, and we'd talk. Of course
I would have liked to do more than just talk, but there was always something
the matter at the last minute. So I could never understand why Tamara always
went to the trouble of introducing me to all these nice girls, and then,
even though things would start out all right, I would always end up buying
drinks, spending the evening talking, but that was it. My friend, who didn't
have the advantage of Tamara's introductions, wasn't getting anywhere either
-- we were both clunks.
After a few weeks of different shows and different girls, a new show
came, and as usual Tamara introduced me to a girl from the group, and we
went through the usual thing -- I'm buying her drinks, we're talking, and
she's being very nice. She went and did her show, and afterwards she came
back to me at my table, and I felt pretty good. People would look around and
think, "What's he got th