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

by Richard Phillips Feynman

“I don’t think so. In appendicitis we understand the causes better, and something about the mechanism of it, whereas with insanity it’s much more complicated and mysterious.” I won’t go through the whole debate; the point is that I meant insanity is physiologically peculiar, and he thought I meant it was socially peculiar.

  Up until this time, although I had been unfriendly to the psychiatrist, I had nevertheless been honest in everything I said. But when he asked me to put out my hands, I couldn’t resist pulling a trick a guy in the “bloodsucking line” had told me about. I figured nobody was ever going to get a chance to do this, and as long as I was halfway under water, I would do it. So I put out my hands with one palm up and the other one down.

  The psychiatrist doesn’t notice. He says, “Turn them over.”

  I turn them over. The one that was up goes down, and the one that was down goes up, and he still doesn’t notice, because he’s always looking very closely at one hand to see if it is shaking. So the trick had no effect.

  Finally, at the end of all these questions, he becomes friendly again. He lights up and says, “I see you have a Ph.D., Dick. Where did you study?”

  “MIT and Princeton. And where did you study!”

  “Yale and London. And what did you study, Dick?”

  “Physics. And what did you study?”

  “Medicine.”

  “And this is medicine?”

  “Well, yes. What do you think it is? You go and sit down over there and wait a few minutes!”

  So I sit on the bench again, and one of the other guys waiting sidles up to me and says, “Gee! You were in there twenty-five minutes! The other guys were in there only five minutes!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey,” he says. “You wanna know how to fool the psychiatrist? All you have to do is pick your nails, like this.”

  “Then why don’t you pick your nails like that?”

  “Oh,” he says, “I wanna get in the army!”

  “You wanna fool the psychiatrist?” I say. “You just tell him that!”

  After a while I was called over to a different desk to see another psychiatrist. While the first psychiatrist had been rather young and innocent-looking, this one was gray-haired and distinguished-looking—obviously the superior psychiatrist. I figure all of this is now going to get straightened out, but no matter what happens, I’m not going to become friendly.

  The new psychiatrist looks at my papers, puts a big smile on his face, and says, “Hello, Dick. I see you worked at Los Alamos during the war.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There used to be a boys’ school there, didn’t there?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Were there a lot of buildings in the school?”

  “Only a few.”

  Three questions—same technique—and the next question is completely different. “You said you hear voices in your head. Describe that, please.”

  “It happens very rarely, when I’ve been paying attention to a person with a foreign accent. As I’m falling asleep I can hear his voice very clearly. The first time it happened was while I was a student at MIT. I could hear old Professor Vallarta say, ‘Dee-a dee-a electric field-a.’ And the other time was in Chicago during the war, when Professor Teller was explaining to me how the bomb worked. Since I’m interested in all kinds of phenomena, I wondered how I could hear these voices with accents so precisely, when I couldn’t imitate them that well … Doesn’t everybody have something like that happen once in a while?”

  The psychiatrist put his hand over his face, and I could see through his fingers a little smile (he wouldn’t answer the question).

  Then the psychiatrist checked into something else. “You said that you talk to your deceased wife. What do you say to her?”

  I got angry. I figure it’s none of his damn business, and I say, “I tell her I love her, if it’s all right with you!”

  After some more bitter exchanges he says, “Do you believe in the supernormal?”

  I say, “I don’t know what the ‘supernormal’ is.”

  “What? You, a Ph.D. in physics, don’t know what the supernormal is?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s what Sir Oliver Lodge and his school believe in.”

  That’s not much of a clue, but I knew it. “You mean the supernatural.”

  “You can call it that if you want.”

  “All right, I will.”

  “Do you believe in mental telepathy?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Well, I’m keeping an open mind.”

  “What? You, a psychiatrist, keeping an open mind? Ha!” It went on like this for quite a while.

  Then at some point near the end he says, “How much do you value life?”

  “Sixty-four.”

  “Why did you say ‘sixty-four’?”

  “How are you supposed to measure the value of life?”

  “No! I mean, why did you say ‘sixty-four,’ and not ‘seventy-three,’ for instance?”

  “If I had said ‘seventy-three,’ you would have asked me the same question!”

  The psychiatrist finished with three friendly questions, just as the other psychiatrist had done, handed me my papers, and I went off to the next booth.

  While I’m waiting in the line, I look at the paper which has the summary of all the tests I’ve taken so far. And just for the hell of it I show my paper to the guy next to me, and I ask him in a rather stupid-sounding voice, “Hey! What did you get in ‘Psychiatric’? Oh! You got an ‘N.’ I got an ‘N’ in everything else, but I got a ‘D’ in ‘Psychiatric.’ What does that mean?” I knew what it meant: “N” is normal, “D” is deficient.

  The guy pats me on the shoulder and says, “Buddy, it’s perfectly all right. It doesn’t mean anything. Don’t worry about it!” Then he walks way over to the other corner of the room, frightened: It’s a lunatic!

  I started looking at the papers the psychiatrists had written, and it looked pretty serious! The first guy wrote:

  Thinks people talk about him.

  Thinks people stare at him.

  Auditory hypnogogic hallucinations.

  Talks to self.

  Talks to deceased wife.

  Maternal aunt in mental institution.

  Very peculiar stare. (I knew what that was—that was when I said, “And this is medicine?”)

  The second psychiatrist was obviously more important, because his scribble was harder to read. His notes said things like “auditory hypnogogic hallucinations confirmed.” (“Hypnogogic” means you get them while you’re falling asleep.)

  He wrote a lot of other technical-sounding notes, and I looked them over, and they looked pretty bad. I figured I’d have to get all of this straightened out with the army somehow.

  At the end of the whole physical examination there’s an army officer who decides whether you’re in or you’re out. For instance, if there’s something the matter with your hearing, he has to decide if it’s serious enough to keep you out of the army. And because the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel for new recruits, this officer wasn’t going to take anything from anybody. He was tough as nails. For instance, the fellow ahead of me had two bones sticking out from the back of his neck—some kind of displaced vertebra, or something—and this army officer had to get up from his desk and feel them—he had to make sure they were real!

  I figure this is the place I’ll get this whole misunderstanding straightened out. When it’s my turn, I hand my papers to the officer, and I’m ready to explain everything, but the officer doesn’t look up. He sees the “D” next to “Psychiatric,” immediately reaches for the rejection stamp, doesn’t ask me any questions, doesn’t say anything; he just stamps my papers “REJECTED,” and hands me my 4-F paper, still looking at his desk.

  So I went out and got on the bus for Schenectady, and while I was riding on the bus I thought about the crazy thing that had happened, and I started to laugh—out loud—and I said to myself, “M
y God! If they saw me now, they would be sure!”

  When I finally got back to Schenectady I went in to see Hans Bethe. He was sitting behind his desk, and he said to me in a joking voice, “Well, Dick, did you pass?”

  I made a long face and shook my head slowly. “No.”

  Then he suddenly felt terrible, thinking that they had discovered some serious medical problem with me, so he said in a concerned voice, “What’s the matter, Dick?”

  I touched my finger to my forehead.

  He said, “No!”

  “Yes!”

  He cried, “No-o-o-o-o-o-o!!!” and he laughed so hard that the roof of the General Electric Company nearly came off.

  I told the story to many other people, and everybody laughed, with a few exceptions.

  When I got back to New York, my father, mother, and sister called for me at the airport, and on the way home in the car I told them all the story. At the end of it my mother said, “Well, what should we do, Mel?”

  My father said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Lucille. It’s absurd!”

  So that was that, but my sister told me later that when we got home and they were alone, my father said, “Now, Lucille, you shouldn’t have said anything in front of him. Now what should we do?”

  By that time my mother had sobered up, and she said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Mel!”

  One other person was bothered by the story. It was at a Physical Society meeting dinner, and Professor Slater, my old professor at MIT, said, “Hey, Feynman! Tell us that story about the draft I heard.”

  I told the whole story to all these physicists—I didn’t know any of them except Slater—and they were all laughing throughout, but at the end one guy said, “Well, maybe the psychiatrist had something in mind.”

  I said resolutely, “And what profession are you, sir?” Of course, that was a dumb question, because we were all physicists at a professional meeting. But I was surprised that a physicist would say something like that.

  He said, “Well, uh, I’m really not supposed to be here, but I came as the guest of my brother, who’s a physicist. I’m a psychiatrist.” I smoked him right out!

  After a while I began to worry. Here’s a guy who’s been deferred all during the war because he’s working on the bomb, and the draft board gets letters saying he’s important, and now he gets a “D” in “Psychiatric”—it turns out he’s a nut! Obviously he isn’t a nut; he’s just trying to make us believe he’s a nut—we’ll get him!

  The situation didn’t look good to me, so I had to find a way out. After a few days, I figured out a solution. I wrote a letter to the draft board that went something like this:

  Dear Sirs:

  I do not think I should be drafted because I am teaching science students, and it is partly in the strength of our future scientists that the national welfare lies. Nevertheless, you may decide that I should be deferred because of the result of my medical report, namely, that I am psychiatrically unfit. I feel that no weight whatsoever should be attached to this report because I consider it to be a gross error.

  I am calling this error to your attention because I am insane enough not to wish to take advantage of it.

  Sincerely,

  R. P Feynman

  Result: “Deferred. 4F Medical Reasons.”

  Part 4.

  From Cornell to Caltech, With a Touch of Brazil

  The Dignified Professor

  I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere I can say to myself, “At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something; I’m making some contribution”—it’s just psychological.

  When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.

  Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!

  In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you’ve got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it’s the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer periods of time when not much is coming to you. You’re not getting any ideas, and if you’re doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can’t even say “I’m teaching my class.”

  If you’re teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn’t do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can’t think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you’re rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.

  The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

  So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.

  But once I was offered such a position.

  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, a
nd 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.