The pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it – these are real things.
BY OTHERS◆Monday, February 15, 1988
by Richard P. Feynman
His Notebook of Things I Don't Know About: 256 scraps of things he said, then eighteen questions he could not leave alone, from his father's wagon and the bird with no name to the wobbling plate, the bongos in Rio, the dancers at Gianonni's, the little arrows of light and a glass of ice water in Washington.
tags: physics, qed, curiosity, teaching, discovery, bongos, drawing, feynman
Notebook of things I don’t know about
- Name
- R. P. Feynman
- School
- Princeton
- Subject
- everything (nearly)
- Dates
- 1918–1988
“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
inside the back cover
The pocket: 256 scraps of things he said
Everything he said that somebody wrote down, tucked into the back of the notebook. The colour of a scrap is what it is about; the paper is how the words reached us. Pull a coloured edge, or reach in.
Things he said
R. P. F. · 256 scraps
| said out loud | 211 |
|---|---|
| from his own pen | 27 |
| as others told it | 13 |
| doubtful | 5 |
Most of what we keep of him he said out loud: 211 of 256, to a lecture hall, a camera, a friend across a table. He thought by talking. Only 27 he wrote down himself.
43 of 256 read 1 of 256
The prize is the finding out, not the medal.
Sort the pocket
by colour
by paper
all 256 scraps
Before the notebook opens, sit down with him for an evening: in 1983 the BBC filmed him at home, imagining out loud.
BBC2, Fridays, July and August 1983
Fun to Imagine
Six short films for the BBC, shot on 16mm in his own house in Altadena: a man in an armchair, enjoying himself. All six are on this set. Choose a channel, then press the screen.
Channel 1: Jiggling Atoms, from 0:00. Press the screen to watch.
The channels
Nine, as the man who made the films marked his complete upload.
Jiggling Atoms
Heat is jiggling. A tennis ball stops bouncing because its motion has gone into the atoms of the floor.
Fire
A tree is made mostly out of the air, and when it burns it gives back the sunlight it stored.
Rubber Bands
Stretch one against your lips and it warms; let it in and it cools. The jiggling is what pulls it back.
Magnets
Why do two magnets push apart? Why did Aunt Minnie slip on the ice? Every why stands on something you have to take as it is.
Electricity
A comb lifts scraps of paper: a tiny leak of a force so enormous it is nearly always perfectly balanced. And the dentist’s drill, turned by a waterfall far away.
Mirror and Train Puzzles
Why does a mirror swap left and right but not up and down? And how does a train get round a bend with both wheels fixed to one axle?
Seeing Things
Light is ripples crossing a swimming pool, and the room is full of waves you cannot see until a radio tunes them in.
Big Numbers
Light years, galaxies, a neutron star spinning thirty times a second: how to imagine sizes past imagining.
Ways of Thinking
He counts seconds in his head while reading; John Tukey counts by watching a tape of numbers go by. Two minds, the same sum.
Fun to Imagine, a BBC production made by Christopher Sykes, first shown on BBC2 in July 1983. The complete series plays from Christopher Sykes’s own upload on YouTube; the channel times are his chapter marks. Nothing is fetched from YouTube until you press play, and then only from youtube-nocookie.com. Open it on YouTube (opens in a new tab).
He grew up in Far Rockaway, at the edge of the sea, with a father who showed him how to look.
Entry 1Far Rockaway, 1920s
Why does the ball go to the back of the wagon?
Hold the button, or press and hold on the drawing (slide right to hurry him). Let go and he stops short. The right arrow pulls too.
- Pull the wagon. Watch the ball.
Try it: a ball in a shoebox, pulled along the kitchen table. Get your eye down to the table and watch from the side.
“See that bird? It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling, and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird.”
Tap a bird when it does something, and it goes in the notebook. Or press the button, or Enter on the drawing.
Try it: watch one bird for five minutes, any bird, and write down only what it does.
“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
Entry 2Far Rockaway, c. 1930
Can you fix a radio by thinking?
Repair job
- Set
- one radio, its tubes all of one kind
- Fault
- a noise when switched on; after a while, all right
- Customer
- poor; his car a complete wreck
- Rate
- less than a shop’s (it’s the Depression)
- Tools
- none yet: think first
All the way over, in his wreck of a car:
“…you’re just a little boy!”
What he thinks of you
What he thinks of you: not sure yet.
His house, in a cheap part of town: walk up and down, and think
Walking up and down
The roar, each time you switch it on
He says it makes a noise when it’s switched on, and after a while it’s all right. Switch it on.
In the Depression people hired the boy because he fixed radios for less, and this customer doubted him the whole drive over. The toy runs on the guess Feynman made walking up and down, that the amplifier came up hot before the beginning part could feed it; he never says he checked it. He reversed the tubes, the set came on quiet, and the man, who had never imagined that a little boy could stop and think and figure it out, told everybody. From “He Fixes Radios by Thinking!”, in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985). Here the clock runs fast.
The pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it - these are real things.
At Princeton he turned his own room into a laboratory.
Entry 3Princeton, c. 1940
Can an ant learn?
“Can they tell each other where food is, like bees can?”
A bay window with a U-shaped sill. Sugar on a folded card, hung from a string across the U where no ant can stumble on it; folded strips of paper for ferries. When ants walk onto ferry 1, carry them over. Tap a ferry, or use the buttons.
ferried: 0waiting by ferry 1: 0at the new spot: 0ants out: 0
The dotted amber line is their trail: invisible to him, drawn here for you.
Entry 4Princeton, c. 1940
How does my head count time?
Far Rockaway, aged eleven or twelve, he told his friend Bernie Walker that thinking is “nothing but talking to yourself inside.” Bernie asked: then how, talking to yourself, do you describe the crazy shape of a car’s crankshaft? So he learned that a thought can be a picture as well as a sentence.
Princeton, the Graduate College: a paper says the brain’s clock runs on iron. Baloney, he thinks. But what does it run on? He counts.
Press the watch. Count to yourself, one, two, three, at a slow steady rhythm. At sixty, press it again: Now!
His: 48, 49, 48, 47, 48, 49, 48, 48 seconds. Steady as a clock.
Choose an experiment above; start with II if you are new to this.
| who | doing | sixty in | note |
|---|---|---|---|
| R.P.F. | just counting | 48, 49, 48, 47, 48, 49, 48, 48 | a standard of 48 |
| R.P.F. | counting, reading | 48 | held; told them what he read |
| J.W.T. | counting, “Mary had a little lamb” | on the nose | held |
| you | your rows go here, in ink | ||
his, counting
The talker R. P. Feynman
Says the numbers to himself. Can read while counting; cannot talk.
The looker J. W. Tukey
Watches a tape of numbers go by. Can talk while counting; cannot read. (Later he gave us the word bit.)
Not yet written
Start with II: count to sixty once or twice, so the page learns your standard. Then III and IV, reading and talking.
Jn(x)
Even his letters were not what yours are. Teaching Bessel functions he saw light-tan j’s, violet-bluish n’s, dark brown x’s flying about, and wondered what the students saw. What colour is your x?
No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.
You need not ask anyone how they count, and trust what they say. Watch what they can and cannot do while counting, and the answer cannot be faked: “The test is absolute.” Something as simple as one, two, three goes on differently in every head. Yours included.
Once, he sat in on the philosophers.
Entry 5Princeton, c. 1940
Is a brick an essential object?
The philosophers at the Graduate College asked him to their seminar. They were going through Whitehead’s Process and Reality, a chapter a week. He had not read it; he had “only come to watch.”
Philosophy seminar. Whitehead, Process and Reality. Minutes.
- A student reads his paper on the chapter. Discussion.
- THE PROFESSOR, at the board, to the visitor: Would you say an electron is an “essential object”?
The brick
definitions 0bricks 1
Nothing measured yet. The tools are on the desk.
Thirteen ways of looking at a brick. It weighed 2,150 grams through every one of them.
His father taught him this with a bird: all its names, and nothing about the bird.
Years later, a conference on the ethics of equality in education. A sentence from a sociologist’s paper he could not make out:
“The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.”
“We cannot define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other, ‘You don’t know what you are talking about!’ The second one says, ‘What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you?’”
And the electron, which the professor asked about? A brick gives the same answer every time. An electron does not.
“A philosopher once said, ‘It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results.’ Well, they don’t.”
“Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”
From “A Map of the Cat?”, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985). The first three answers follow his account; after that another got up, and another, and the din here is the page’s, in Whitehead’s own vocabulary and Feynman’s parody of philosophers from the Lectures. Whitehead’s term is “eternal object”; Feynman tells it as “essential object”. His next question was going to be about the inside of the brick. The brick is a standard American one, 8 by 3¾ by 2¼ inches.
At Los Alamos he was twenty-five, and the war was a puzzle box.
Entry 6Los Alamos, 1943 to 1945
How do you open a safe without the numbers?
He took the lock on his own cabinet apart first. Three discs on one shaft, each with a notch; a pin catches the next disc once a turn. Left, right, left puts the notches in a row, and right to ten draws the bolt down into them. Then one day, fiddling with his drawer open, he noticed something.
R. P. Feynman
Drag the dial round, or focus it and use the arrow keys: ← turns left (the numbers climb), → turns right, Shift for fives.
The drawer is open and the dial sits on ten, the way people leave it while they take papers out. The bolt is still down, so the notches are still in a row. Go away from ten in fives, and come back each time.
Christy was out of town, and someone needed a document from his cabinet. Could Feynman open it? Yes, he said, but he had to get his tools. He needed none. He went back to his office, took apart the lock on his own cabinet, read the slip of paper he kept inside it, picked up a screwdriver for show, and shut Christy’s door behind him.
R. F. Christy
Christy 35, 60
The last two numbers are on the slip. The dial forgives two either side, so of a hundred first numbers only every fifth needs trying: twenty at most. Each one dials the whole combination and tugs the handle.
none tried yet
The summer after the war he came back from Cornell to finish some work, and needed a report of his own from the library, which was shut on Saturdays. But Frederic de Hoffmann, in Declassification, kept a copy of every document, all the secrets of the bomb, in nine filing cabinets in his office. Feynman had never taken their numbers off. So, for once, he followed the safecracker books.
de Hoffmann · A to C
First, the books said, the secretary: afraid of forgetting it, she writes it down somewhere.
After the war Los Alamos hired a locksmith, and the Captain’s safe made his name: a heavy steel safe, jacked up the stairs of a flimsy wooden building in wartime. The Captain was away at Bikini, Alvarez had forgotten the combination, and the locksmith was sent up to drill it. He opened it in minutes instead.
Feynman had to meet him. It took weeks: a hello in the evenings, then soup, then fixing the Marchant calculator the locksmith was stuck on, by threading its spring-loaded wheels on a wire like beads. At last he traded his own trick for the locksmith’s. The locks leave the factory set to 25-0-25 or 50-25-50, and the Captain had never changed his.
Try the two factory settings office by office, the way he went down his own building.
Try it yourself: an old combination padlock and a small screwdriver. The discs are in there, notches and all.
The steel was never the weak part. Every lock he beat gave way at a habit: a drawer left open, a favourite constant, a setting nobody changed. He found that out the way he found most things out: for the fun of it, by taking the thing apart.
“I have to understand the world, you see.”
June 1945 to October 1946
A letter, never mailed
He had loved Arline Greenbaum since they were teenagers. They married in 1942, when she already had tuberculosis, and while he worked on the bomb at Los Alamos she lay in a sanatorium in Albuquerque. She died there on 16 June 1945, with him beside her. He did not cry for weeks; then he passed a shop window, saw a dress he thought she would like, and broke down.
An envelope, addressed to Arline. Open it.Fold it away.
October 17, 1946
D’Arline,
The body of the letter is not reproduced here. [the rest is his, and it is in the book]
I love my wife. My wife is dead.
Rich.
PS Please excuse my not mailing this but I don’t know your new address.
He wrote it sixteen months after she died, and he kept it. It was found among his papers after his death, and his daughter Michelle published it in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track (2005).
After the war he was burned out, and decided to play.
Entry 7Cornell, 1947
Why does a plate wobble when you throw it?
Cornell, after the war. He felt burned out, and the offers kept coming from people who expected wonders of him, the Institute for Advanced Study among them. So he decided to do physics the way he used to: as play, for the fun of it. Within a week, in the cafeteria, somebody threw a plate in the air.
“It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish.”
Or flick the plate upward. Tap it in the air to catch it.
wobbles
medallion
He stopped trying to be important and started to play. The importance came later, by itself.
In Brazil he played something other than physics.
Entry 8Rio de Janeiro, 1951 to 1952
Can the hands learn what the head cannot?
Copacabana · Rio de Janeiro · Carnaval
Rehearsal on the beach
observed: the dancers never look at their feet
- 1Two sticks on the beach
- 2The frying pan
- 3Carnival
Tap the drums, or press F, J and K. Then fall in: ink dots are your notes, 4 clean bars to move the school along.
Every hit is plotted here in milliseconds, the way he would have.
In Rio, on his year in Brazil, a little samba school on the beach, the Farçantes de Copacabana, the Fakers of Copacabana, took in a physicist. They gave him the frigideira; he practised walking the beach with two sticks until the hands knew what the head could not count. He drummed all his life. In Pasadena his partner on the drums was Ralph Leighton, who wrote the stories down.
“On the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.”
Between the questions, the stories he told.
Eight cards from the drawer
Stories he told
He told them over dinner and between sessions on the drums, and his drumming partner Ralph Leighton taped them; that is how the books were made. Eight of the best, filed on cards. Pull one.
Cream or lemon?
Princeton, 1939A new graduate student, fresh from MIT, at the dean’s afternoon tea. He is nervous, still looking for somewhere to sit, when the dean’s wife, Mrs. Eisenhart, asks him a question. Answer it for him.
“Would you like cream or lemon in your tea, Mr. Feynman?”
“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, the title story of the book (1985)
Entry 9Pasadena, 1948 to 1985
Which way does light go?
UCLA, 1983. Four lectures for people who knew no physics, and in them the theory he had shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for, given away with no equations at all. The seed was planted in high school in Far Rockaway, when his physics teacher, Mr. Bader, called him down after class: “You look bored; I want to tell you something interesting.” It was the principle of least action, and it fascinated him for the rest of his life.
“You will have to brace yourselves for this - not because it is difficult to understand, but because it is absolutely ridiculous: All we do is draw little arrows on a piece of paper - that’s all!”
I. The whole mirror
A lamp at S, a counter at P, a screen between them so nothing goes straight across. The old rule: light bounces off one point of the mirror, where the angles are equal. His rule: it goes every way at once, and every way gets an arrow.
the counter at P says100the whole mirror = 100
your arrows say?the final arrow, squared
Time some paths and your arrows will make a prediction.
Tap anywhere on the mirror (or use the arrow keys on it): one photon goes that way while the stopwatch runs.
“So light doesn’t really travel only in a straight line; it ‘smells’ the neighboring paths around it, and uses a small core of nearby space.”
II. The end of the mirror
Now the strangest part. A small piece of mirror, and the counter set where no mirror sends light: back toward the lamp, at 30 degrees. Under the glass, 24 of its strips: their arrows go round three times and come back to where they began, and so on all along the piece, to nothing. In the book he does something outrageous: he scrapes away the strips whose arrows point the wrong way. Try it.
24 of its strips, under a glass, each with its arrow scratched on it (the page scrapes the rest of the piece the same way)
Drag across the strips to scrape the silver off (start on bare glass to put it back), or use the arrow keys and Space.
the counter at 30°, lamp side says0a whole mirror at equal angles = 100
silver scraped off: 0 of 24 strips
All 24 arrows go round three times and end where they began: nothing reaches the counter.
“The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept Nature as She is - absurd.”
The pictures are his: the stopwatch, the arrows, the scraped mirror, from chapter 2 of QED (Princeton, 1985), first tried out in Auckland in 1979. The drawings here turn the hand far fewer times than real light does; the arithmetic (arrows added tail to head, the final arrow squared) is the real arithmetic. Mr. Bader’s words are from The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. II, chapter 19.
One night in 1957 he knew something nobody else in the world knew.
Entry 10Caltech, 1957
What does it feel like to know a law of nature?
i. the case for T
The book said the neutron decays by S and T, and an experiment said T. He had read it years before. Strike out points with the red pencil and watch the verdict. Which points is it standing on?
T. The experiment has spoken.
ii. the little stool
Back at Caltech they sat him on a little stool and told him how mixed up it all was: even the neutron’s S and T was being questioned. His own idea had only ever stumbled on that S and T. Set the type.
- Is the case for T as strong as the meter says?
- What should the type say?
iii. that night
For a moment, only you know.
“It was the first time, and the only time, in my career that I knew a law of nature that nobody else knew.”
“It had elegance and beauty. The goddamn thing was gleaming.”as quoted in James Gleick, Genius (1992)
Red pencil: nothing struck yet. Type: S and T. Tab to a point or a sort; Enter strikes or turns it.
In 1957 the weak force, the one that lets a neutron fall apart, was a mess of half results. His idea fitted everything except the neutron’s S and T, and the T rested on an experiment he had once read and thought “That doesn’t prove anything!”: its verdict leaned on one or two points at the very edge of the data, and the last point “isn’t very good, because if it was, they’d have another point further along.” He had believed the experts anyway. That night he calculated all kinds of things with V and A. Gell-Mann had found the same theory, and so had Sudarshan and Marshak; it “didn’t spoil my fun.”
“I’ll never make that mistake again, reading the experts’ opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that’s the end of you.”
In a dinner speech he invited everyone to go small.
Entry 11Caltech, 29 December 1959
How small can you write?
field of view
stop 1 of 7: 2 cm across
A pin, stuck in the notebook.
Its head is a sixteenth of an inch across, about 1.6 millimetres, as he said in the talk. Turn the brass knob, or tap the circle, and go down.
At the end of the talk, two challenges, with $1,000 for each.
Challenge one: a motor
“...a rotating electric motor which can be controlled from the outside and, not counting the lead-in wires, is only 1/64 inch cube.”
Won by William McLellan, a Caltech engineer (class of 1950), by November 1960.
- two and a half months of lunch hours
- a microscope
- a watchmaker’s lathe
- a toothpick
No new way of making things at all, which surprised him. The talk had only said he intended to offer a prize, but his conscience bothered him, and he paid.
He had just married and bought a house. Caltech’s magazine begged whoever was writing small for the second prize: “TAKE YOUR TIME! WORK SLOWLY! RELAX!”
Challenge two: a page
“It is my intention to offer a prize of $1,000 to the first guy who can take the information on the page of a book and put it on an area 1/25,000 smaller in linear scale in such manner that it can be read by an electron microscope.”
5.9 micrometres on a side, 512 dots by 512. Point at it to see the dots: each, he wrote, “only about 60 atoms on a side”.
Won by Tom Newman, a graduate student in electrical engineering at Stanford, in November 1985. He was three years old when the prize was offered.
He wrote the opening page of A Tale of Two Cities, one of his favourite novels, with a beam of electrons about one five-millionth of an inch wide. It took about a month of hard work, and Ann Marshall had to tune her electron microscope before the page could be read. Then he sent Feynman a telegram: had anyone claimed the prize? No one had.
“I can’t quite manage to imagine the square 1/160 mm on a side onto which all that is printed.”
Redrawn here on the same 512 by 512 grid; this is not his micrograph.
asked: 29 December 1959paid: 1960paid: 1985
There’s plenty of room at the bottom.
He asked for a page small enough for a pinhead. It came nearly twenty-six years later, from a student who was three years old when he asked.
Find the smallest thing within reach: a grain of salt, a speck of dust, the full stop at the end of this line. How many atoms across is it? Go and find out.
From 1961 to 1963 he taught the freshmen and sophomores everything, from the beginning.
An interlude: the lecture hall
Come to the lectures
He was filmed teaching, and he is still wonderful to watch: chalk in hand, joking, pacing, building a law of nature out of nothing in front of you. Pick an evening from the programme and press play. Then take a red book down from the shelf.
On the screenThe Character of Physical Law, 1: The Law of GravitationRichard Feynman, the Messenger Lectures, Cornell University, November 1964; filmed by the BBC. About 56 minutes.
“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”
Uploaded to YouTube by TalkReelTV. Open it on YouTube (new tab). Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play; then the film comes from youtube-nocookie.com, its privacy-enhanced mode.
The programme
The Messenger Lectures
The Character of Physical Law
Cornell University, November 1964 · seven evenings
The Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures
Photons and electrons: QED
University of Auckland, 1979 · four evenings
The red books
His two years of lectures to Caltech’s freshmen and sophomores became three red volumes, edited with Robert Leighton and Matthew Sands, and they have been teaching the world physics ever since. Caltech keeps them free to read. Take one down: every chapter is a door.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics Volume I
mainly mechanics, radiation, and heat
- 1Atoms in Motion
- 2Basic Physics
- 3The Relation of Physics to Other Sciences
- 4Conservation of Energy
- 5Time and Distance
- 6Probability
- 7The Theory of Gravitation
- 8Motion
- 9Newton's Laws of Dynamics
- 10Conservation of Momentum
- 11Vectors
- 12Characteristics of Force
- 13Work and Potential Energy (A)
- 14Work and Potential Energy (conclusion)
- 15The Special Theory of Relativity
- 16Relativistic Energy and Momentum
- 17Space-Time
- 18Rotation in Two Dimensions
- 19Center of Mass; Moment of Inertia
- 20Rotation in Space
- 21The Harmonic Oscillator
- 22Algebra
- 23Resonance
- 24Transients
- 25Linear Systems and Review
- 26Optics: The Principle of Least Time
- 27Geometrical Optics
- 28Electromagnetic Radiation
- 29Interference
- 30Diffraction
- 31The Origin of the Refractive Index
- 32Radiation Damping. Light Scattering
- 33Polarization
- 34Relativistic Effects in Radiation
- 35Color Vision
- 36Mechanisms of Seeing
- 37Quantum Behavior
- 38The Relation of Wave and Particle Viewpoints
- 39The Kinetic Theory of Gases
- 40The Principles of Statistical Mechanics
- 41The Brownian Movement
- 42Applications of Kinetic Theory
- 43Diffusion
- 44The Laws of Thermodynamics
- 45Illustrations of Thermodynamics
- 46Ratchet and Pawl
- 47Sound. The wave equation
- 48Beats
- 49Modes
- 50Harmonics
- 51Waves
- 52Symmetry in Physical Laws
The whole of Volume I, with every section, on Caltech’s site.
Read free at The Feynman Lectures on Physics website, California Institute of Technology. Each chapter opens on Caltech’s own site, in a new tab, without telling it where you came from.
In his forties he learned something new from the beginning.
Entry 12Altadena, from 1962
Can a physicist learn to draw?
I The trade
Agreement
Whereas neither of us knows a damn thing about the other's subject: on alternate Sundays, R. P. F. gives J. Z. a lesson in science, and J. Z. gives R. P. F. a lesson in art.
DickJerry
Altadena, 1962. A physicist and an artist keep arguing about art and science and getting nowhere. Dick proposes a trade.
II Without looking
eyes on your hand
In a drawing class the teacher had them draw without looking at the paper. Your model is the hand you are not drawing with: look at it, not at the screen, and follow its edge here, slowly. The sheet shows nothing until you look.
III Too small, too tight
In a drawing class, he wrote, "the only thing he told me was my picture was too small on the page." Make her bigger with the first pencil, then loosen the hand with the second.
IV Au fait
A drawing wants a signature, and he did not sign his own name. Sign it.
He drew in a bar in Pasadena, too. That is another entry.
I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. . . . It's a feeling of awe - of scientific awe - which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion.
Entry 13near Caltech, late 1960s
What's so interesting about a topless bar?
Gianonni’s was a topless restaurant a mile and a half from his house. He went very often: a booth, his free 7-Up, and a little physics on “the paper placemats with the scalloped edges.”
Gianonni’sdancing
Albuquerque, a summer in the Cornell years
Theory (a nightclub’s master of ceremonies): stop being a gentleman. Buy her nothing, not even a pack of cigarettes, until you have asked her, straight out, the question you came to ask.
Experiment: he tried it.
Result: it worked.
Conclusion: he never really used it again. “I didn’t enjoy doing it that way.”
“You Just Ask Them?”, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Right way up: physics. Two electrons trading a photon, and his sum over histories, the integral sign curling off toward a dancer.
He worked on the placemat from every side. Turn it.
Then the police raided the place, and there was a big court case: somebody wanted the topless dancing stopped. Gianonni went round his customers asking who would testify for him. Ask them.
On the standWitness: Richard P. Feynman, professor of theoretical physics, Caltech
- The question before the court: is topless dancing acceptable to the community? Do community standards allow it?
- (A discussion of what "acceptable to the community" means. They settle on a percentage.)
- Q.How often do you go there?
- A."Five, six times a week."
- Q.And who goes there?
- A.Nearly every section of the community: men in real estate, a man from the city governing board, workmen from the gas station.
- In the papers, as he tells it: the Caltech professor of physics who goes to see topless dancing six times a week.
- Gianonni lost, for the time being. His case, or another one very like it, went in the end to the Supreme Court.
- In the meantime the place stayed open, and he got still more free 7-Ups.
Paraphrased from “But Is It Art?”, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985). His words are in quotation marks.
Everybody else had a reputation to keep. He had a place he liked.
Before Gianonni’s there were the summers. Every year he set off to drive to the Pacific, and every year he got stuck somewhere, usually in Las Vegas: cheap rooms, dinners next to nothing, good shows, “and I liked the girls.” The show girls, he admits, were his real reason for liking the place.
A matchbook from Las Vegas. Open it.
The first time, he worked the odds out before he bet: .493. A dollar on the line should cost him 1.4 cents.
- the odds say
- down 0.0¢
- the table says
- down $0
Open the matchbook and strike the matches. Put a dollar on the line.
From “Certainly, Mr. Big!”, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985), paraphrased; his words are in quotation marks. The matchbook is made up for this page.
“And, like falling in love with a woman, it is only possible if you do not know much about her, so you cannot see her faults.”
To the graduating class of 1974 he told a story about an island.
Entry 14Caltech, 1974
Why don't the planes land?
I. The island
The old strip is overgrown. Make the runway, light the fires, build the hut, and wait.
II. Millikan’s oil drop
“Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right.”
fall between the hairlines not yet timedrise not yet timed
From the speeds up and down, and the drag of the air on a drop that small, he worked out its charge, always a whole number of one small charge: e.
“It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air.” The charge goes as the viscosity to the power three halves: air about 0.4% stickier puts e on today’s value.
III. After Millikan
“If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.”
The charge of the electron, as published
- oil drops
- X-rays
- reviews of all the values
- electron diffraction
1913
- R. A. Millikan, oil drops: 4.774 ± 0.009
“When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong, and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong.”
Leaning over backwards, ourselves: the record is rougher than his telling. The X-ray values were already high by 1931; Birge’s review of 1929 kept Millikan’s number and his review of 1936 took the higher one, after Kellström measured the viscosity of air again. And the islanders are a parable: the real cargo movements of Melanesia were faiths and politics of their own. Values from the original papers, as gathered by Christian Hill (2021).
What the islanders, and the people after Millikan, were missing:
a kind of utter honesty, a kind of leaning over backwards.
Cargo Cult Science, Caltech commencement, 1974
“Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them.”
And then he told them about Mr. Young’s ratsAnd the rest of that talk: the one rule that matters.
Entry 15Caltech, 1974
How do you keep from fooling yourself?
You are Mr. Young, 1937. Teach a rat to go in at the third door down from wherever it starts.
Yesterday the food was behind door 6. Put the rat in at any door: today the food goes behind the third door down from where it starts.
It knows the door by its face?
It smells where the food was?
It sees the lamp and the room?
Face down. It turns over when the first three are not enough.
No runs yet. Yesterday it was fed behind door 6.
Honest runs, every clue covered: 0; hits: 0.
three honest hits in a row
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
Who was Mr. Young? Nobody has found a 1937 paper like this one. Some point to the psychologist Paul Thomas Young, who did run rats, but no such study is among his published papers. This is the experiment as Feynman told it; the eight doors and the rat’s pace of learning are ours.
The rat was never the stupid one: it was cleverer than the experiment. Young found out nothing about rats, and everything you must do before a rat can tell you anything. Next time something works, ask what else it could be listening to.
On the BBC he made the ordinary world strange again.
Entry 16the BBC, Fun to Imagine, 1983
Where does the fire come from?
Summer 1. Drag the sun across the sky.
“That’s the light and heat of the sun that went in. So it’s sort of stored sun that is coming out when you burn a log.”
Fun to Imagine, BBC, 1983
more from the same films things he liked to imagine
cold water: the same molecules, loose now: they roll over one another.
“If they jiggle more it corresponds to hotter, and colder is jiggling less.”
Pull it out quickly, hold it until it cools, then let it in.
“If you take a fairly wide rubber band and put it between your lips and pull it out, you’ll certainly notice it’s hotter.”
Why is Aunt Minnie in the hospital?
She went out, slipped on the ice, and broke her hip. Everybody is satisfied with that.
Why is Aunt Minnie in the hospital? She went out, slipped on the ice, and broke her hip. Everybody is satisfied with that.
Filmed for BBC Two in his own house and shown in July 1983. No blackboard, no lecture hall: just him, talking, enjoying it.
When the shuttle broke apart, he went to find out why, himself.
Entry 17Washington, 11 February 1986
What does ice water do to rubber?
Tuesday
28 January 1986
Kennedy Space Center. 36°F at launch, fifteen degrees colder than any launch before.
Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after liftoff. The seven aboard died.
Tuesday
11 February 1986
Washington. The commission sits in public, in front of the television cameras.
He has bought a small C-clamp at a hardware store. (as he tells it)
Two weeks later, in front of the cameras, he did an experiment. Do it with him.
- Take a piece of the O-ring out of the model.
- Squeeze it in the C-clamp.
- Put it in the ice water.
- Leave it a while. Take it out, undo the clamp.
A model of the booster joint, cut through. Take a piece of its O-ring out.
DR. FEYNMAN: (the record opens when you have done it in the ice water, )
On the launch pad nobody squeezes the rubber and lets it go. The joint opens by itself the moment the boosters light, in six tenths of a second. Can the rubber keep up?
Before ignition: the rubber squeezed between the clevis and the tang, the joint sealed.
Drawn to scale, much enlarged: the cord is 0.28 inch thick, and the gap opens 0.029 inch in 0.6 seconds (Rogers Commission). How fast the rubber follows is a sketch of the trend in its tests, not their numbers. On 28 January, puffs of smoke came from this joint of the right booster between 0.678 and 2.5 seconds after ignition.
Then he went and asked the engineers, and their managers, how likely the Shuttle was to fail.
One red cross in 109,500 days. You may have to look for it.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
STS 51-LDick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe.“We honor them for their courage.” (Appendix F)
And to anyone who thinks knowing takes the wonder away:
Entry 18Pasadena, 1981
Is a flower less beautiful if you understand it?
his friend, the artist“I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.”
Feynman“and I think that he’s kind of nutty.”
BBC Horizon, 1981. The friend is not named in the film; he is usually said to be Jirayr Zorthian, the artist who taught him to draw.
So take it apart. Turn the knob, look closer, and keep the sum.
What I see, added up
- the flower, as the artist sees it (I see it too)
- II, not yet looked at
- III, not yet looked at
- IV, not yet looked at
- V, not yet looked at
- VI, not yet looked at
the same flower
subtracted so far: 0
IAt this dimensionscale bar: 1 cm
“look how beautiful it is”
He agreed with the first half: “the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too.” Say the flower is a sunflower. Even at this size there is more than meets the eye: every yellow “petal” is a whole flower, a sterile one, there only to be seen.
5 more to look at before the sum is done.
Strangers wrote to him all his life, and he answered.
Ten letters in a box, filed by decade
Letters he answered
Students and strangers wrote to him, and he answered; some he wrote first, one of them to his wife, and never mailed. His daughter Michelle gathered his letters in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track (2005). Where we quote him, his sentences come into focus; where we can only tell you what he said, the letter stays a blur and a pencilled slip says it in our words.
Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world.
Caltech, February 1988
The blackboard in his office
He died on 15 February 1988, at sixty-nine, after years of cancer. This is the board in his office at Caltech as it was photographed afterwards. He was still writing down what to learn next.
What I cannot create, I do not understand.
Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.
TO LEARN:
Tap anything on his TO LEARN list, and a slip will say what it is.
Things I don’t know about
His notebook ends here, and the rest of the pages are yours. Write down something you don’t know. Then go and find out.
Stuck? Borrow one:
Nothing written yet. Kept in this browser only.
He never got to Tuva. For years he and his friend Ralph Leighton schemed to reach the little country whose triangle and diamond stamps he had collected as a boy, and whose capital is spelled K-Y-Z-Y-L. The papers that would have let him in came after he died.
His last words, as Gleick reports them: I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.
Ralph Leighton, Tuva or Bust! (1991); James Gleick, Genius (1992); the blackboard, Caltech Archives.