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

So I prepared the talk, and when the day came, I went in and did something that young men who have had no experience in giving talks often do—I put too many equations up on the blackboard. You see, a young fella doesn’t know how to say, “Of course, that varies inversely, and this goes this way … because everybody listening already knows; they can see it. But he doesn’t know. He can only make it come out by actually doing the algebra—and therefore the reams of equations.

As I was writing these equations all over the blackboard ahead of time, Einstein came in and said pleasantly, “Hello, I’m coming to your seminar. But first, where is the tea?”

I told him, and continued writing the equations.

Then the time came to give the talk, and here are these monster minds in front of me, waiting! My first technical talk—and I have this audience! I mean they would put me through the wringer! I remember very clearly seeing my hands shaking as they were pulling out my notes from a brown envelope.

But then a miracle occurred, as it has occurred again and again in my life, and it’s very lucky for me: the moment I start to think about the physics, and have to concentrate on what I’m explaining, nothing else occupies my mind—I’m completely immune to being nervous. So after I started to go, I just didn’t know who was in the room. I was only explaining this idea, that’s all.

But then the end of the seminar came, and it was time for questions. First off, Pauli, who was sitting next to Einstein, gets up and says, “I do not sink dis teory can be right, because of dis, and dis, and dis,” and he turns to Einstein and says, “Don’t you agree, Professor Einstein?”

Einstein says, “Nooooooooooooo,” a nice, German sounding “No, “—very polite. “I find only that it would be very difficult to make a corresponding theory for gravitational interaction.” He meant for the general theory of relativity, which was his baby. He continued: “Since we have at this time not a great deal of experimental evidence, I am not absolutely sure of the correct gravitational theory.” Einstein appreciated that things might he different from what his theory stated; he was very tolerant of other ideas.

I wish I had remembered what Pauli said, because I discovered years later that the theory was not satisfactory when it came to making the quantum theory. It’s possible that that great man noticed the difficulty immediately and explained it to me in the question, but I was so relieved at not having to answer the questions that I didn’t really listen to them carefully. I do remember walking up the steps of Palmer Library with Pauli, who said to me, “What is Wheeler going to say about the quantum theory when he gives his talk?”

I said, “I don’t know. He hasn’t told me. He’s working it out himself.”

“Oh?” he said. “The man works and doesn’t tell his assistant what he’s doing ‘on the quantum theory?” He came closer to me and said in a low, secretive voice, “Wheeler will never give that seminar.”

And it’s true. Wheeler didn’t give the seminar. He thought it would he easy to work out the quantum part; he thought he had it, almost. But he didn’t. And by the time the seminar came around, he realized he didn’t know how to do it, and therefore didn’t have anything to say.

I never solved it, either—a quantum theory of half-advanced, half-retarded potentials—and I worked on it for years.

Mixing Paints

The reason why I say I’m “uncultured” or “anti-intellectual” probably goes all the way back to the time when I was in high school. I was always worried about being a sissy; I didn’t want to be too delicate. To me, no real man ever paid any attention to poetry and such things. How poetry ever got written–that never struck me! So I developed a negative attitude toward the guy who studies French literature, or studies too much music or poetry—all those “fancy” things. I admired better the steel-worker, the welder, or the machine shop man. I always thought the guy who worked in the machine shop and could make things, now he was a real guy! That was my attitude. To be a practical man was, to me, always somehow a positive virtue, and to be “cultured” or “intellectual” was not. The first was right, of course, but the second was crazy.

I still had this feeling when I was doing my graduate study at Princeton, as you’ll see. I used to eat often in a nice little restaurant called Papa’s Place. One day while I was eating there, a painter in his painting clothes came down from an upstairs room he’d been painting, and sat near me. Somehow we struck up a conversation and he started talking about how you’ve got to learn a lot to be in the painting business. “For example,” he said, “in this restaurant, what colors would you use to paint the walls, if you had the job to do?”