The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

by Richard P Feynman

  I had a lot of interesting experiences with Bethe. The first day when he came in, we had an adding machine, a Marchant that you work with your hands, and so he said “Let’s see, the pressure”–the formula which he’d been working out involves the pressure squared–“the pressure is 48; the square of 48. . . .” I reach for the machine; he says it’s about 23 hundred. So I plug it out just to find out. He says, “You want to know exactly? It’s 2,304.” And so it came out 2,304. So I said, “How do you do that?” He says, “Don’t you know how to take squares of numbers near 50? If it’s near 50, say 3 below, then it’s 3 below 25, like 47 squared is 22. And how much is left over is the square of what’s residual. For instance, with your 3 less you get 9–2, 209 from 47 squared. Very nice, OK?” So we (he was very good at arithmetic) kept on going and a few moments later we had to take the cube root of 2. Now, to do cube roots there was a little chart that you take that had some trial numbers that you try on the adding machine that the Marchant Company had given us. So (this takes him a little longer, you see) I opened the drawer, take out the chart, and he says “1.35.” So I figured there is some way to take cube roots numbers near 2, but it turns out no. I said, “How do you do that?” He says, “Well,” he says “you see the logarithm of 2.5 is so-and-so; you divide by 3 to get the cube root of so and so. Now, the log of 1.3 is this, the log of 1.4 is . . . I interpolate in between.” I couldn’t have divided anything by three, much less . . . So he knew all his arithmetic and he was very good at it and that was a challenge to me. I kept practicing. We used to have a little contest. Every time we’d have to calculate anything we’d rush to the answer, he and I, and I would win; after several years I began to be able to do it, you know get in there once, maybe one out of four. Of course you’d notice something funny about a number like if you have to multiply 174 by 140, for example. You notice that 173 by 141 which is like the square root of 3, times the square root of 2, which is the square root of 6, which is 245. But you have to notice the numbers, you see, and each guy would notice a different way–we had lots of fun.

  Well, when I was first there, as I said, we didn’t have the dormitories, and the theoretical physicists had to stay on the site. The first place they put us was in the old school building, from the boys’ school which had been there previously. The first place I lived in was a thing called the mechanics lodge; we were all jammed in there in bunk beds and so on and it turned out it wasn’t organized very well and Bob Christie and his wife had to go to the bathroom each morning through our bedroom. So that was very uncomfortable.

  The next place we moved to was a thing called the Big House, which had a patio all the way around the outside on the second floor where all the beds had been stuck next to each other, all along the wall. And then downstairs was a big chart that told you what your bed number was and which bathroom you changed your clothes in. So under my name it said “Bathroom C,” no bed number! As a result of this I was rather annoyed. At last the dormitory is built. I go down to the dormitory place to get rooms assigned, and they say you can pick your room now. I tried to pick one; you know what I did–I looked to see where the girls’ dormitory was and I picked one that you could look out across. Later I discovered a big tree was growing right in front of it. But, anyway, I picked this room. They told me that temporarily there would be two people in a room, but that would only be temporary. Two rooms would share a bathroom. It would be double-decker beds, bunks, in there and I didn’t want two people in the room. When I first got there, the first night, nobody else was there. Now my wife was sick with TB in Albuquerque, so I had some boxes of stuff of hers. So I opened a box and I took out a little nightgown and I just sort of threw it carelessly. I opened the top bed, I threw the nightgown careless on the top bed. I took out the slippers; I threw some powder on the floor in the bathroom. I just made it look like somebody else was there. OK? So if the other bed is occupied, nobody else is going to sleep there. OK? So, what happened? Because it’s a men’s dormitory. Well, I came home that night and my pajamas are folded nicely and put under the pillow, and the slippers put nicely at the bottom of the bed. The lady’s pajama is nicely folded and it’s been put under the pillow, the bed is all fixed up and made, and the slippers are put down nicely. The powder is cleaned from the bathroom and nobody is sleeping up there. I still have the room to myself. So, next night, same thing. When I wake up I mess up the bed up top, I throw the nightgown, and the powder in the bathroom and so on, and I went on like this for four nights until it settled down. Everybody was settled and there was no more danger that they would put a second person in the room. Each night, everything was set very neatly, everything was all right, even though it was a men’s dormitory. So, that’s what happened in that situation.

  I got involved in politics a little bit because there was a thing called the Town Council. Apparently there were certain things the Army people would decide about how the town was supposed to be run, with assistance from some governing board up there that I never knew anything about. But there was all kinds of excitement like there is in any political thing. In particular, there were factions: the housewives’ faction, the mechanics’ faction, the technical people’s faction, and so on. Well, the bachelors and bachelor girls, the people who lived in the dormitory, felt they had to have a faction because a new rule had been promulgated–no women in the men’s dorm, for instance. Well, this is absolutely ridiculous. All grown people of course (ha, ha). What kind of nonsense? So we had to have political action. So we decided and we debated and this stuff; you know how it is. And so I was elected to represent the dormitory people, you see, in the Town Council.

  After I was in the Town Council for about a year or so, a year and a half, I was talking to Hans Bethe about something. He was up in the governing council during all this time. And I told him this story, I had done this trick one time with my wife’s stuff in the upper bed and he starts to laugh. He says, “Ha, that’s how you got on the Town Council.” Because it turned out that what happened was this. There was a report, a very serious report. The poor woman was shaking, the woman who cleans the rooms in the dormitory had just opened the door and all of a sudden there is trouble–somebody is sleeping with one of the guys! Shaking, she doesn’t know what to do. She reports, the charwoman reports to the chief charwoman, the chief charwoman reports to the lieutenant, the lieutenant reports to the major, it goes all the way up, it goes all the way up through to the generals to the governing board–what are they going to do?–they’re going to think about it! So in the meantime, what instructions go down, down, through the captains, down through the majors, through the lieutenants, through the chars’ chief, through the charwoman?–“Just put things back the way they are, clean ’em up” and see what happens. OK? Next day, report–same thing, brump, bruuuuump, bruuuump. Meantime, for four days, they worried up there, what they’re going to do. So they finally promulgated a rule. “No women in the men’s dormitory!” And that caused such a stink down there. You see, now they had to have all the politics and they elected somebody to represent them. . . .

  Now I would like to tell you about the censorship that we had. They decided to do something utterly illegal, which was to censor mail of people inside the United States, in the Continental United States, which they have no right to do. So it had to be set up very delicately, as a voluntary thing. We would all volunteer not to seal our envelopes that we would send our letters out with. We would accept, it would be all right, that they would open letters coming in to us; that was voluntarily accepted by us. We would leave the outgoing letters open; they would seal them, if they were OK. If they weren’t OK in their opinion, in other words they found something that we shouldn’t send out, they would send the letter back to us with a note that there was a violation of such and such a paragraph of our “understanding,” and so on and so forth. So, very delicately, amongst all these liberal-minded scientific guys agreeing to such a proposition, we finally got the censorship set up. With many rules, such as that we were allowed
to comment on the character of the administration if we wanted to, so we could write our senator and tell him we don’t like the way things are run, and things like that. So it was all set up and they said that they would notify us if there were any difficulties.

  So, the day starts, the first day for censorship. Telephone! Briiing! Me–“What?” “Please come down.” I come down. “What’s this?” It’s a letter from my father. “Well, what is it?” There’s lined paper, and there’s these lines going out with dots–four dots under, one dot above, two dots under, one dot above, dot under dot. “What’s that?” I said, “It’s a code.” They said, “Yes, it’s a code; but what does it say?” I said, “I don’t know what it says.” They said “Well, what’s the key to the code; how do you decipher it?” I said, “Well, I don’t know.” Then they said, “What’s this?” I said, “It’s a letter from my wife.” “It says TJXYWZ TW1X3. What’s this?” I said, “Another code.” “What’s the key to it?” “I don’t know.” They said, “You’re receiving codes and you don’t know the key?” “Precisely,” I said, “I have a game. I challenge them to send me a code that I can’t decipher, see? So they’re making up codes at the other end and they’re not going to tell me what the key is and they’re sending them in.” Now one of the rules of the censorship was that they aren’t going to disturb anything that you would ordinarily do, in the mail. So they said, “Well, you’re going to have to tell them please to send the key in with the code.” I said, “I don’t want to see the key!” They said, “Well, all right, we’ll take the key out.” So we had that arrangement. OK? All right. Next day, I get a letter from my wife which says “It’s very difficult writing because I feel that blank is looking over my shoulder.” And in the spot there is nicely eradicated a splotch with ink eradicator. So I went down to the bureau and I said, “You’re not supposed to touch the incoming mail if you don’t like it, you can tell me but you’re not supposed to do anything to it. Just look at it but you’re not supposed to take anything out.” They said, “Don’t be ridiculous; do you think that’s the way censors work anyway, with ink eradicator? They cut things out with the scissor.” I said OK. So I wrote a letter back to my wife and said, “Did you use ink eradicator in your letter?” She writes back, “No, I didn’t use ink eradicator in my letter; it must have been the -----,” and there’s a hole cut out. So I went back to the guy in charge, the major who was supposed to be in charge of all this, and complained. This went on for a few days. I felt I was sort of the representative to get the thing straightened out. He tried to explain to me that these people who were the censors had been taught how to do it, and they didn’t understand this new way that we had to be so delicate about. I was trying to be the front, the one with the most experience, I was writing back and forth to my wife every day anyway. So, he said, “What’s the matter, don’t you think I have good faith, have good will?” I says, “Yes, you have perfectly good will but I don’t think you have power.” ’Cause you see, this had gone on three or four days. He said “We’ll see about that!” He grabs the telephone . . . everything was straightened out. So no more was the letter cut.

  However, there were a number of difficulties that arose. For example, one day I got a letter from my wife and a note from the censor that said there was a code enclosed, without the key, and so we removed it. So when I went to see my wife in Albuquerque that day, she says “Well, where’s all the stuff?” I said, “What stuff?” She says “Lethage, glycerine, hot dogs, laundry.” I said, “Wait a minute, that was a list?” She says, “Yes.” “That was a code,” I said. They thought it was a code–lethage, glycerine, etc. Then one day I am jiggling around–in the first few weeks all this went on, it was a few weeks before we got each other straightened out, but–I’m piddling around with the adding machine, the computing machine, and I notice something. So, writing every day, I had a lot of things to write–so, it’s very peculiar. Notice what happens. If you take one divided by 243 you get 0.004115226337. It’s quite acute and then it goes a little cockeyed when your carrying occurs for only about three numbers and then you can see how the 10 10 13 is really equivalent to 114 again, or 115 again, and it keeps on going, and I was explaining that, how nicely it repeated itself after a couple of cycles. I thought it was kind of amusing. Well, I put that in the mail and it comes back to me; it doesn’t go through, and there’s a little note “Look at Paragraph 17B.” I look at paragraph 17B. It says “Letters are to be written only in English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, German, and so forth. Permission to use any other language must be obtained in writing.” And then it said “No codes.” So I wrote back to the censor a little note included in my letter which said that I feel that of course this cannot be a code, because if you actually do divide 243 by 1 you do, in fact, get ---- and I wrote all that there, and therefore there’s no more information in the number 1-1-1-1–zero, zero, zero than there is in the number 243 which is hardly any information. And so forth. I therefore asked for permission to write my letters in Arabic numerals. I like to use Arabic numerals in my letters. So, I got that through all right.

  There was always some kind of difficulty with the letters going back and forth. At one time my wife kept insisting on mentioning the fact that she feels uncomfortable writing with the feeling that the censor is looking over [her shoulder]. As a rule we aren’t supposed to mention censorship–we aren’t, but how can they tell her? So they keep sending me a note, “Your wife mentioned censorship.” Certainly, my wife mentioned censorship, so finally they sent me a note that said “Please inform your wife not to mention censorship in her letters.” So I take my letter and I start, “I have been instructed to inform you not to mention censorship in your letters.” Phoom, phoooom, it comes right back! So I write, “I have been instructed to inform her not to mention censorship. How in the heck am I going to do it? Furthermore, why do I have to instruct her not to mention censorship? You keeping something from me?” It is very interesting that the censor himself has to tell me to tell my wife not to tell me that she’s. . . But they had an answer. They said, yes, that they are worried about mail being intercepted on the way from Albuquerque, and that they would find out that there was censorship if they looked in the mail and would she please act much more normal. So I went down the next time to Albuquerque and I talked to her and I said, “Now, look, let’s not mention censorship,” but we had had so much trouble that we had at last worked out a code, something illegal. We had a code; if I would put a dot at the end of my signature it meant I had had trouble again, and she would move on to the next of the moves that she had concocted. She would sit there all day long because she was ill and she would think of things to do. The last thing that she did was to send me, which she found perfectly legitimately, an advertisement that said “Send your boyfriend a letter on a jigsaw puzzle. Here are the blanks. We sell you the blank, you write the letter on it, take it all apart, you put it in a little sac and mail it.” So I received that one with a note saying “We do not have time to play games. Please instruct your wife to confine herself to ordinary letters!” Well, we were ready with the one more dot. The letter would start, “I hope you remembered to open this letter carefully because I have included the Pepto-Bismol for your stomach as we arranged.” It would be a letter full of powder. In the office we expected they would open it quickly, the powder would go all over the floor, they would get all upset because you are not supposed to upset anything, you’d have to gather all this Pepto-Bismol. . . . But we didn’t have to use that one. OK?

  As a result of all these experiences with the censor, I knew exactly what could get through and what could not get through. Nobody else knew as well as I. And so I made a little money out of all of this by making bets. One day, on the outside fence, I had discovered that workmen who lived still further out and wanted to come in were too lazy to go around through the gate, and so they had cut themselves a hole, some distance along. So I went out the fence, went over to the hole and came in, went out again, and so on, until th
e guy, the sergeant at the gate begins to wonder what’s happening, this guy is always going out and never coming in? And of course his natural reaction was to call the lieutenant and try to put me in jail for doing this. I explained that there was a hole. You see, I was always trying to straighten people out, point out that there was a hole. And so I made a bet with somebody that I could tell where the hole in the fence was, in the mail, and mail it out. And sure enough, I did. And the way I did it was I said–“You should see the way they administer this place”; you see, that’s what we were allowed to say. “There’s a hole in the fence 71 feet away from such and such a place, that’s this size and that size, that you can walk through.” Now, what can they do? They can’t say to me that there is no such hole. I mean, what are they going to do, it’s their own hard luck that there’s such a hole. They should fix the hole. So, I got that one through. I also got through a letter that told about how one of the boys who worked in one of my groups had been wakened up in the middle of the night and grilled with lights in front of him by some idiots in the Army, because they found out something about his father or something. I don’t know, he was supposed to be a communist. His name was Kamane. He’s a famous man now.