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

“But the beach is nice in the afternoon, so why don’t you give the lectures in the morning, so you can enjoy the beach in the afternoon.”

“But you said the students prefer to have them in the afternoon.”

“Don’t worry about that. Do what’s most convenient for you! Enjoy the beach in the afternoon.”

So I learned how to look at life in a way that’s different from the way it is where I come from. First, they weren’t in the same hurry that I was. And second, if it’s better for you, never mind! So I gave the lectures in the morning and enjoyed the beach in the afternoon. And had I learned that lesson earlier, I would have learned Portuguese in the first place, instead of Spanish.

I thought at first that I would give my lectures in English, but I noticed something: When the students were explaining something to me in Portuguese, I couldn’t understand it very well, even though I knew a certain amount of Portuguese. It was not exactly clear to me whether they had said “increase,” or “decrease,” or “not increase,” or “not decrease,” or “decrease slowly.” But when they struggled with English, they’d say “ahp” or “doon,” and I knew which way it was, even though the pronunciation was lousy and the grammar was all screwed up. So I realized that if I was going to talk to them and try to teach them, it would be better for me to talk in Portuguese, poor as it was. It would be easier for them to understand.

During that first time in Brazil, which lasted six weeks, I was invited to give a talk at the Brazilian Academy of Sciences about some work in quantum electrodynamics that I had just done. I thought I would give the talk in Portuguese, and two students at the center said they would help me with it. I began by writing out my talk in absolutely lousy Portuguese. I wrote it myself, because if they had written it, there would be too many words I didn’t know and couldn’t pronounce correctly. So I wrote it, and they fixed up all the grammar, fixed up the words and made it nice, but it was still at the level that I could read easily and know more or less what I was saying. They practiced with me to get the pronunciations absolutely right: the “de” should be in between “deh” and “day”—it had to be just so.

I got to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences meeting, and the first speaker, a chemist, got up and gave his talk—in English. Was he trying to be polite, or what? I couldn’t understand what he was saying because his pronunciation was so bad, but maybe everybody else had the same accent so they could understand him; I don’t know. Then the next guy gets up, and gives his talk in English!

When it was my turn, I got up and said, “I’m sorry; I hadn’t realized that the official language of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences was English, and therefore I did not prepare my talk in English. So please excuse me, but I’m going to have to give it in Portuguese.”

So I read the thing, and everybody was very pleased with it.

The next guy to get up said, “Following the example of my colleague from the United States, I also will give my talk in Portuguese.” So, for all I know, I changed the tradition of what language is used in the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Some years later, I met a man from Brazil who quoted to me the exact sentences I had used at the beginning of my talk to the Academy. So apparently it made quite an impression on them.

But the language was always difficult for me, and I kept working on it all the time, reading the newspaper, and so on. I kept on giving my lectures in Portuguese—what I call “Feynman’s Portuguese,” which I knew couldn’t be the same as real Portuguese, because I could understand what I was saying, while I couldn’t understand what the people in the street were saying.

Because I liked it so much that first time in Brazil, I went again a year later, this time for ten months. This time I lectured at the University of Rio, which was supposed to pay me, but they never did, so the center kept giving me the money I was supposed to get from the university.

I finally ended up staying in a hotel right on the beach at Copacabana, called the Miramar. For a while I had a room on the thirteenth floor, where I could look out the window at the ocean and watch the girls on the beach.

It turned out that this hotel was the one that the airline pilots and the stewardesses from Pan American Airlines stayed at when they would “lay over”—a term that always bothered me a little bit. Their rooms were always on the fourth floor, and late at night there would often be a certain amount of sheepish sneaking up and down in the elevator.

One time I went away for a few weeks on a trip, and when I came back the manager told me he had to book my room to somebody else, since it was the last available empty room, and that he had moved my stuff to a new room.