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

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!