“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character Read online

“Well, I thought that even though you were in a hurry, you’d have to go back into the kitchen and get a soup plate; then you’d have to sloooowly and carefully slide the cup over to the edge of the table …”

  “I did that,” she complained, “but there was no water in it!”

  My masterpiece of mischief happened at the fraternity. One morning I woke up very early, about five o’clock, and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I went downstairs from the sleeping rooms and discovered some signs hanging on strings which said things like “DOOR! DOOR! WHO STOLE THE DOOR?” I saw that someone had taken a door off its hinges, and in its place they hung a sign that said, “PLEASE CLOSE THE DOOR!”—the sign that used to be on the door that was missing.

  I immediately figured out what the idea was. In that room a guy named Pete Bernays and a couple of other guys liked to work very hard, and always wanted it quiet. If you wandered into their room looking for something, or to ask them how they did problem such and such, when you would leave you would always hear these guys scream, “Please close the door!”

  Somebody had gotten tired of this, no doubt, and had taken the door off. Now this room, it so happened, had two doors, the way it was built, so I got an idea: I took the other door off its hinges, carried it downstairs, and hid it in the basement behind the oil tank. Then I quietly went back upstairs and went to bed.

  Later in the morning I made believe I woke up and came downstairs a little late. The other guys were milling around, and Pete and his friends were all upset: The doors to their room were missing, and they had to study, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was coming down the stairs and they said, “Feynman! Did you take the doors?”

  “Oh, yeah!” I said. “I took the door. You can see the scratches on my knuckles here, that I got when my hands scraped against the wall as I was carrying it down into the basement.”

  They weren’t satisfied with my answer; in fact, they didn’t believe me.

  The guys who took the first door had left so many clues—the handwriting on the signs, for instance—that they were soon found out. My idea was that when it was found out who stole the first door, everybody would think they also stole the other door. It worked perfectly: The guys who took the first door were pummeled and tortured and worked on by everybody, until finally, with much pain and difficulty, they convinced their tormentors that they had only taken one door, unbelievable as it might be.

  I listened to all this, and I was happy.

  The other door stayed missing for a whole week, and it became more and more important to the guys who were trying to study in that room that the other door be found.

  Finally, in order to solve the problem, the president of the fraternity says at the dinner table, “We have to solve this problem of the other door. I haven’t been able to solve the problem myself, so I would like suggestions from the rest of you as to how to straighten this out, because Pete and the others are trying to study.”

  Somebody makes a suggestion, then someone else.

  After a little while, I get up and make a suggestion. “All right,” I say in a sarcastic voice, “whoever you are who stole the door, we know you’re wonderful. You’re so clever! We can’t figure out who you are, so you must be some sort of super-genius. You don’t have to tell us who you are; all we want to know is where the door is. So if you will leave a note somewhere, telling us where the door is, we will honor you and admit forever that you are a super-marvel, that you are so smart that you could take the other door without our being able to figure out who you are. But for God’s sake, just leave the note somewhere, and we will be forever grateful to you for it.”

  The next guy makes his suggestion: “I have another idea,” he says. “I think that you, as president, should ask each man on his word of honor towards the fraternity to say whether he took the door or not.”

  The president says, “That’s a very good idea. On the fraternity word of honor!” So he goes around the table, and asks each guy, one by one: “Jack, did you take the door?”

  “No, sir, I did not take the door.”

  “Tim: Did you take the door?”

  “No, sir! I did not take the door!”

  “Maurice. Did you take the door?”

  “No, I did not take the door, sir.”

  “Feynman, did you take the door?”

  “Yeah, I took the door.”

  “Cut it out, Feynman; this is serious! Sam! Did you take the door …”—it went all the way around. Everyone was shocked. There must be some real rat in the fraternity who didn’t respect the fraternity word of honor!

  That night I left a note with a little picture of the oil tank and the door next to it, and the next day they found the door and put it back.

  Sometime later I finally admitted to taking the other door, and I was accused by everybody of lying. They couldn’t remember what I had said. All they could remember was their conclusion after the president of the fraternity had gone around the table and asked everybody, that nobody admitted taking the door. The idea they remembered, but not the words.

  People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way—in such a way that often nobody believes me!

  Latin or Italian?

  There was an Italian radio station in Brooklyn, and as a boy I used to listen to it all the time. I LOVed the ROLLing SOUNds going over me, as if I was in the ocean, and the waves weren’t very high. I used to sit there and have the water come over me, in this BEAUtiful iTALian. In the Italian programs there was always some kind of family situation where there were discussions and arguments between the mother and father: High voice: “Nio teco TIEto capeto TUtto …”

  Loud, low voice: “DRO tone pala TUtto!!” (with hand slapping).

  It was great! So I learned to make all these emotions: I could cry; I could laugh; all this stuff. Italian is a lovely language.

  There were a number of Italian people living near us in New York. Once while I was riding my bicycle, some Italian truck driver got upset at me, leaned out of his truck, and, gesturing, yelled something like, “Me aRRUcha LAMpe etta Tiche!”

  I felt like a crapper. What did he say to me? What should I yell back?

  So I asked an Italian friend of mine at school, and he said, “Just say, ‘A te! A te!’—which means ‘The same to you! The same to you!”

  I thought it was a great idea. I would say “A te! A te!” back—gesturing, of course. Then, as I gained confidence, I developed my abilities further. I would be riding my bicycle, and some lady would be driving in her car and get in the way, and I’d say, “PUzzia a la maLOche!”—and she’d shrink! Some terrible Italian boy had cursed a terrible curse at her!

  It was not so easy to recognize it as fake Italian. Once, when I was at Princeton, as I was going into the parking lot at Palmer Laboratory on my bicycle, somebody got in the way.

  My habit was always the same: I gesture to the guy, “oREzze caB ONca MIche!”, slapping the back of one hand against the other.

  And way up on the other side of a long area of grass, there’s an Italian gardner putting in some plants. He stops, waves, and shouts happily, “REzza ma LIa!”

  I call back, “RONte BALta!”, returning the greeting. He didn’t know I didn’t know, and I didn’t know what he said, and he didn’t know what I said. But it was OK! It was great! It works! After all, when they hear the intonation, they recognize it immediately as Italian—maybe it’s Milano instead of Romano, what the hell. But he’s an iTALian! So it’s just great. But you have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen.

  One time I came home from college for a vacation, and my sister was sort of unhappy, almost crying: her Girl Scouts were having a father-daughter banquet, but our father was out on the road, selling uniforms. So I said I would take her, being the brother (I’m nine years older, so it wasn’t so crazy).

  When we got there, I sat among the fathers for a while, but soon became sick of them. All these fathers bring their daughters to this nice little ba
nquet, and all they talked about was the stock market—they don’t know how to talk to their own children, much less their children’s friends.

  During the banquet the girls entertained us by doing little skits, reciting poetry, and so on. Then all of a sudden they bring out this funny-looking apronlike thing, with a hole at the top to put your head through. The girls announce that the fathers are now going to entertain them.

  So each father has to get up and stick his head through and say something—one guy recites “Mary Had a Little Lamb”—and they don’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do either, but by the time I got up there, I told them that I was going to recite a little poem, and I’m sorry that it’s not in English, but I’m sure they will appreciate it anyway:

  A TUZZO LANTO

  Poici di Pare

  TANto SAca TULna TI, na PUta TUchi PUti TI la.

  RUNto CAta CHANto CHANta MANto CHI la TI da.

  YALta CAra SULda MI la CHAta Picha Pino Tito

  BRALda pe te CHIna nana CHUNda lala CHINda lala CHUNda!

  RONto piti CA le, a TANto CHINto quinta LALda

  ola TiNta dalla LALta, YENta PUcha lalla TALta!

  I do this for three or four stanzas, going through all the emotions that I heard on Italian radio, and the kids are unraveled, rolling in the aisles, laughing with happiness.

  After the banquet was over, the scoutmaster and a schoolteacher came over and told me they had been discussing my poem. One of them thought it was Italian, and the other thought it was Latin. The schoolteacher asks, “Which one of us is right?”

  I said, “You’ll have to go ask the girls—they understood what language it was right away.”

  Always Trying to Escape

  When I was a student at MIT I was interested only in science; I was no good at anything else. But at MIT there was a rule: You have to take some humanities courses to get more “culture.” Besides the English classes required were two electives, so I looked through the list, and right away I found astronomy—as a humanities course! So that year I escaped with astronomy. Then next year I looked further down the list, past French literature and courses like that, and found philosophy. It was the closest thing to science I could find.

  Before I tell you what happened in philosophy, let me tell you about the English class. We had to write a number of themes. For instance, Mill had written something on liberty, and we had to criticize it. But instead of addressing myself to political liberty, as Mill did, I wrote about liberty in social occasions—the problem of having to fake and lie in order to be polite, and does this perpetual game of faking in social situations lead to the “destruction of the moral fiber of society.” An interesting question, but not the one we were supposed to discuss.

  Another essay we had to criticize was by Huxley, “On a Piece of Chalk,” in which he describes how an ordinary piece of chalk he is holding is the remains from animal bones, and the forces inside the earth lifted it up so that it became part of the White Cliffs, and then it was quarried and is now used to convey ideas through writing on the blackboard.

  But again, instead of criticizing the essay assigned to us, I wrote a parody called, “On a Piece of Dust,” about how dust makes the colors of the sunset and precipitates the rain, and so on. I was always a faker, always trying to escape.

  But when we had to write a theme on Goethe’s Faust, it was hopeless! The work was too long to make a parody of it or to invent something else. I was storming back and forth in the fraternity saying, “I can’t do it. I’m just not gonna do it. I ain’t gonna do it!”

  One of my fraternity brothers said, “OK, Feynman, you’re not gonna do it. But the professor will think you didn’t do it because you don’t want to do the work. You oughta write a theme on something—same number of words—and hand it in with a note saying that you just couldn’t understand the Faust, you haven’t got the heart for it, and that it’s impossible for you to write a theme on it.”

  So I did that. I wrote a long theme, “On the Limitations of Reason.” I had thought about scientific techniques for solving problems, and how there are certain limitations: moral values cannot be decided by scientific methods, yak, yak, yak, and so on.

  Then another fraternity brother offered some more advice. “Feynman,” he said, “it ain’t gonna work, handing in a theme that’s got nothing to do with Faust. What you oughta do is work that thing you wrote into the Faust.”

  “Ridiculous!” I said.

  But the other fraternity guys think it’s a good idea.

  “All right, all right!” I say, protesting. “I’ll try.”

  So I added half a page to what I had already written, and said that Mephistopheles represents reason, and Faust represents the spirit, and Goethe is trying to show the limitations of reason. I stirred it up, cranked it all in, and handed in my theme.

  The professor had us each come in individually to discuss our theme. I went in expecting the worst.

  He said, “The introductory material is fine, but the Faust material is a bit too brief. Otherwise, it’s very good—B +.” I escaped again!

  Now to the philosophy class. The course was taught by an old bearded professor named Robinson, who always mumbled. I would go to the class, and he would mumble along, and I couldn’t understand a thing. The other people in the class seemed to understand him better, but they didn’t seem to pay any attention. I happened to have a small drill, about one-sixteenth-inch, and to pass the time in that class, I would twist it between my fingers and drill holes in the sole of my shoe, week after week.

  Finally one day at the end of the class, Professor Robinson went “wugga mugga mugga wugga wugga … and everybody got excited! They were all talking to each other and discussing, so I figured he’d said something interesting, thank God! I wondered what it was?

  I asked somebody, and they said, “We have to write a theme, and hand it in in four weeks.”

  “A theme on what?”

  “On what he’s been talking about all year.”

  I was stuck. The only thing that I had heard during that entire term that I could remember was a moment when there came this upwelling, “muggawuggastreamofconsciousnessmugga wugga,” and phoom!—it sank back into chaos.

  This “stream of consciousness” reminded me of a problem my father had given to me many years before. He said, “Suppose some Martians were to come down to earth, and Martians never slept, but instead were perpetually active. Suppose they didn’t have this crazy phenomenon that we have, called sleep. So they ask you the question: ‘How does it feel to go to sleep? What happens when you go to sleep? Do your thoughts suddenly stop, or do they move less aanndd lleeessss rraaaaapppppiidddddllllllllyyyyyyyyyyy yyy? How does the mind actually turn off?”

  I got interested. Now I had to answer this question: How does the stream of consciousness end, when you go to sleep?

  So every afternoon for the next four weeks I would work on my theme, I would pull down the shades in my room, turn off the lights, and go to sleep. And I’d watch what happened, when I went to sleep.

  Then at night, I’d go to sleep again, so I had two times each day when I could make observations—it was very good!

  At first I noticed a lot of subsidiary things that had little to do with falling asleep. I noticed, for instance, that I did a lot of thinking by speaking to myself internally. I could also imagine things visually.

  Then, when I was getting tired, I noticed that I could think of two things at once. I discovered this when I was talking internally to myself about something, and while I was doing this, I was idly imagining two ropes connected to the end of my bed, going through some pulleys, and winding around a turning cylinder, slowly lifting the bed. I wasn’t aware that I was imagining these ropes until I began to worry that one rope would catch on the other rope, and they wouldn’t wind up smoothly. But I said, internally, “Oh, the tension will take care of that,” and this interrupted the first thought I was having, and made me aware that I was thinking of two things at once.<
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  I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they become less and less logically interconnected. You don’t notice that they’re not logically connected until you ask yourself, “What made me think of that?” and you try to work your way back, and often you can’t remember what the hell did make you think of that!

  So you get every illusion of logical connection, but the actual fact is that the thoughts become more and more cockeyed until they’re completely disjointed, and beyond that, you fall asleep.

  After four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and explained the observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out that all of these observations were made while I was watching myself fall asleep, and I don’t really know what it’s like to fall asleep when I’m not watching myself. I concluded the theme with a little verse I made up, which pointed out this problem of introspection:

  I wonder why. I wonder why.

  I wonder why I wonder.

  I wonder why I wonder why

  I wonder why I wonder!

  We hand in our themes, and the next time our class meets, the professor reads one of them: “Mum bum wugga mum bum …” I can’t tell what the guy wrote.

  He reads another theme: “Mugga wugga mum bum wugga wugga…” I don’t know what that guy wrote either, but at the end of it, he goes:

  Uh wugga wuh. Uh wugga wuh.

  Uh wugga wugga wugga.

  I wugga wuh uh wugga wuh

  Uh wugga wugga wugga.

  “Aha!” I say. “That’s my theme!” I honestly didn’t recognize it until the end.

  After I had written the theme I continued to be curious, and I kept practicing this watching myself as I went to sleep. One night, while I was having a dream, I realized I was observing myself in the dream. I had gotten all the way down into the sleep itself!

  In the first part of the dream I’m on top of a train and we’re approaching a tunnel. I get scared, pull myself down, and we go into the tunnel—whoosh! I say to myself, “So you can get the feeling of fear, and you can hear the sound change when you go into the tunnel.”