'What Do You Care What Other People Think?'

by Richard P Feynman

  “Oh, yes. Then it’s the Goldschmidt funeral.”

  “Herman Goldschmidt?”

  “That’s right; Herman Goldschmidt and Mrs. Goldschmidt.”

  Okay. It’s Herman Goldschmidt. But I still can’t remember a Herman Goldschmidt. I haven’t any idea what it is I’ve forgotten; from the way she talked, my friend was sure that Herman and I knew each other well.

  The last chance I have is to go to the funeral and look into the casket.

  I go to the funeral, and the woman who had arranged everything comes over, dressed in black, and says in a sorrowful voice, “I’m so glad you’re here. Herman would be so happy if he knew”—all this serious stuff. Everybody’s got long faces about Herman, but I still don’t know who Her man is—though I’m sure that if I knew, I’d feel very sorry that he was dead!

  The funeral proceeded, and when it came time for everybody to file past the caskets, I went up. I looked into the first casket, and there was Herman’s mother. I looked into the second casket, and there was Herman—and I swear to you, I’d never seen him before in my life!

  It came time to carry the casket out, and I took my place among the pallbearers. I very carefully laid Herman to rest in his grave, because I knew he would have appreciated it. But I haven’t any idea, to this day, who Herman was.

  Many years later I finally got up enough courage to bring it up to my friend. “You know that funeral I went to, about ten years ago, for Howard…”

  “You mean Herman.”

  “Oh yeah—Herman. You know, I didn’t know who Herman was. I didn’t even recognize him in the casket.”

  “But Richard, you knew each other in Los Alamos just after the war. You were both good friends of mine, and we had many conversations together.”

  “I still can’t remember him.”

  A few days later she called and told me what might have happened: maybe she had met Herman just after I had left Los Alamos—and therefore got the timing mixed up somehow—but because she was such good friends with each of us, she thought we must have known each other. So she was the one who had made the mistake, not me (which is usually the case). Or was she just being polite?

  Feynman Sexist Pig!

  A FEW YEARS after I gave some lectures for the freshmen at Caltech (which were published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics), I received a long letter from a feminist group. I was accused of being anti-woman because of two stories: the first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There’s a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop’s definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the woman look stupid.

  The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, “Look how pretty the stars shine!” To which he replied, “Yes, and right now, I’m the only man in the world who knows how they shine.” He was describing a kind of wonderful loneliness you have when you make a discovery.

  The letter claimed that I was saying a woman is incapable of understanding nuclear reactions.

  I figured there was no point in trying to answer their accusations in detail, so I wrote a short letter back to them: “Don’t bug me, man!”

  Needless to say, that didn’t work too well. Another letter came: “Your response to our letter of September 29th is unsatisfactory…”—blah, blah, blah. This letter warned that if I didn’t get the publisher to revise the things they objected to, there would be trouble.

  I ignored the letter and forgot about it.

  A year or so later, the American Association of Physics Teachers awarded me a prize for writing those books, and asked me to speak at their meeting in San Francisco. My sister, Joan, lived in Palo Alto—an hour’s drive away—so I stayed with her the night before and we went to the meeting together.

  As we approached the lecture hall, we found people standing there giving out handbills to everybody going in. We each took one, and glanced at it. At the top it said, “A PROTEST.” Then it showed excerpts from the letters they sent me, and my response (in full). It concluded in large letters: “FEYNMAN SEXIST PIG!”

  Joan stopped suddenly and rushed back: “These are interesting,” she said to the protester. “I’d like some more of them!”

  When she caught up with me, she said, “Gee whiz, Richard; what did you do?”

  I told her what had happened as we walked into the hall.

  At the front of the hall, near the stage, were two prominent women in the American Association of Physics Teachers. One was in charge of women’s affairs for the organization, and the other was Fay Ajzenberg, a professor of physics I knew, from Pennsylvania. They saw me coming down towards the stage accompanied by this woman with a fistful of handbills, talking to me. Fay walked up to her and said, “Do you realize that Professor Feynman has a sister that he encouraged to go into physics, and that she has a Ph.D. in physics?”

  “Of course I do,” said Joan. “I’m that sister!”

  Fay and her associate explained to me that the protesters were a group—led by a man, ironically—who were always disrupting meetings in Berkeley. “We’ll sit on either side of you to show our solidarity, and just before you speak, I’ll get up and say something to quiet the protesters,” Fay said.

  Because there was another talk before mine, I had time to think of something to say. I thanked Fay, but declined her offer.

  As soon as I got up to speak, half a dozen protesters marched down to the front of the lecture hall and paraded right below the stage, holding their picket signs high, chanting, “Feynman sexist pig! Feynman sexist pig!”

  I began my talk by telling the protesters, “I’m sorry that my short answer to your letter brought you here unnecessarily. There are more serious places to direct one’s attention towards improving the status of women in physics than these relatively trivial mistakes—if that’s what you want to call them—in a textbook. But perhaps, after all, it’s good that you came. For women do indeed suffer from prejudice and discrimination in physics, and your presence here today serves to remind us of these difficulties and the need to remedy them.”

  The protesters looked at one another. Their picket signs began to come slowly down, like sails in a dying wind.

  I continued: “Even though the American Association Physics Teachers has given me an award for teaching, I must confess I don’t know how to teach. Therefore, I have nothing to say about teaching. Instead, I would like to talk about something that will be especially interesting to the women in the audience: I would like to talk about the structure of the proton.”

  The protesters put their picket signs down and walked off. My hosts told me later that the man and his group of protesters had never been defeated so easily.

  (Recently I discovered a transcript of my speech, and what I said at the beginning doesn’t seem anywhere near as dramatic as the way I remember it. What I remember saying is much more wonderful than what I actually said!)

  After my talk, some of the protesters came up to press me about the woman-driver story. “Why did it have to be a woman driver?” they said. “You are implying that all women are bad drivers.”

  “But the woman makes the cop look bad,” I said. “Why aren’t you concerned about the cop?”

  “That’s what you expect from cops!” one of the protesters said. “They’re all pigs!”

  “But you should be concerned,” I said. “I forgot to say in the story that the cop was a woman!”

  I Just Shook His Hand, Can You Believe It?

  FOR SOME YEARS now the Kyoto University has been inviting me to visit Japan. But every time I accepted their invitation, I would happen to get sick and not be able to go.

  In the summer of 1986 there was going to be a conference in Kyoto and the university a
gain invited me to come. Although I love Japan and wanted very much to visit, I felt uncomfortable at the invitation because I had no paper to give. The university said it would be all right for me to give a summary paper, but I said I don’t like to do that. But then they said they would be honored if I would be the chairman of one session of the conference—that’s all I would have to do. So I finally said okay.

  I was lucky this time and didn’t get sick.* So Gweneth and I went to Kyoto, and I was chairman of one session.

  The chairman is supposed to make sure that the speakers only talk for a certain length of time, in order to leave enough time for the next speaker. The chairman occupies a position of such high honor that there are two co-chairmen to assist him. My co-chairmen said they would take care of introducing the speakers, as well as telling them when it’s time to stop.

  Things went smoothly for most of the session until one speaker—a Japanese man—didn’t stop talking when his time was up. I look at the clock and figure it’s time he should stop. I look over at the co-chairmen and gesture a little bit.

  They come up to me and say, “Don’t do anything; we’ll take care of it. He’s talking about Yukawa.* It’s all right.”

  So I was the honorary chairman of one session, and I felt I didn’t even do my job right. And for that, the university paid my way to Japan, they took care of arranging my trip, and they were all very gracious.

  One afternoon we were talking to the host who was arranging our trip. He shows us a railroad map, and Gweneth sees a curved line with lots of stops in the middle of the Ise Peninsula—it’s not near the water; it’s not near anywhere. She puts her finger on the end of the line and says, “We want to go here.”

  He looks at it, and says, “Oh! You want to go to… Iseokitsu?”

  She says, “Yes.”

  “But there’s nothing in Iseokitsu,” he says, looking at me as if my wife is crazy, and hoping I’ll bring her back to her senses.

  So I say, “Yes, that’s right; we want to go to Iseokitsu.”

  Gweneth hadn’t talked to me about it, but I knew what she was thinking: we enjoy traveling to places in the middle of nowhere, places we’ve never heard of, places which have nothing.

  Our host becomes a little bit upset: he’s never made a hotel reservation for Iseokitsu; he doesn’t even know if there’s an inn there.

  He gets on the telephone and calls up Iseokitsu for us. In Iseokitsu, it turns out, there are no accommodations.

  But there’s another town—about seven kilometers beyond the end of the line—that has a Japanese-style inn.

  We say, “Fine! That’s just what we want—a Japanese-style inn!” They give him the number and he calls.

  The man at the inn is very reluctant: “Ours is a very small inn. It’s a family-run place.”

  “That’s what they want,” our host reassures him.

  “Did he say yes?” I ask.

  After more discussion, our host says, “He agrees.”

  But the next morning, our host gets a telephone call from this same inn: last night they had a family conference. They decided they can’t handle the situation. They can’t take care of foreigners.

  I say, “What’s the trouble?”

  Our host telephones the inn and asks what the problem is. He turns to us and says, “It’s the toilet—they don’t have a Western-style toilet.”

  I say, “Tell them that the last time my wife and I went on a trip, we carried a small shovel and toilet paper, and dug holes for ourselves in the dirt. Ask him, ‘Shall we bring our shovel?’ “

  Our host explains this over the telephone, and they say, “It’s okay. You can come for one night. You don’t need to bring your shovel.”

  The innkeeper picked us up at the railroad station in Iseokitsu and took us to his inn. There was a beautiful garden outside our room. We noticed a brilliant, emerald-green tree frog climbing a metal frame with horizontal bars (used for hanging out the wet clothes), and a tiny yellow snake in a shrub in front of our engawa (veranda). Yes, there was “nothing” in Iseokitsu—but everything was beautiful and interesting to us.

  It turned out there was a shrine about a mile away—that’s why this little inn was there—so we walked to it. On our way back, it began to rain. A guy passed us in his car, then turned around and came back. “Where are you going?” he asked in Japanese. “To the inn,” I said. So he took us there.

  When we got back to our room, we discovered that Gweneth had lost a roll of film—perhaps in the man’s car. So I got the dictionary out and looked up “film” and “lost,” and tried to explain it to the innkeeper. I don’t know how he did it, but he found the man who had given us the ride, and in his car we found the film.

  The bath was interesting; we had to go through another room to get to it. The bathtub was wooden, and around it were all kinds of little toys—little boats and so on. There was also a towel with Mickey Mouse on it.

  The innkeeper and his wife had a little daughter who was two, and a small baby. They dressed their daughter in a kimono and brought her up to our room. Her mother made origami things for her; I made some drawings for her, and we played with her.

  A lady across the street gave us a beautiful silk ball that she had made. Everything was friendly; everything was very good.

  The next morning we were supposed to leave. We had a reservation at one of the more famous resorts, at a spa somewhere. I looked in the dictionary again; then I came down and showed the innkeeper the receipt for our reservation at the big resort hotel—it was called the Grand View, or something like that. I said, “We don’t want stay big hotel tomorrow night; we want stay here tomorrow night. We happy here. Please you call them; change this.”

  He says, “Certainly! Certainly!” I could tell he was pleased by the idea that these foreigners were canceling their reservation in this big, fancy hotel in order to stay in his little inn another night.

  After we returned to Tokyo, we went to the University of Kanazawa. Some professors arranged to drive us along the coast of nearby Noto Peninsula. We passed through several delightful fishing villages, and went to visit a pagoda in the middle of the countryside.

  Then we visited a shrine with an enclave behind it, where one could go only by special invitation. The Shinto priest there was very gracious and invited us into his private rooms for tea, and he did some calligraphy for us.

  After our hosts had taken us a little farther along the coast, they had to return to Kanazawa. Gweneth and I decided to stay in Togi for two or three days. We stayed in a Japanese-style hotel, and the lady innkeeper there was very, very nice to us. She arranged for her brother to take us by car down the coast to several villages, and then we came back by bus.

  The next morning the innkeeper told us there was something important happening in town. A new shrine, replacing an old one, was being dedicated.

  When we arrived at the grounds we were invited to sit on a bench, and were served tea. There were many people milling around, and eventually a procession came out from behind the shrine. We were delighted to see the leading figure was the head priest from the shrine we had visited a few days before. He was dressed in a big, ceremonial outfit, and was obviously in charge of everything.

  After a little while the ceremony began. We didn’t want to intrude into a religious place, so we stayed back from the shrine itself. But there were kids running up and down the steps, playing and making noise, so we figured it wasn’t so formal. We came a little closer and stood on the steps so we could see inside.

  The ceremony was wonderful. There was a ceremonial cup with branches and leaves on it; there was a group of girls in special uniforms; there were dancers, and so on. It was quite elaborate.

  We’re watching all these performances when all of a sudden we feel a tap on the shoulder. It’s the head priest! He gestures to us to follow him.

  We go around the shrine and enter from the side. The head priest introduces us to the mayor and other dignitaries, and invites us to sit down. A
noh actor does a dance, and all kinds of other wonderful things go on.

  Then there are speeches. First, the mayor gives a speech. Then the head priest gets up to speak. He says, “Unano, utsini kuntana kanao. Untanao uni kanao. Uniyo zoimasu doi zinti Fain-man-san-to unakano kane gozai-mas…”—and he points to “Fain-man-san” and tells me to say something!

  My Japanese is very poor, so I say something in English: “I love Japan,” I say. “I am particularly impressed by your tremendous rate of technological change, while at the same time your traditions still mean so much, as you are showing with this shrine dedication.” I tried to express the mixture I saw in Japan: change, but without losing respect for traditions.

  The head priest says something in Japanese which I do not believe is what I said (although I couldn’t really tell), because he had never understood anything I had said to him previously! But he acted as if he understood exactly what I said, and he “translated” it with complete confidence for everyone. He was much like I am, in this respect.

  Anyway, the people politely listened to whatever it was that I said, and then another priest gave a speech. He was a young man, a student of the head priest, dressed in a wonderful outfit with big, wide pant legs and a big, wide hat. He looked so gorgeous, so wonderful.

  Then we went to lunch with all the dignitaries, and felt very honored to be included.

  After the shrine dedication ceremony was over, Gweneth and I thanked the head priest and left the dining hall to walk around the village for a while. After a bit we found some people pulling a big wagon, with a shrine in it, through the streets. They’re all dressed up in outfits with symbols on the back, singing, “Eyo! Eyo!”

  We follow the procession, enjoying the festivities, when a policeman with a walkie-talkie comes up to us. He takes off his white glove and puts out his hand. I shake hands with him.

  As we leave the policeman and begin to follow the procession again, we hear a loud, high-pitched voice behind us, speaking very rapidly. We turn around and see the policeman clutching his walkie-talkie, speaking into it with great excitement: “O gano fana miyo ganu Fain-man-san iyo kano muri tono muroto kala…”—and I could just imagine him telling the person at the other end: “Do you remember that Mr. Fain-man who spoke at the shrine dedication? I just shook his hand, can you believe it?”