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

What I did was this: In preparation, I put a bit of sugar about six or eight inches from their entry point into the room, that they didn’t know about. Then I made those ferry things again, and whenever an ant returning with food walked onto my little ferry I’d carry him over and put him on the sugar. Any ant coming toward the larder that walked onto a ferry I also carried over to the sugar. Eventually the ants found their way from the sugar to their hole, so this new trail was being doubly reinforced, while the old trail was being used less and less. I knew that after half an hour or so the old trail would dry up, and in an hour they were out of my larder. I didn’t wash the floor; I didn’t do anything but ferry ants.

Part 3. Feynman, the Bomb, and the Military

Fizzled Fuses

When the war began in Europe but had not yet been declared in the United States, there was a lot of talk about getting ready and being patriotic. The newspapers had big articles on businessmen volunteering to go to Plattsburg, New York, to do military training, and so on.

I began to think I ought to make some kind of contribution, too. After I finished up at MIT, a friend of mine from the fraternity, Maurice Meyer, who was in the Army Signal Corps, took me to see a colonel at the Signal Corps offices in New York.

“I’d like to aid my country sir, and since I’m technically minded, maybe there’s a way I could help.”

“Well, you’d better just go up to Plattsburg to boot camp and go through basic training. Then we’ll be able to use you,” the colonel said.

“But isn’t there some way to use my talent more directly?”

“No; this is the way the army is organized. Go through the regular way.”

I went outside and sat in the park to think about it. I thought and thought: Maybe the best way to make a contribution is to go along with their way. But fortunately I thought a little more, and said, “To hell with it! I’ll wait awhile. Maybe something will happen where they can use me more effectively”

I went to Princeton to do graduate work, and in the spring I went once again to the Bell Labs in New York to apply for a summer job. I loved to tour the Bell Labs. Bill Shockley the guy who invented transistors, would show me around. I remember somebody’s room where they had marked a window: The George Washington Bridge was being built, and these guys in the lab were watching its progress. They had plotted the original curve when the main cable was first put up, and they could measure the small differences as the bridge was being suspended from it, as the curve turned into a parabola. It was just the kind of thing I would like to be able to think of doing. I admired those guys; I was always hoping I could work with them one day.

Some guys from the lab took me out to this seafood restaurant for lunch, and they were all pleased that they were going to have oysters. I lived by the ocean and I couldn’t look at this stuff; I couldn’t eat fish, let alone oysters.

I thought to myself, “I’ve gotta be brave. I’ve gotta eat an oyster.”

I took an oyster, and it was absolutely terrible. But I said to myself, “That doesn’t really prove you’re a man. You didn’t know how terrible it was gonna be. It was easy enough when it was uncertain.”

The others kept talking about how good the oysters were, so I had another oyster, and that was really harder than the first one.

This time, which must have been my fourth or fifth time touring the Bell Labs, they accepted me. I was very happy. In those days it was hard to find a job where you could be with other scientists.

But then there was a big excitement at Princeton. General Trichel from the army came around and spoke to us: “We’ve got to have physicists! Physicists are very important to us in the army! We need three physicists!”

You have to understand that, in those days, people hardly knew what a physicist was. Einstein was known as a mathematician, for instance—so it was rare that anybody needed physicists. I thought, “This is my opportunity to make a contribution,” and I volunteered to work for the army.

I asked the Bell Labs if they would let me work for the army that summer, and they said they had war work, too, if that was what I wanted. But I was caught up in a patriotic fever and lost a good opportunity. It would have been much smarter to work in the Bell Labs. But one gets a little silly during those times.