I said to my cousin, “What are you trying to do?”
“I’m trying to find out what x is, like in 2x + 7 = 15.”
I say, “You mean 4.”
“Yeah, but you did it by arithmetic. You have to do it by algebra.”
I learned algebra, fortunately, not by going to school, but by finding my aunt’s old schoolbook in the attic, and understanding that the whole idea was to find out what x is—it doesn’t make any difference how you do it. For me, there was no such thing as doing it “by arithmetic,” or doing it “by algebra.” “Doing it by algebra” was a set of rules which, if you followed them blindly, could produce the answer: “subtract 7 from both sides; if you have a multiplier, divide both sides by the multiplier,” and so on—a series of steps by which you could get the answer if you didn’t understand what you were trying to do. The rules had been invented so that the children who have to study algebra can all pass it. And that’s why my cousin was never able to do algebra.
There was a series of math books in our local library which started out with Arithmetic for the Practical Man. Then came Algebra for the Practical Man, and then Trigonometry for the Practical Man. (I learned trigonometry from that, but I soon forgot it again, because I didn’t understand it very well.) When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get Calculus for the Practical Man. By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.
When I finally saw the calculus book at the library, I was very excited. I went to the librarian to check it out, but she looked at me and said, “You’re just a child. What are you taking this book out for?”
It was one of the few times in my life I was uncomfortable and I lied. I said it was for my father.
I took the book home and I began to learn calculus from it. I thought it was relatively simple and straightforward. My father started to read it, but he found it confusing and he couldn’t understand it. So I tried to explain calculus to him. I didn’t know he was so limited, and it bothered me a little bit. It was the first time I realized that I had learned more in some sense than he.
One of the things that my father taught me besides physics—whether it’s correct or not—was a disrespect for certain kinds of things. For example, when I was a little boy, and he would sit me on his knee, he’d show me rotogravures in the New York Times—that’s printed pictures which had just come out in newspapers.
One time we were looking at a picture of the pope and everybody bowing in front of him. My father said, “Now, look at those humans. Here’s one human standing here, and all these others are bowing in front of him. Now, what’s the difference? This one is the pope”—he hated the pope anyway. He said, “This difference is the hat he’s wearing.” (If it was a general, it was the epaulets. It was always the costume, the uniform, the position.) “But,” he said, “this man has the same problems as everybody else: he eats dinner; he goes to the bathroom. He’s a human being.” (By the way, my father was in the uniform business, so he knew what the difference is in a man with the uniform off and the uniform on—it was the same man for him.)
He was happy with me, I believe. Once, though, when I came back from MIT (I’d been there a few years), he said to me, “Now that you’ve become educated about these things, there’s one question I’ve always had that I’ve never understood very well.”
I asked him what it was.
He said, “I understand that when an atom makes a transition from one state to another, it emits a particle of light called a photon.”
“That’s right,” I said.
He says, “Is the photon in the atom ahead of time?”
“No, there’s no photon beforehand.”
“Well,” he says, “where does it come from, then? How does it come out?”
I tried to explain it to him—that photon numbers aren’t conserved; they’re just created by the motion of the electron—but I couldn’t explain it very well. I said, “It’s like the sound that I’m making now: it wasn’t in me before.” (It’s not like my little boy, who suddenly announced one day, when he was very young, that he could no longer say a certain word—the word turned out to be “cat”—because his “word bag” had run out of the word. There’s no word bag that makes you use up words as they come out; in the same sense, there’s no “photon bag” in an atom.)
He was not satisfied with me in that respect. I was never able to explain any of the things that he didn’t understand. So he was unsuccessful: he sent me to all these universities in order to find out those things, and he never did find out.
Although my mother didn’t know anything about science, she had a great influence on me as well. In particular, she had a wonderful sense of humor, and I learned from her that the highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.
“What Do You Care What Other People Think?”
WHEN I was a young fella, about thirteen, I had somehow gotten in with a group of guys who were a little older than I was, and more sophisticated. They knew a lot of different girls, and would go out with them—often to the beach.
One time when we were at the beach, most of the guys had gone out on some jetty with the girls. I was interested in a particular girl a little bit, and sort of thought out loud: “Gee, I think I’d like to take Barbara to the movies…”
That’s all I had to say, and the guy next to me gets all excited. He runs out onto the rocks and finds her. He pushes her back, all the while saying in a loud voice, “Feynman has something he wants to say to you, Barbara!” It was most embarrassing.
Pretty soon the guys are all standing around me, saying, “Well, say it, Feynman!” So I invited her to the movies. It was my first date.
I went home and told my mother about it. She gave me all kinds of advice on how to do this and that. For example, if we take the bus, I’m supposed to get off the bus first, and offer Barbara my hand. Or if we have to walk in the street, I’m supposed to walk on the outside. She even told me what kinds of things to say. She was handing down a cultural tradition to me: the women teach their sons how to treat the next generation of women well.
After dinner, I get all slicked up and go to Barbara’s house to call for her. I’m nervous. She isn’t ready, of course (it’s always like that) so her family has me wait for her in the dining room, where they’re eating with friends—a lot of people. They say things like, “Isn’t he cute!” and all kinds of other stuff. I didn’t feel cute. It was absolutely terrible!
I remember everything about the date. As we walked from her house to the new, little theater in town, we talked about playing the piano. I told her how, when I was younger, they made me learn piano for a while, but after six months I was still playing “Dance of the Daisies,” and couldn’t stand it any more. You see, I was worried about being a sissy, and to be stuck for weeks playing “Dance of the Daisies” was too much for me, so I quit. I was so sensitive about being a sissy that it even bothered me when my mother sent me to the market to buy some snacks called Peppermint Patties and Toasted Dainties.
We saw the movie, and I walked her back to her home. I complimented her on the nice, pretty gloves she was wearing. Then I said goodnight to her on the doorstep.
Barbara says to me, “Thank you for a very lovely evening.”
“You’re welcome!” I answered. I felt terrific.
The next time I went out on a date—it was with a different girl—I say goodnight to her, and she says, “Thank you for a very lovely evening.”
I didn’t feel quite so terrific.
When I said goodnight to the third girl I took out, she’s got her mouth open, ready to speak, and I say, “Thank you for a very lovely evening!”
She says, “Thank you—uh—Oh!—Yes—uh, I had a lovely evening, too, thank you!”
One time I was at a party with my beach crowd, and one of the older guys was in the kitchen teaching us how to kiss, using his girlfriend to demonstrate: “You
have to have your lips like this, at right angles, so the noses don’t collide,” and so on. So I go into the living room and find a girl. I’m sitting on the couch with my arm around her, practicing this new art, when suddenly there’s all kinds of excitement: “Arlene is coming! Arlene is coming!” I don’t know who Arlene is.
Then someone says, “She’s here! She’s here!”—and everybody stops what they’re doing and jumps up to see this queen. Arlene was very pretty, and I could see why she had all this admiration—it was well deserved—but I didn’t believe in this undemocratic business of changing what you’re doing just because the queen is coming in.
So, while everybody’s going over to see Arlene, I’m still sitting there on the couch with my girl.
(Arlene told me later, after I had gotten to know her, that she remembered that party with all the nice people—except for one guy who was over in the corner on the couch smooching with a girl. What she didn’t know was that two minutes before, all the others were doin’ it too!)
The first time I ever said anything to Arlene was at a dance. She was very popular, and everybody was cutting in and dancing with her. I remember thinking I’d like to dance with her, too, and trying to decide when to cut in. I always had trouble with that problem: first of all, when she’s over on the other side of the dance floor dancing with some guy, it’s too complicated—so you wait until they come closer. Then when she’s near you, you think, “Well, no, this isn’t the kind of music I’m good at dancing to.” So you wait for another type of music. When the music changes to something you like, you sort of step forward—at least you think you step forward to cut in—when some other guy cuts in just in front of you. So now you have to wait a few minutes because it’s impolite to cut in too soon after someone else has. And by the time a few minutes have passed, they’re over at the other side of the dance floor again, or the music has changed again, or whatever!
After a certain amount of this stalling and fooling around, I finally mutter something about wanting to dance with Arlene. One of the guys I was hanging around with overhears me and makes a big announcement to the other guys: “Hey, listen to this, guys; Feynman wants to dance with Arlene!” Soon one of them is dancing with Arlene and they dance over towards the rest of us. The others push me out onto the dance floor and I finally “cut in.” You can see the condition I was in by my first words to her, which were an honest question: “How does it feel to be so popular?” We only danced a few minutes before somebody else cut in.
My friends and I had taken dancing lessons, although none of us would ever admit it. In those depression days, a friend of my mother was trying to make a living by teaching dancing in the evening, in an upstairs dance studio. There was a back door to the place, and she arranged it so the young men could come up through the back way without being seen.
Every once in a while there would be a social dance at this lady’s studio. I didn’t have the nerve to test this analysis, but it seemed to me that the girls had a much harder time than the boys did. In those days, girls couldn’t ask to cut in and dance with boys; it wasn’t “proper.” So the girls who weren’t very pretty would sit for hours at the side, just sad as hell.
I thought, “The guys have it easy: they’re free to cut in whenever they want.” But it wasn’t easy. You’re “free,” but you haven’t got the guts, or the sense, or whatever it takes to relax and enjoy dancing. Instead, you tie yourself in knots worrying about cutting in or inviting a girl to dance with you.
For example, if you saw a girl who was not dancing, who you thought you’d like to dance with, you might think, “Good! Now at least I’ve got a chance!” But it was usually very difficult: often the girl would say, “No, thank you, I’m tired. I think I’ll sit this one out.” So you go away somewhat defeated—but not completely, because maybe she really is tired—when you turn around and some other guy comes up to her, and there she is, dancing with him! Maybe this guy is her boyfriend and she knew he was coming over, or maybe she didn’t like the way you look, or maybe something else. It was always so complicated for such a simple matter.
One time I decided to invite Arlene to one of these dances. It was the first time I took her out. My best friends were also at the dance; my mother had invited them, to get more customers for her friend’s dance studio. These guys were contemporaries of mine, guys my own age from school. Harold Gast and David Leff were literary types, while Robert Stapler was a scientific type. We would spend a lot of time together after school, going on walks and discussing this and that.
Anyway, my best friends were at the dance, and as soon as they saw me with Arlene, they called me into the cloakroom and said, “Now listen, Feynman, we want you to understand that we understand that Arlene is your girl tonight, and we’re not gonna bother you with her. She’s out of bounds for us,” and so on. But before long, there was cutting in and competition coming from precisely these guys! I learned the meaning of Shakespeare’s phrase “Me-thinks thou dost protest too much.”
You must appreciate what I was like then. I was a very shy character, always feeling uncomfortable because everybody was stronger than I, and always afraid I would look like a sissy. Everybody else played baseball; everybody else did all kinds of athletic things. If there was a game somewhere, and a ball would come rolling across the road, I would be petrified that maybe I’d have to pick it up and throw it back—because if I threw it, it would be about a radian off the correct direction, and not anywhere near the distance! And then everybody would laugh. It was terrible, and I was very unhappy about it.
One time I was invited to a party at Arlene’s house. Everybody was there because Arlene was the most popular girl around: she was number one, the nicest girl, and everybody liked her. Well, I’m sitting in a big armchair with nothing to do, when Arlene comes over and sits on the arm of the chair to talk to me. That was the beginning of the feeling, “Oh, boy! The world is just wonderful now! Somebody I like has paid attention to me!”
In those days, in Far Rockaway, there was a youth center for Jewish kids at the temple. It was a big club that had many activities. There was a writers group that wrote stories and would read them to each other; there was a drama group that put on plays; there was a science group, and an art group. I had no interest in any subject except science, but Arlene was in the art group, so I joined it too. I struggled with the art business—learning how to make plaster casts of the face and so on (which I used much later in life, it turned out)—just so I could be in the same group with Arlene.
But Arlene had a boyfriend named Jerome in the group, so there was no chance for me. I just hovered around in the background.
One time, when I wasn’t there, somebody nominated me for president of the youth center. The elders began getting nervous, because I was an avowed atheist by that time.
I had been brought up in the Jewish religion—my family went to the temple every Friday, I was sent to what we called “Sunday school,” and I even studied Hebrew for a while—but at the same time, my father was telling me about the world. When I would hear the rabbi tell about some miracle such as a bush whose leaves were shaking but there wasn’t any wind, I would try to fit the miracle into the real world and explain it in terms of natural phenomena.
Some miracles were harder than others to understand. The one about the leaves was easy. When I was walking to school, I heard a little noise: although the wind was hardly noticeable, the leaves of a bush were wiggling a little bit because they were in just the right position to make a kind of resonance. And I thought, “Aha! This is a good explanation for Elijah’s vision of the quaking bush!”
But there were some miracles I never did figure out. For instance, there was a story in which Moses throws down his staff and it turns into a snake. I couldn’t figure out what the witnesses saw that made them think his staff was a snake.
If I had thought back to when I was much younger, the Santa Claus story could have provided a clue for me. But it didn’t hit me hard enough at the time to p
roduce the possibility that I should doubt the truth of stories that don’t fit with nature. When I found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real, I wasn’t upset; rather, I was relieved that there was a much simpler phenomenon to explain how so many children all over the world got presents on the same night! The story had been getting pretty complicated—it was getting out of hand.
Santa Claus was a particular custom we celebrated in our family, and it wasn’t very serious. But the miracles I was hearing about were connected with real things: there was the temple, where people would go every week; there was the Sunday school, where rabbis taught children about miracles; it was much more of a dramatic thing. Santa Claus didn’t involve big institutions like the temple, which I knew were real.
So all the time I was going to the Sunday school, I was believing everything and having trouble putting it together. But of course, ultimately, it had to come to a crisis, sooner or later.
The actual crisis came when I was eleven or twelve. The rabbi was telling us a story about the Spanish Inquisition, in which the Jews suffered terrible tortures. He told us about a particular individual whose name was Ruth, exactly what she was supposed to have done, what the arguments were in her favor and against her—the whole thing, as if it had all been documented by a court reporter. And I was just an innocent kid, listening to all this stuff and believing it was a true commentary, because the rabbi had never indicated otherwise.
At the end, the rabbi described how Ruth was dying in prison: “And she thought, while she was dying”—blah, blah.
That was a shock to me. After the lesson was over, I went up to him and said, “How did they know what she thought when she was dying?”
He says, “Well, of course, in order to explain more vividly how the Jews suffered, we made up the story of Ruth. It wasn’t a real individual.”
'What Do You Care What Other People Think?' Page 2
