Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (31 page)

She said she would take me home. As soon as I got into her bed I went BONGO! I was out.

The next morning I woke up in this beautiful bed. The sun was shining, and there was no sign of her. Instead, there was a maid. “Sir,” she said, “are you awake? I’m ready with breakfast.”

“Well, uh . . .”

“I’ll bring it to you. What would you like?” and she went through a whole menu of breakfasts.

I ordered breakfast and had it in bed–in the bed of a woman I didn’t know; I didn’t know who she was or where she came from!

I asked the maid a few questions, and she didn’t know anything about this mysterious woman either: She had just been hired, and it was her first day on the job. She thought I was the man of the house, and found it curious that I was asking _her_ questions. I got dressed, finally, and left. I never saw the mysterious woman again.

The first time I was in Las Vegas I sat down and figured out the odds for everything, and I discovered that the odds for the crap table were something like .493. If I bet a dollar, it would only cost me 1.4 cents. So I thought to myself, “Why am I so reluctant to bet? It hardly costs anything!”

So I started betting, and right away I lost five dollars in succession–one, two, three, four, five. I was supposed to be out only seven cents; instead, I was five dollars behind! I’ve never gambled since then (with my own money, that is). I’m very lucky that I started off losing.

One time I was eating lunch with one of the show girls. It was a quiet time in the afternoon; there was not the usual big bustle, and she said, “See that man over there, walking across the lawn? That’s Nick the Greek. He’s a professional gambler.”

Now I knew damn well what all the odds were in Las Vegas, so I said, “How can he be a professional gambler?”

“I’ll call him over.”

Nick came over and she introduced us.” Marilyn tells me that you’re a professional gambler.”

“That’s correct.”

“Well, I’d like to know how it’s possible to make your living gambling, because at the table, the odds are .493.”

“You’re right,” he said, “and I’ll explain it to you. I don’t bet on the table, or things like that. I only bet when the odds are in my favor.”

“Huh? When are the odds ever in your favor?” I asked incredulously.

“It’s really quite easy,” he said. “I’m standing around a table, when some guy says, ‘It’s comin’ out nine! It’s gotta be a nine!’ The guy’s excited; he thinks it’s going to be a nine, and he wants to bet. Now I know the odds for all the numbers inside out, so I say to him, ‘I’ll bet you four to three it’s _not_ a nine,’ and I win in the long run. I don’t bet on the table; instead, I bet with people around the table who have prejudices–superstitious ideas about lucky numbers.”

Nick continued: “Now that I’ve got a reputation, it’s even easier, because people will bet with me even when they _know_ the odds aren’t very good, just to have the chance of telling the story, if they win, of how they beat Nick the Greek. So I really do make a living gambling, and it’s wonderful!”

So Nick the Greek was really an educated character. He was a very nice and engaging man. I thanked him for the explanation; now I understood it. I have to understand the world, you see.

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An Offer You Must Refuse
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Cornell had all kinds of departments that I didn’t have much interest in. (That doesn’t mean there was anything wrong with them; it’s just that I didn’t happen to have much interest in them.) There was domestic science, philosophy (the guys from this department were particularly inane), and there were the cultural things–music and so on. There were quite a few people I did enjoy talking to, of course. In the math department there was Professor Kac and Professor Feller; in chemistry, Professor Calvin; and a great guy in the zoology department, Dr. Griffin, who found out that bats navigate by making echoes. But it was hard to find enough of these guys to talk to, and there was all this other stuff which I thought was low-level baloney. And Ithaca was a small town.

The weather wasn’t really very good. One day I was driving in the car, and there came one of those quick snow flurries that you don’t expect, so you’re not ready for it, and you figure, “Oh, it isn’t going to amount to much; I’ll keep on going.”

But then the snow gets deep enough that the car begins to skid a little bit, so you have to put the chains on. You get out of the car, put the chains out on the snow, and it’s _cold_, and you’re beginning to shiver. Then you roll the car back onto the chains, and you have this problem–or we had it in those days; I don’t know what there is now–that there’s a hook on the inside that you have to hook first. And because the chains have to go on pretty tight, it’s hard to get the hook to hook. Then you have to push this clamp down with your fingers, which by this time are nearly frozen. And because you’re on the outside of the tire, and the hook is on the inside, and your hands are cold, it’s very difficult to control. It keeps slipping, and it’s _cold_, and the snow’s coming down, and you’re trying to push this clamp, and your hand’s hurting, and the damn thing’s not going down–well, I remember that _that_ was the _moment_ when I decided that _this_ is _insane_; there must be a part of the world that doesn’t have this problem.

I remembered the couple of times I had visited Caltech, at the invitation of Professor Bacher, who had previously been at Cornell. He was very smart when I visited. He knew me inside out, so he said, “Feynman, I have this extra car, which I’m gonna lend you. Now here’s how you go to Hollywood and the Sunset Strip. Enjoy yourself.”

So I drove his car every night down to the Sunset Strip–to the nightclubs and the bars and the action. It was the kind of stuff I liked from Las Vegas–pretty girls, big operators, and so on. So Bacher knew how to get me interested in Caltech.

You know the story about the donkey who is standing exactly in the middle of two piles of hay, and doesn’t go to either one, because it’s balanced? Well, that’s nothing. Cornell and Caltech started making me offers, and as soon as I would move, figuring that Caltech was really better, they would up their offer at Cornell; and when I thought I’d stay at Cornell, they’d up something at Caltech. So you can imagine this donkey between the two piles of hay, with the extra complication that as soon as he moves toward one, the other one gets higher. That makes it very difficult!

The argument that finally convinced me was my sabbatical leave. I wanted to go to Brazil again, this time for ten months, and I had just earned my sabbatical leave from Cornell. I didn’t want to lose that, so now that I had invented a reason to come to a decision, I wrote Bacher and told him what I had decided.

Caltech wrote back: “We’ll hire you immediately, and we’ll give you your first year as a sabbatical year.” That’s the way they were acting: no matter what I decided to do, they’d screw it up. So my first year at Caltech was really spent in Brazil. I came to Caltech to teach on my second year. That’s how it happened.

Now that I have been at Caltech since 1951, I’ve been very happy here. It’s _exactly_ the thing for a one-sided guy like me. There are all these people who are close to the top, who are very interested in what they are doing, and who I can talk to. So I’ve been very comfortable.

But one day, when I hadn’t been at Caltech very long, we had a bad attack of smog. It was worse then than it is now–at least your eyes smarted much more. I was standing on a corner, and my eyes were watering, and I thought to myself, “This is crazy! This is absolutely INSANE! It was all right back at Cornell. I’m getting out of here.”

So I called up Cornell, and asked them if they thought it was possible for me to come back. They said, “Sure! We’ll set it up and call you back tomorrow.”

The next day, I had the greatest luck in making a decision. God must have set it up to help me decide. I was walking to my office, and a guy came running up to me and said, “Hey, Feynman! Did you hear what happened? Baade found that there are two different populations of stars! All the measurements we had been making of the distances to the galaxies had been based on Cephid variables of _one_ type, but there’s _another_ type, so the universe is twice, or three, or even four times as old as we thought!”

I knew the problem. In those days, the earth appeared to be older than the universe. The earth was four and a half billion, and the universe was only a couple, or three billion years old. It was a great puzzle. And this discovery resolved all that: The universe was now demonstrably older than was previously thought. And I got this information right away– the guy came running up to me to tell me all this.

I didn’t even make it across the campus to get to my office, when _another_ guy came up–Matt Meselson, a biologist who had minored in physics. (I had been on his committee for his Ph.D.) He had built the first of what they call a density gradient centrifuge-it could measure the density of molecules. He said, “Look at the results of the experiment I’ve been doing!”

He had proved that when a bacterium makes a new one, there’s a whole molecule, intact, which is passed from one bacterium to another–a molecule we now know as DNA. You see, we always think of everything dividing, dividing. So we think _everything_ in the bacterium divides and gives half of it to the new bacterium. But that’s impossible: Somewhere, the smallest molecule that contains genetic information _can’t_ divide in half; it has to make a _copy_ of itself, and send one copy to the new bacterium, and keep one copy for the old one. And he had proved it in this way: He first grew the bacteria in heavy nitrogen, and later grew them all in ordinary nitrogen. As he went along, he weighed the molecules in his density gradient centrifuge.

The first generation of new bacteria had all of their chromosome molecules at a weight exactly in between the weight of molecules made with heavy, and molecules made with ordinary, nitrogen–a result that could occur if everything divided, including the chromosome molecules.

But in succeeding generations, when one might expect that the weight of the chromosome molecules would be one-fourth, one-eighth, and one-sixteenth of the difference between the heavy and ordinary molecules, the weights of the molecules fell into only two groups. One group was the same weight as the first new generation (halfway between the heavier and the lighter molecules), and the other group was lighter–the weight of molecules made in ordinary nitrogen. The _percentage_ of heavier molecules was cut in half in each succeeding generation, but not their weights. That was tremendously exciting, and very important–it was a fundamental discovery. And I realized, as I finally got to my office, that this is where I’ve got to be. Where people from all different fields of science would tell me stuff, and it was all exciting. It was exactly what I wanted, really.

So when Cornell called a little later, and said they were setting everything up, and it was nearly ready, I said, “I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind again.” But I decided then _never_ to decide again. Nothing–absolutely nothing–would ever change my mind again.

When you’re young, you have all these things to worry about–should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It’s much easier to just plain _decide_. Never mind–_nothing_ is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would _always_ be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again–I had the solution to _that_ problem. Anyway, I decided it would always be Caltech.

One time someone tried to change my mind about Caltech. Fermi had just died a short time before, and the faculty at Chicago were looking for someone to take his place. Two people from Chicago came out and asked to visit me at my home–I didn’t know what it was about. They began telling me all the good reasons why I ought to go to Chicago: I could do this, I could do that, they had lots of great people there, I had the opportunity to do all kinds of wonderful things. I didn’t ask them how much they would pay, and they kept hinting that they would tell me if I asked. Finally, they asked me if I wanted to know the salary. “Oh, no!” I said. “I’ve already decided to stay at Caltech. My wife Mary Lou is in the other room, and if she hears how much the salary is, we’ll get into an argument. Besides, I’ve decided not to decide any more; I’m staying at Caltech for good.” So I didn’t let them tell me the salary they were offering.

About a month later I was at a meeting, and Leona Marshall came over and said, “It’s funny you didn’t accept our offer at Chicago. We were so disappointed, and we couldn’t understand how you could turn down such a terrific offer.”

“It was easy,” I said, “because I never let them tell me what the offer was.”

A week later I got a letter from her. I opened it, and the first sentence said, “The salary they were offering was–,” a _tremendous_ amount of money, three or four times what I was making. Staggering! Her letter continued, “I told you the salary before you could read any further. Maybe now you want to reconsider, because they’ve told me the position is still open, and we’d very much like to have you.”

So I wrote them back a letter that said, “After reading the salary, I’ve decided that I _must_ refuse. The reason I have to refuse a salary like that is I would be able to do what I’ve always wanted to do–get a wonderful mistress, put her up in an apartment, buy her nice things.. . With the salary you have offered, I could actually _do_ that, and I know what would happen to me. I’d worry about her, what she’s doing; I’d get into arguments when I come home, and so on. All this bother would make me uncomfortable and unhappy. I wouldn’t be able to do physics well, and it would be a _big mess!_ What I’ve always wanted to do would be bad for me, so I’ve decided that I can’t accept your offer.”

The World of One Physicist

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Would _You_ Solve

the Dirac Equation?
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Near the end of the year I was in Brazil I received a letter from Professor Wheeler which said that there was going to be an international meeting of theoretical physicists in Japan, and might I like to go? Japan had some famous physicists before the war–Professor Yukawa, with a Nobel prize, Tomonaga, and Nishina–but this was the first sign of Japan coming back to life after the war, and we all thought we ought to go and help them along.