“Oh, no,” she says. “They won’t do for Fermi and Bethe and all those other famous people.” Sure enough, she’s got another box of cards.
She pulls one out. It says the usual stuff, and then: From Dr. & Mrs. R. P. Feynman.
So I had to send them those.
“What’s this formal stuff, Dick?” they laughed. They were happy that she was having such a good time out of it, and that I had no control over it.
Arlene didn’t spend all of her time inventing games. She had sent away for a book called Sound and Symbol in Chinese. It was a lovely book—I still have it—with about fifty symbols done in beautiful calligraphy, with explanations like “Trouble: three women in a house.” She had the right paper, brushes, and ink, and was practicing calligraphy. She had also bought a Chinese dictionary, to get a lot of other symbols.
One time when I came to visit her, Arlene was practicing these things. She says to herself, “No. That one’s wrong.”
So I, the “great scientist,” say, “What do you mean, ‘wrong’? It’s only a human convention. There’s no law of nature which says how they’re supposed to look; you can draw them any way you want.”
“I mean, artistically it’s wrong. It’s a question of balance, of how it feels.”
“But one way is just as good as another,” I protest.
“Here,” she says, and she hands me the brush. “Make one yourself.”
So I made one, and I said, “Wait a minute. Let me make another one—it’s too blobby.” (I couldn’t say it was wrong, after all.)
“How do you know how blobby it’s supposed to be?” she says.
I learned what she meant. There’s a particular way you have to make the stroke for it to look good. An aesthetic thing has a certain set, a certain character, which I can’t define. Because it couldn’t be defined made me think there was nothing to it. But I learned from that experience that there is something to it—and it’s a fascination I’ve had for art ever since.
Just at this moment, my sister sends me a postcard from Oberlin, where she’s going to college. It’s written in pencil, with small symbols—it’s in Chinese.
Joan is nine years younger than I am, and studied physics, too. Having me as her older brother was tough on her. She was always looking for something I couldn’t do, and was secretly taking Chinese.
Well, I didn’t know any Chinese, but one thing I’m good at is spending an infinite amount of time solving a puzzle. The next weekend I took the card with me to Albuquerque. Arlene showed me how to look up the symbols. You have to start in the back of the dictionary with the right category and count the number of strokes. Then you go into the main part of the dictionary. It turns out each symbol has several possible meanings, and you have to put several symbols together before you can understand it.
With great patience I worked everything out. Joan was saying things like, “I had a good time today.” There was only one sentence I couldn’t figure out. It said, “Yesterday we celebrated mountain-forming day”—obviously an error. (It turned out they did have some crazy thing called “Mountain-forming Day” at Oberlin, and I had translated it right!)
So it was trivial things like you’d expect to have on a postcard, but I knew from the situation that Joan was trying to floor me by sending me Chinese.
I looked back and forth through the art book and picked out four symbols which would go well together. Then I practiced each one, over and over. I had a big pad of paper, and I would make fifty of each one, until I got it just right.
When I had accidentally made one good example of each symbol, I saved them. Arlene approved, and we glued the four of them end to end, one on top of the other. Then we put a little piece of wood on each end, so you could hang it up on the wall. I took a picture of my masterpiece with Nick Metropolis’s camera, rolled up the scroll, put it in a tube, and sent it to Joan.
So she gets it. She unrolls it, and she can’t read it. It looks to her as if I simply made four characters, one right after the other, on the scroll. She takes it to her teacher.
The first thing he says is, “This is written rather well! Did you do this?”
“Uh, no. What does it say?”
“Elder brother also speaks.”
I’m a real bastard—I would never let my little sister score one on me.
When Arlene’s condition became much weaker, her father came out from New York to visit her. It was difficult and expensive to travel that far during the war, but he knew the end was near. One day he telephoned me at Los Alamos. “You’d better come down here right away,” he said.
I had arranged ahead of time with a friend of mine at Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs, to borrow his car in case of an emergency, so I could get to Albuquerque quickly. I picked up a couple of hitchhikers to help me in case something happened on the way.
Sure enough, as we were driving into Santa Fe, we got a flat tire. The hitchhikers helped me change the tire. Then on the other side of Santa Fe, the spare tire went flat, but there was a gas station nearby. I remember waiting patiently for the gas station man to take care of some other car, when the two hitchhikers, knowing the situation, went over and explained to the man what it was. He fixed the flat right away. We decided not to get the spare tire fixed, because repairing it would have taken even more time.
We started out again towards Albuquerque, and I felt foolish that I hadn’t thought to say anything to the gas station man when time was so precious. About thirty miles from Albuquerque, we got another flat! We had to abandon the car, and we hitchhiked the rest of the way. I called up a towing company and told them the situation.
I met Arlene’s father at the hospital. He had been there for a few days. “I can’t take it any more,” he said. “I have to go home.” He was so unhappy, he just left.
When I finally saw Arlene, she was very weak, and a bit fogged out. She didn’t seem to know what was happening. She stared straight ahead most of the time, looking around a little bit from time to time, and was trying to breathe. Every once in a while her breathing would stop—and she would sort of swallow—and then it would start again. It kept going like this for a few hours.
I took a little walk outside for a while. I was surprised that I wasn’t feeling what I thought people were supposed to feel under the circumstances. Maybe I was fooling myself. I wasn’t delighted, but I didn’t feel terribly upset, perhaps because we had known for a long time that it was going to happen.
It’s hard to explain. If a Martian (who, we’ll imagine, never dies except by accident) came to Earth and saw this peculiar race of creatures—these humans who live about seventy or eighty years, knowing that death is going to come—it would look to him like a terrible problem of psychology to live under those circumstances, knowing that life is only temporary. Well, we humans somehow figure out how to live despite this problem: we laugh, we joke, we live.
The only difference for me and Arlene was, instead of fifty years, it was five years. It was only a quantitative difference—the psychological problem was just the same. The only way it would have become any different is if we had said to ourselves, “But those other people have it better, because they might live fifty years.” But that’s crazy. Why make yourself miserable saying things like, “Why do we have such bad luck? What has God done to us? What have we done to deserve this?”—all of which, if you understand reality and take it completely into your heart, are irrelevant and unsolvable. They are just things that nobody can know. Your situation is just an accident of life.
We had a hell of a good time together.
I came back into her room. I kept imagining all the things that were going on physiologically: the lungs aren’t getting enough air into the blood, which makes the brain fogged out and the heart weaker, which makes the breathing even more difficult. I kept expecting some sort of ava-lanching effect, with everything caving in together in a dramatic collapse. But it didn’t appear that way at all: she just slowly got more foggy, and her breathing gradually became less and l
ess, until there was no more breath—but just before that, there was a very small one.
The nurse on her rounds came in and confirmed that Arlene was dead, and went out—I wanted to be alone for a moment. I sat there for a while, and then went over to kiss her one last time.
I was very surprised to discover that her hair smelled exactly the same. Of course, after I stopped and thought about it, there was no reason why hair should smell different in such a short time. But to me it was a kind of a shock, because in my mind, something enormous had just happened—and yet nothing had happened.
The next day, I went to the mortuary. The guy hands me some rings he’s taken from her body. “Would you like to see your wife one last time?” he asks.
“What kind of a—no, I don’t want to see her, no!” I said. “I just saw her!”
“Yes, but she’s been all fixed up,” he says.
This mortuary stuff was completely foreign to me. Fixing up a body when there’s nothing there? I didn’t want to look at Arlene again; that would have made me more upset.
I called the towing company and got the car, and packed Arlene’s stuff in the back. I picked up a hitchhiker, and started out of Albuquerque.
It wasn’t more than five miles before… BANG! Another flat tire. I started to curse.
The hitchhiker looked at me like I was mentally unbalanced. “It’s just a tire, isn’t it?” he says.
“Yeah, it’s just a tire—and another tire, and again another tire, and another tire!”
We put the spare tire on, and went very slowly, all the way back to Los Alamos, without getting the other tire repaired.
I didn’t know how I was going to face all my friends at Los Alamos. I didn’t want people with long faces talking to me about the death of Arlene. Somebody asked me what happened.
“She’s dead. And how’s the program going?” I said.
They caught on right away that I didn’t want to moon over it. Only one guy expressed his sympathy, and it turned out he had been out of town when I came back to Los Alamos.
One night I had a dream, and Arlene came into it. Right away, I said to her, “No, no, you can’t be in this dream. You’re not alive!”
Then later, I had another dream with Arlene in it. I started in again, saying, “You can’t be in this dream!”
“No, no,” she says. “I fooled you. I was tired of you, so I cooked up this ruse so I could go my own way. But now I like you again, so I’ve come back.” My mind was really working against itself. It had to be explained, even in a goddamn dream, why it was possible that she was still there!
I must have done something to myself, psychologically. I didn’t cry until about a month later, when I was walking past a department store in Oak Ridge and noticed a pretty dress in the window. I thought, “Arlene would like that,” and then it hit me.
It’s as Simple as One, Two, Three…
WHEN I was a kid growing up in Far Rockaway, I had a friend named Bernie Walker. We both had “labs” at home, and we would do various “experiments.” One time, we were discussing something—we must have been eleven or twelve at the time—and I said, “But thinking is nothing but talking to yourself inside.”
“Oh yeah?” Bernie said. “Do you know the crazy shape of the crankshaft in a car?”
“Yeah, what of it?”
“Good. Now, tell me: how did you describe it when you were talking to yourself?”
So I learned from Bernie that thoughts can be visual as well as verbal.
Later on, in college, I became interested in dreams. I wondered how things could look so real, just as if light were hitting the retina of the eye, while the eyes are closed: are the nerve cells on the retina actually being stimulated in some other way—by the brain itself, perhaps—or does the brain have a “judgment department” that gets slopped up during dreaming? I never got satisfactory answers to such questions from psychology, even though I became very interested in how the brain works. Instead, there was all this business about interpreting dreams, and so on.
When I was in graduate school at Princeton a kind of dumb psychology paper came out that stirred up a lot of discussion. The author had decided that the thing controlling the “time sense” in the brain is a chemical reaction involving iron. I thought to myself, “Now, how the hell could he figure that?”
Well, the way he did it was, his wife had a chronic fever which went up and down a lot. Somehow he got the idea to test her sense of time. He had her count seconds to herself (without looking at a clock), and checked how long it took her to count up to 60. He had her counting—the poor woman—all during the day: when her fever went up, he found she counted quicker; when her fever went down, she counted slower. Therefore, he thought, the thing that governed the “time sense” in the brain must be running faster when she’s got fever than when she hasn’t got fever.
Being a very “scientific” guy, the psychologist knew that the rate of a chemical reaction varies with the surrounding temperature by a certain formula that depends on the energy of the reaction. He measured the differences in speed of his wife’s counting, and determined how much the temperature changed the speed. Then he tried to find a chemical reaction whose rates varied with temperature in the same amounts as his wife’s counting did. He found that iron reactions fit the pattern best. So he deduced that his wife’s sense of time was governed by a chemical reaction in her body involving iron.
Well, it all seemed like a lot of baloney to me—there were so many things that could go wrong in his long chain of reasoning. But it was an interesting question: what does determine the “time sense”? When you’re trying to count at an even rate, what does that rate depend on? And what could you do to yourself to change it?
I decided to investigate. I started by counting seconds—without looking at a clock, of course—up to 60 in a slow, steady rhythm: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.… When I got to 60, only 48 seconds had gone by, but that didn’t bother me: the problem was not to count for exactly one minute, but to count at a standard rate. The next time I counted to 60, 49 seconds had passed. The next time, 48. Then 47, 48, 49, 48, 48.… So I found I could count at a pretty standard rate.
Now, if I just sat there, without counting, and waited until I thought a minute had gone by, it was very irregular—complete variations. So I found it’s very poor to estimate a minute by sheer guessing. But by counting, I could get very accurate.
Now that I knew I could count at a standard rate, the next question was—what affects the rate?
Maybe it has something to do with the heart rate. So I began to run up and down the stairs, up and down, to get my heart beating fast. Then I’d run into my room, throw myself down on the bed, and count up to 60.
I also tried running up and down the stairs and counting to myself while I was running up and down.
The other guys saw me running up and down the stairs, and laughed. “What are you doing?”
I couldn’t answer them—which made me realize I couldn’t talk while I was counting to myself—and kept right on running up and down the stairs, looking like an idiot.
(The guys at the graduate college were used to me looking like an idiot. On another occasion, for example, a guy came into my room—I had forgotten to lock the door during the “experiment”—and found me in a chair wearing my heavy sheepskin coat, leaning out of the wide-open window in the dead of winter, holding a pot in one hand and stirring with the other. “Don’t bother me! Don’t bother me!” I said. I was stirring Jell-O and watching it closely: I had gotten curious as to whether Jell-O would coagulate in the cold if you kept it moving all the time.)
Anyway, after trying every combination of running up and down the stairs and lying on the bed, surprise! The heart rate had no effect. And since I got very hot running up and down the stairs, I figured temperature had nothing to do with it either (although I must have known that your temperature doesn’t really go up when you exercise). In fact, I couldn’t find anything that affected my rate of counting.
&
nbsp; Running up and down stairs got pretty boring, so I started counting while I did things I had to do anyway. For instance, when I put out the laundry, I had to fill out a form saying how many shirts I had, how many pants, and so on. I found I could write down “3” in front of “pants” or “4” in front of “shirts,” but I couldn’t count my socks. There were too many of them: I’m already using my “counting machine”—36, 37, 38—and here are all these socks in front of me—39, 40, 41.… How do I count the socks?
I found I could arrange them in geometrical patterns—like a square, for example: a pair of socks in this corner, a pair in that one; a pair over here, and a pair over there—eight socks.
I continued this game of counting by patterns, and found I could count the lines in a newspaper article by grouping the lines into patterns of 3, 3, 3, and 1 to get 10; then 3 of those patterns, 3 of those patterns, 3 of those patterns, and 1 of those patterns made 100. I went right down the newspaper like that. After I had finished counting up to 60,1 knew where I was in the patterns and could say, “I’m up to 60, and there are 113 lines.” I found that I could even read the articles while I counted to 60, and it didn’t affect the rate! In fact, I could do anything while counting to myself—except talk out loud, of course.
What about typing—copying words out of a book? I found that I could do that, too, but here my time was affected. I was excited: finally, I’ve found something that appears to affect my counting rate! I investigated it more.
I would go along, typing the simple words rather fast, counting to myself 19, 20, 21, typing along, counting 27, 28, 29, typing along, until—What the hell is that word?— Oh, yeah—and then continue counting 30, 31, 32, and so on. When I’d get to 60, I’d be late.
After some introspection and further observation, I realized what must have happened: I would interrupt my counting when I got to a difficult word that “needed more brains,” so to speak. My counting rate wasn’t slowing down; rather, the counting itself was being held up temporarily from time to time. Counting to 60 had become so automatic that I didn’t even notice the interruptions at first.
'What Do You Care What Other People Think?' Page 5
